but to the topic, and my theorizing. i don't believe feminism has really accomplished much. in our capitalist world, he/she who has the money has the power. or rather, he who has the ability to make money. the trend towards male dominance was set by our physiological differences in cave days. survival depended primarily on physical strength, which men have more of. they went out and killed some beasts, and the women, limited not only by being physically weaker but the misfortune to have been the child-bearing gender in a social species, stay at the cave to cook and clean.
as humans developed into larger communities, these roles remained, and were reinforced by males. eventually, someone developed money. women could weave some baskets or clothes to sell or trade, but those weren't essential commodities: meat and crops were, and males were the ones who put forth these. add the tendency of males to play (and work) in larger, heirarchical groups that lead to social castes (the chief of the tribe, his inner circle, right down to the guy they all make fun of). the women are just s.o.l. for the next few thousand years.
then the industrial revolution. massive poverty, and women have to work(everyone in the bloody family has to work) to stay alive. women now are empowered because now more than ever before they are the ones making money! there is no longer a need for a gender distinction based on that. unfortunately, they're fighting against several millenia of sexism. feminist are ridiculed. imperialistic societies throughout the ages have traditionally treated women and minorities like second class citizens. women leaders ascend in other parts of the world, and eventually, women in america get the right to vote.
a rather convenient world war, with rosie the riveter to make women feel useful while the givernment throws some japs in concentration camps and tests out its latest toy on a two japanese cities. and then a couple decades of red-hysteria to distract the commoners. and then...
the sixties! the 50s were NOT the age of innocence. times were NOT as happy and prosperous as they were made out to be. women were growing increasingly discontent, as were minorities, because they wanted economic empowerment. they had realized that for some time now, they could do a "man's job" as easily as a man. because of the industrial revolution, as evil as it was otherwise, women and men were now equal. marriage was no longer a prison, because the wife could get a job, too. meaning she could leave the husband any time she wanted. meaning she could truly be independant. fuck! she doesn't even have to marry now, for spinsterhood doesn't carry the bad connotations it used to.
let's not forget the pill and roe vs. wade. now women have more control over their bodies. they can no longer be held down by a man or by a womb. women can now go out of the caves and hunt, too. she who has the money has the power.
this is just to annoy christopherobin, who absolutely hates it when i talk about "gender issues". =P i've been thinking a lot lately about how, after thousands of years of female-oppression (except in a few matriarchal cultures), the women's lib movement suddenly gained such momentum. i already typed a freakin' essay on this topic: Read it above, if you want. but i've also been thinking that despite all the changes, females are still... well, second class citizens. we aren't much better off now than were women in ancient rome or greece(a favorite topic of mine, if you haven't already guessed). besides the obvious inequalities of lower pay for the same work, statutory rape laws (when was the last time a woman was prosecuted for "raping" a boy under the age of 18? besides that teacher-student thing a few months ago...), and job discrimination (how many female congresspersons are there?).
there are other problems. the main one bugging me is sexual freedom. marriage has always been, quite simply, a prison. women were not allowed to work any sort of professional job, and so had to depend on husbands for money, and therefore survival. guys have a thing for virgins, so it was to your advantage to be pure when entering marriage. marriage was also safe. there was no effective birth control back then, and the only safe thing to do was to get yourself a husband, get knocked up to keep him happy, and feed off his money until one of you died. as a character in "eyes wide shut" said (and this is a rough paraphrase), "a woman got married so that she could lose her virginity, and then have sex with the men she really wanted". nevermind all those christian guilt-trips about adam and eve and lot's wife and that other chick in the bible who fucked around a lot and so our loving, wise god exterminated her. those, and the concept of love (says my cynical mind), were all just ways of keeping the institution of marriage going. men have always been sexually free. they don't get pregnant. if they catch a disease, it shows immediately and they can do something about it. women don't shine flashlights up their cunts on a regular basis. women were slaves to their bodies. but!
around the turn of the century, penicillin, the cure-all for most std's was discovered. and then, in 1969, the fda approved the pill. no more coat hanger abortions(or at least fewer of them)! you could stop the problem before it began. roe vs. wade made abortions legal. women could now fuck with impunity. we had achieved sexual freedom. or had we? women who sleep around are still considered sluts. i'm sure billy-boy has shoved his tongue up his share of pussies, but when most people speak of monica's "deep-throat", it's not only with fascination that she screwed the president, but also with a faint sense of shame (and probably ridicule) that she sucked him off. jfk fancied himself a player as well, but it's marilyn monroe who gets the bad rep. and some of this guilt is self-imposed (women vs. women). an attractive friend of mine complains that she always get bitched at by the wife when a man who she didn't know was married sleeps with her. but to the point (finally!): do you think that women are liberated? that females can ever escape relentlessly reinforced gender roles imposed on us?
As I mentioned before, my favorite website is the quirky, off-center Anti-social.com. I found it back in October when, bored with Hotmail, I ran a search for free email on Yahoo!. The "anti-social" title caught my eye, and after taking stock of the spartan black and white graphics, the primitive email system, and Rhubarb, the inflammatory tee-shirt company that sponsors the site, I decided to stick around and try it out for awhile. After a couple of weeks I finally got up the nerve to see what the Bulletin Board was about, and clicked on the two arguing faces the grace the Anti-social homepage. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I'd gotten into the swing of things, and was cheerfully spewing venom and exchanging hostilities with other members.
Around that same time, Thanksgiving weekend, a user by the name of "djcrackwhore" posted a thread entitled "My Children Are Missing" with the implication that another user, one "radioethiopia" had abducted his 2 young children. This was proven to be a hoax by the moderator's assertions that, contrary to djcrackwhore's claims, no one had contacted them about any problems. Business at anti-social continued as usual, until Christmas Eve, when one of the most clever and prolific posters at anti-social, "Abby", began a thread entitled "Someone Broke into my Apt. Last Night and Molested My Dog!" The chief suspect was once again radioethiopia, the author of such threads as "why isn't bestiality legal" and "Pedophiles Aren't all Bad" and a self-proclaimed pedophile and rapist of women, the "inferior sex". During the course of that thread, Abby's friend was seemingly assaulted and Abby was kidnapped and brainwashed to join radioethiopia's cult following, a group including such personalities as "skinwhistle", "fascisthemerrhoid", and "HitlerJesus". This was exposed to be a hoax by "MrBell's" thread, "Your sick fucking idea of a joke", in which he said:
"well, i am the fool for thinking that the radio/abby thing was yet another case of on line stalking..but silly me for worrying about the potential stalk/rape of someone involved with this bbs...please tell mr hill that since i have been informed that you were all in on this "harmless" charade.. i tender my resignation for all present and future projects with anti-social..i cannot work with people that would stoop to this level to get a rise out of our viewing public.. good bye and riddance"This isn't exactly the type of material you'd like your children to view while "surfing the 'Net". Violence, rape, and "liquid plumber enemas" are a permanent feature on Anti-social.com's boards. Very frequently had disgruntled teenagers, caught in the throes of teen angst, logged onto the boards and started threads lamenting their sorry lives. The standard response was encouragement by other board members to do the world a favor and kill themselves. No one ever believed that the teen would actually take these gibes seriously. But on March 7, a user named "blackstormbob" logged on, and started the thread "fucked up party", concerning problems with his girlfriend. The thread ran its course, except in this one, instead of whining about how malicious an insensitive the other users were, "blackstormbob" took the advice to heart and got himself a shotgun, strongly alluding that he would kill himself. The thread dropped down the list, and on March 10th, "A MESSAGE TO ALL ANTI-SOCIAL USERS" by "Elsie_D" appeared on the Rant thread list. It opened, "I have a beautiful boy named Robert. You know him as 'Black Storm Bob'." It went on to tell of the son's suicide two days earlier and the mother's efforts to contact the FBI and serve the Anti-social administrators with a subpoena for information on certain users that had encouraged the teen. My name was on the list. A quick check of the board rules and regulations let me know that it was perfectly legal for Anti-social to release information. I was informed by moriarty that universitites do in fact keep log-in records on all of the computers, records that include information such as what time a person logged in and what sites they visited. The IP address that the Anti-social administrators would surrender to the FBI would provide them with enough information to do a DNS look-up, and that would lead them to the University of Miami. They could put all the information together, and I'd wind cutting my college education short and going to court on charges of assisted suicide.
But before any more anxieties could set in, the whole affair was revealed by the moderator "remy" to be a hoax. As I read his words, I heaved a sigh of relief. My ass wasn't going to be dragged to court after all. Nevertheless, the incident and my role in it raised some issues in my mind. The supposed anonymity of the Internet. It's role as a forum for free speech. And could free speech really exist in a society as litigious as ours?
The entire reason why Anti-social appealed to me was because of its complete and total exercise of free speech. The moderators and administrators, as with all boards, have the option of closing threads they deem inappropriate, deleting those threads entirely (this is usually the option chosen on boards), censoring profanity, and editing users' posts. But these options remain largely unused on Anti-social. Out of the more than 1000 threads in the Rant forum, only 12 have been closed, including blackstormbob's suicide thread "fucked up party", and djcrackwhore's "My Children Are Missing". Whenever threads were closed, it was usually for a practical reason, such as the thread's initiaor asking for it to be closed or the thread's taking a very long time to load. Also, to the best of my knowledge, only once has a moderator edited someone's post; remy edited someone's post as a joke once after that person pointed out the fact that the moderators never edited people's posts.
In the Sex forum with the induction of the new moderator "ThrashInc"things are a bit different. Thrash has been openly accused of censorship when he closed thread containing content related to pedophilia. His reasons?
"If a thread comes to light that asks for something illegal SUCH AS KIDDIE PORN and people answer with the places to find it, THAT IS A LEGAL LIABILITY! Free speech or not, there ARE certain liabilites to running a BBS(Bulletin Board System). I have been doing it for OVER 16 years. I've learned MOST of the laws, what I'm responsible for, what I'm not... As soon as there's a place where posting of KIDDIE PORN LAIRS comes to be, there WILL be Feds (I've seen it happen too many times).... P.S. In a private system under suspicion, there needs to be a search warrant for EACH PERSON INVOLVED BEFORE THE FEDS CAN OBTAIN INDIVIDUAL USER RECORDS. This is an OPEN SYSTEM. ONE WARRANT COVERS IT ALL!..."Thrash's statements were particularly compelling in light of the recent article by Bruce Schimmel in the Philadelphia City Paper entitled "LooseCannon: Hustling Free Speech". In it he accuses the head honcho "Lee_Harvey" of cynically exploiting the idea of free speech" and points out the fact that "Lee_Harvey", as a common carrier instead of a publisher, carries no resposibility for what is posted. The general tone of his article could be summed up in the words of a publisher that rejected Abbie Hoffman's subversive "Steal This Book": "This book will end free speech". Apparently, Bruce Schimmel believes this site will end free speech.
In truth, it's not sites like Anti-social that endanger our first amendment right; on the contrary, it's our society of loathesome, fearful, lazy Americans who refuse to assume the duty of thinking for themselves and the responsibilities that go with that. It's so much easier to have the government do all the thinking for you: to promote the use of faulty filtering systems such as 'NetNanny; to commision bills like the 1996 Communications Decency Act that, using vague wording to establich guidelines for internet "decency"; to crack down on the number of pornographic sites and other "offensive" sites on the web with the help of "concerned" (watchdog and vigilante are both more appropriate words) citizens. The citizens who push for this always seem to forget the options of simply avoiding these sites or, if a child is involved, monitoring the child's computer activities or simply restricting access. These are NOT terribly difficult options; yet these activists for cyberspace decency are willing to sacrifice what is arguably the most important right in the Constitution. For once that amendment is broken, laws not only censoring pornography and general vulgarity can be made, but eventually laws restricting free thought and unconventional ideas will come into place, pushing us further and further into a totalitarian state.
But it is not only concerned parents and religious officials (who, ironically enough, are protected by the very same amendment they so callously disregard in their crusade for "decency") who pose a threat to free exchange of ideas on the Internet. Individual entities and corporations out to make money by exploiting America's judicial system are also cause for anxiety. In 1993 a company named Epitope brought charges against a stockbroker who criticized the company on Prodigy's message boards. This year in January the Itex Corporation issued search warrants because of "slanderous" material that users posted on Yahoo!'s message boards. And in March, Anti-social users recieved a jolt out of our cozy little world of virtual misanthropy an into the bitter realities of American society with the suicide hoax. The most shocking thing about the incident was not the possibilty of having pushed someone to kill themself, but the possibility of being systematically hunted downso that a relation of that person, perhaps several times more likely to have contributed to the victim's decision to commit suicide, could cash in on the victim's death. Only in a society like ours, a society that promotes litigation and exploitation of even something as tragic as suicide, could this be the case. If nothing else was learned it was that we live in a society that rewards greed over personal expression, and that, unless you're willing to become someone's scapegoat, you'd best think twice about exercising your first amendment rights.
"Let me ask you this, Mr. Ai: do you know, by your own experience, what patriotism is?"
"No, I don't think I do. If by patriotism you don't mean the love of one's homeland, for that I do know."
"No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other."
-The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. LeGuin
Since the end of the Vietnam War, the United States has engaged in military action in the Mideast, Africa, the Western Hemisphere and in Europe. The details:IRAN HOSTAGE RESCUE MISSION Date: April 25, 1980 Purpose: President Carter dispatched eight helicopters to Iran in an attempt to rescue 52 Americans taken hostage in November 1979. The rescue attempt ended in failure when a helicopter and a transport plane collided over the Iranian desert during a sandstorm. The hostages were finally released Jan. 20, 1981, minutes after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president. American fatalities: eight noncombat.
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LEBANON PEACEKEEPING MISSION Dates: Aug. 25, 1982-Feb. 26, 1984 Purpose: President Reagan sent 1,200 troops to help stabilize Lebanon. On Oct. 23, 1983, trucks packed with explosives rammed into the U.S. Marine barracks, killing over 240 U.S. servicemen. Reagan withdrew the troops in 1984. American fatalities: 256 hostile, nine noncombat.
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GRENADA Date: 1983 Purpose: Reagan sent an invasion force to the Caribbean island, saying American medical students there were in danger after a Marxist junta seized power. The junta was ousted. American fatalities: 18 hostile, one noncombat.
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LIBYA BOMBING RAID Date: April 15, 1986 Purpose: Reagan sought to punish Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi for Libya's support of international terrorism, including the bombing of a German disco in which two U.S. servicemen died. American planes bombed the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi. Gadhafi was not hurt, but his adopted daughter was killed. American fatalities: Two when their F-111 bomber was lost.
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PANAMA Date: 1989 Purpose: President Bush sent troops to oust General Manuel Noriega amid reports of his involvement in drug trafficking and corruption. He was captured, then tried and convicted in U.S. federal court. He has spent nearly nine years at a federal prison near Miami. American fatalities: 23 hostile.
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OPERATIONS DESERT STORM and DESERT SHIELD, IRAQ Dates: 1990-1991 Purpose: Bush deployed 500,000 troops to contest Iraq's invasion of neighboring Kuwait. Allied troops regained control of Kuwait, yet skirmishes between Iraq and the allies continue to this day. American fatalities: 148 hostile, 235 noncombat.
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SOMALIA Dates: 1992-1994 Purpose: Bush launched Operation Restore Hope to relieve suffering caused by famine and restore political stability. President Clinton ordered 15,000 U.S. reinforcements after an attack on U.S. soldiers left 18 dead. American troops retreated. Fighting among Somali warlords continues. American fatalities: 29 hostile, 14 noncombat.
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HAITI Dates: 1994-1995 Purpose: Clinton sent troops to reinstate democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide was reinstated. Command of multinational force passed to the United Nations on March 31, 1995. American fatalities: 4 noncombat.
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BOSNIA AIR STRIKES Date: 1995 Purpose: NATO forces, including American troops, sought to end a war precipitated by Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and his dreams of a Greater Serbia attained through ``ethnic cleansing.'' After the Dayton Peace Accords were signed in 1995, Clinton committed 20,000 U.S. troops to Bosnia as part of a 60,000-person NATO force which was to implement the agreement. American fatalities: None, although Air Force Capt. Scott O'Grady's F-16 fighter jet was shot down over Bosnia on June 2. U.S. Marines rescued him six days later.
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Sources: Department of Defense Statistical Information Analysis Division and Associated Press files.
"The army is not a social experiment.
It is a tool for the forceful imposition of its mother nation's political will upon another, sovereign nation, against that nation's will."
-Fatt
I simply LOVE Libertarianism.All their ideas are so wonderful, and unlike certain other political parties, they actually mean to keep the promises they make. What is the difference between Republicans, Democrats, and Liberatarians you ask? In a nutshell, Republicans believe in economic freedom and fewer personal freedoms (government regulation of personal life), Democrats believe in government control of economic affairs and more personal freedom, authoritarians believe in government control of everything, and libertarians believe in economic and personal freedom: as little government interference as possible. It's the next best thing to anarchism. (NOT anarchy, anarchism. There is a difference.) It's wonderful. But don't take my word on it! Here's the website. Check it out. And don't forget to vote for Harry Browne in 2000!
Recently, over at a-s, someone made a comment that one of the main puroses of religion was to hold societies together, and that with all the advances in technology making communications increasingly easier and building a "global community", relgion was on its way to becoming obsolete. And then yesterday I saw "The Blair Witch Project". One of the reasons the movie worked so well was because of how it used fear of the occult. The characters weren't dealing with serial killers or traditional homicidal maniacs or terrorists or assassins or any typical 20th century villain. They were dealing with forces completely beyond our comprehension, forces against which our usual ways of dealing with violence (more violence) are useless. It's pretty mind-blowing to think that technology that enables us to communicate instantaneously with someone half a world away and supernatural phenomena that have been around since time out of mind co-exist in this world. Be patient, I'm geting to my point.
Do any of you think that as we are propelled further and further (or should it be farther and farther) into the silicon cage of a technocratic society, religion will become obsolete? That we will have to look to ourselves alone for spirituality and morality, without the support syste of religion? Or that, as we steadily kill nature, we kill "God", and therefore whatever was good within us? Or am I just being fatalistic as usual?