Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor. – Robert Frost
The Nation is the oldest continuously-published weekly magazine in the United States, and describes itself as “The Flagship of the Left”. So when it prints a story with the headline, “Liberals and Feminists, Stop Enabling the Police State”, it’s the rough equivalent of a nun sneaking copies of Luther’s 95 Theses into the hymnals at Easter high mass. For several decades now, self-described “leftists” have done their level best to ignore or deny their part in the creation and expansion of the American police state, despite the fact that its chief rationales – the various wars on consensual behaviors – were birthed, nursed and reared to maturity by the Progressives, the intellectual and spiritual ancestors of today’s statist “left”. This state of denial is especially pathetic when the subject is sexual prohibition; soi-disant “progressives” will reflexively and spasmodically point to the right whenever the subject comes up, their left eyes tightly shut so they don’t have to acknowledge that at least half of the crusade, and the lion’s share of the current rhetoric, is growing out of their own beloved sinister avian appendage. But JoAnn Wypijewski isn’t having any of it; she demands that her compatriots recognize the blood on their hands:
…At the crux of [mass incarceration]…is a hard truth, a moral and political catastrophe…It is the lust for prosecution, the clang of the prison door; and the liberal/progressive/feminist hand in enabling the police state and confusing punishment with justice…any invocation of freedom or human rights or bodily integrity that does not also recognize this is hypocrisy…follow the wire linking Ferguson to swelling violence budgets and shriveled social ones, to “quality of life” policing and spatial control of the poor, to police-cordoned “free speech zones” and mass arrest of protesters, to the border “fence” and Border Patrol surge, to the “cleanup” of Times Square’s XXX underbelly for hypercorporatized, hyperpoliced space, to random police stops and dog sniffs, to random drug testing, to the ubiquity of surveillance cameras, to NSA snooping, to the $350 billion US security business, to TSA full body scans, to drug blimps, to asset forfeiture…to immigrant detention, to “zero tolerance” at schools, to enhanced penalties for “hate crimes,” to sex-offender registries, to civil commitment, to torture as policy, to legalized discrimination, to legalized suspension of constitutional rights for ex-cons, to the redefinition of pimps as “traffickers” who…may be sentenced to life, to vice squad entrapment systems, to law upon law passed amid the clamor for safety, to…the gulag of prisons…that [lock away] about 7 million Americans…
Sex, or fear of it, has been almost as important in the construction of this nightmare state as racism. Just as the legal gains of the civil rights movement were blunted by…the incipient “war on drugs,” the sexual revolution…[was] short-circuited by serial sex panics, police power in loco mariti, Victims’ Rights as a mask for vengeance and the conception of the Sex Offender as a new, utterly damnable category of human being…“Carceral feminists”…elided personal power with state power, eschewed the project of liberation…and took as [their] armor the victim’s mantle…when a 6-year-old is called a sexual harasser for stealing a kiss, and men in civil commitment have their dicks hooked to plethysmographs while forced to watch violent porn as “treatment”…the sex-crime side of the prisoner supply chain shows no sign of slowing…
This is not the only recent article in The Nation which is critical of anti-sex feminism and its cringing enablers in the American left; others have questioned the Swedish model and Canada’s flagrant defiance of its own Supreme Court’s decision to decriminalize prostitution. Nor is The Nation the only major publication to recently publish sex-work-friendly articles; the New Republic recently featured a very positive, accepting article on disabled men who hire sex workers, and the Daily Dot (not remotely in the same class as the other two, but still) published a review of the documentary Becoming Belle Knox which not only condemned anti-sex work bile from both the “right” and “left”, but also correctly categorized “sex work isn’t work” and “emotional connection and sex have to go hand in hand” as myths.
Many of my readers and my fellow activists are so stunned by the incessant “sex trafficking”, anti-whore din that they begin to despair; I would be lying if I said I never felt that way myself. But history shows us that prohibitionist noise is always most cacophonous just before the masses begin to turn against those prohibitions; consider the history of “Drug War” propaganda and anti-gay activism and you’ll see what I mean. Though it’s nearly impossible to find a story about sex work in the mainstream American media that doesn’t consist entirely of tinned prohibitionist rhetoric, parroted police statements and regurgitated neofeminist poison, the truth is beginning to percolate into the alternative press, some magazines and many professional organizations. There has been a subtle but noticeable change in the air over the past two years, and it’s becoming more pronounced with every passing month; within a few years sex work will be a full-fledged controversy like gay rights was in the ‘90s, and that’s the first step toward our inevitable victory.
An article that repeats the “1 in 5 women are raped” myth is a good article? Really?
If you’re waiting for perfection from the US media, you’re going to have an awfully long wait. It’s good in the ways I said it was good, and not in any other way.
Not all of them, even in the US.
But yeah, the educated middle class political movement called ‘liberalism’ in the US is all Wypijewski says and more (not that true Burkean liberalism was much better). Note however that she also takes aim at corporatism – something either completely neglected by US libertarians or critiqued through superficial ‘bad apple’ (or bad microsoft) tropes. The small US-style libertarian rump of Australian politics is pretty much entirely Randian and corporate libertarian (with the party representing them in the pocket of Philip Morris*) and while I know many US libertarians have progressed beyond that they still remain almost entirely focused on state power while continuing to facilitate corporate power – if only because of their apparent inability to analyse it structurally.
The equivalent of US liberals in Australia generally don’t call themselves ‘liberals’ – our biggest conservative party has trashed the word here – but they’re pretty much as bad as their yankee cousins. They’ve invariably been the ones behind the most racist state-based initiatives, from herding Aborigines into church missions to stealing and institutionalising their children (currently at record levels, despite the ‘apology’ to it’s earlier victims) to the ongoing Northern Territory Intervention. They too enable the prison industrial complex, though they’ve been far less successful than their US counterparts in that respect.
Except that gay rights was already a full-fledged controversy in the ’60s, so if your metaphor applies we’ve still got a long way to go before the backlash against whorephobia begins to have an effect on the ground (as opposed to in a few pockets of the media).
(* The leader of Australia’s libertarian party – the Liberal Democrats – recently thanked Australians who smoke cigarettes. I know it’s entirely consistent with Ayn Rand’s attitude but when you recall that’s what killed her you might have thought they’d have dropped it by now, despite Philip Morris being the primary contributor to their electoral funding).
Please, please don’t confuse the Randian corporatists in US libertarians with the rest of us. Yes, they’re among the noisiest; yes, they’re the ones whom US “progressives” caricature in order to try to bury the fact that US libertarians care more about civil rights than they have at any point in their history. And no, they’re not the majority of Americans who identify as “libertarian”, and you’ll note from stuff I link that many of us are just as against big corporate power as against big political power. When I describe the US government as “fascist”, that’s exactly what I mean: it’s a synthesis of state, corporate and police/carceral power into one oppressive whole that will need to be burned entirely to the ground to kill it. As for gay rights, I was referring to the time it became a mainstream topic, which was post-AIDS.
Oh, I think I’m fairly aware of non-Randian US libertarians – (I was a big fan of Jesse Venturer, if only for the spectacle). I conceded as much in my comment.
But even when the non-Randian libertarians aren’t being overtly pro-corporate their neglect of corporate power while trying to grind down statist regulatory bodies that might hold it in check and their support for the buccaneering capitalism and unchecked accumulation of wealth that underlies it (as if it was an individualist expression of greed rather than an institutional one) means they might as well be.
And it seems to me that most US gay activists identify the ’69 Stonewall Riots as the point at which gay rights became mainstream. It came a little later here – the mid 70s – but had achieved most of it’s major aims before AIDS – which is why Australia probably responded to the AIDS crisis more rationally than any other country.
How the Australian gay rights movement was so successful so quickly is a mystery to me given the ingrained homophobia of mainstream Australia at the time but I’m glad it was. I suspect our iconoclastic approach to organised religion helped.
Amen to that.
But if you continue to do so asymmetrically you will eventually end up with the sort of corporate police state represented in much science fiction without any similarly overblown institutions that might be able to hold it in check while you’re kindling the fire (of course getting that to work is a pretty tall order too).
I’m all for the “unchecked accumulation of wealth” … as long as it’s “accumulated” legally.
Greed is a much more honorable word to me than “envy” is … and make no mistake, at the heart of every leftist’s opposition to capitalism – is ENVY.
And – you’re disguising your disgust behind the ugly term “corporatism”. Search your soul … your real problem with corporatism is the fact that it’s a fruit of the capitalist tree.
A tree you don’t like and would like to see pulled up by the roots.
Unchecked accumulation of wealth = unchecked accumulation of power and that makes ‘legal’ whatever you (or your money) says it is.
And that’s the fundamental flaw with US libertarianism, isn’t it?
Deep down most of them don’t want to see real democracy, they want to join or replace the plutocrats themselves because, you know, when they get all the wealth and power it’ll be different. Because then things will be run their way.
I’d love to see capitalism ripped up by the roots. It’s money making money by it’s very nature, so it’s just the system of the rentiers. You wanna own something you should work for it and in real life no-one does enough work to be ten times richer than his neighbour – much less several thousand times.
But I’m against corporatism even more – and that includes communist corporatism – because whether or not a corporation has enough judges in its pocket to get itself declared a person it’s still an organism (or meta-organism). And it’s one with completely different imperatives to those of the people who make it up. We can’t afford to live with things that powerful and that alien and the planet is already showing the strain.
It’s really corporations that start modern wars, leaving it to governments to make up idiotic excuses like ‘WMD’ or ‘responsibility to protect’.
I beg to differ. US libertarians, including myself, are mostly anti-corporate (at least to the extent of wanting to strip the veil from corporations, making their owners liable for their actions) and completely against the “crony crapitalism” that so completely fools the Left when it mislabels itself as pro-free-market.
Of course, the only good defense against “crony crapitalism” is to strip away enough of officials’ power that they’ll no longer be capable of granting favors.
Indeed, I’m not sure your critique is that close to target even if you refer only to Randians (a group I don’t really belong to, despite the name, but I get along with most of them).
There’s another example of the bankruptcy of US libertarian philosophy re corporations.
Individual owners are not responsible for the actions of corporations and making them liable won’t change how the corporations behave. Personifying corporations in their owner might make it easier for second rate novelists and third rate philosophers like Ayn Rand to come to grips with them but it doesn’t take much reflection to see how deceptive it is.
In your experience, how much control do, say, oil company shareholders have over whether the company runs unsafe rigs or lobbies governments to bomb uncooperative nations?
As with any other organism, corporations respond to the environment they develop in. Their actions are not dictated by their owners or employees any more than yours are dictated by your individual cells. If a corporation doesn’t ‘like’ its owners it will get new ones.
Corporate behaviour is emergent from the conditions under which it operates and owners are a minor and replaceable factor in those conditions.
The only state power that you could strip away that might hinder corporations is the power to make and enforce property laws. Get rid of that and the people will see to the rest. (Yeah, I know corporations can raise private armies, but I don’t reckon any of them can muster enough firepower to protect all of their vulnerable points. They need to appropriate state power to keep themselves safe and healthy. So they do.).
No, the main state power that _favors_ large corporations is the regulatory power. Large corporations have natural disadvantages in a free market: The decision-makers are elevated far above the critical details, and don’t necessarily lose their job or suffer pay cuts when customers abandon the corporation or costs soar. The CEO can only implement changes through the resistance of a large bureaucracy. The bureaucrats (just like government bureaucrats) become far more interested in protecting their turf than in the official goals of the organization, and are very unlikely to bear the cost of bad customer service, let alone of stifling innovation because it will shake up the organization. Corporations without a government-enforced monopoly tend to not get as bad as the average DMV, for instance, but they can get so big (GM, e.g.) that the guys who started a bad trend will be retired before it brings about bankruptcy. But they do fail in the very long run unless propped up by government – and it’s no coincidence that they almost always are propped up by facially-neutral regulations as well as more direct measures.
Even when the corporations didn’t help write the regulations and deliberately shape them to disfavor smaller competitors, complex regulations naturally favor large corporations. Any large American corporation will have a staff of hundreds busy keeping track of the hundreds of thousands of regulations that apply to them. That doesn’t hurt much when there are tens of thousands of workers on the payroll. A small business with a few dozen employees and selling only within one locality is subject to less than a tenth as many regulations, but cannot possibly know all of them – any small businessman just hopes to never be noticed by the enforcers of the more esoteric regulations.
But such a tiny business is no threat to the giants. The threat arises when the tiny business discovers valuable innovations and grows. And then there is a vulnerable period when the innovative small corporation has from a few hundred to a few thousand employees, and a national market. Now it needs to not only know every federal regulation, but also every state and local regulation everywhere it sells its product, but it cannot afford a hundred non-productive employees for compliance. And at this point, if the regulators overlook the rising business, the big corporations that it threatens will be happy to use their compliance staff to point out issues with their new competitor. Smaller competitors will usually be forced to sell to a megacorporation…
I appreciate the analysis but I’m not sure why you put “No” at the front of it.
Your description of not always compatible factors driving different levels of management tends to support my contention that corporate behaviour is emergent rather than attributable to any person or group of people.
And while your description of how regulation compliance has differential effects on different sized corporations was quite enlightening, surely you don’t believe it’s the only manifestation of crony capitalism or government enhancement of corporate power? The most obvious example of the first (and one that Rand regularly railed against) is preferential allocation of government contracts and a prominent example of the second is heavy handed imposition of ‘free trade’ agreements that force open what would otherwise have been sovereign markets.
Basically, as long as corporations have no limit on the amount of wealth they can accumulate (as was once enforced by limited charters until they accumulated enough wealth to buy out said limitations) they will continue to buy governments, judiciaries and other power centres, nobbling democracy wherever it may hinder their growth.
BTW, thanks for clarifying your position jd. I’d long been making a false assumption based on your handle. Sorry about that.
” US libertarians, including myself, are mostly anti-corporate (at least to the extent of wanting to strip the veil from corporations, making their owners liable for their actions)”
I have heard that here in Australia, directors are criminally liable for what their companies do. This is as it should be, and I hope it actually is the case.
I think you can assess that pretty easily by counting the number of Australian company directors who’ve ever gone to prison due to the actions of their companies.
When you think about it, the sheer scale of the criminality attributable to even an ‘ethical’ big company means that no one human being can ever be held responsible for more than a fraction of it. Limiting liability is what corporations are for.
Limited liability protects stockholders. People who buy shares. It means that if you purchase a few hundred worth of Union Carbide, you cannot be sued beyond losing the value of your shares.
Company directors are a different kettle of fish entirely.
And you think the director is going to carry the can when he knows the owners don’t have to?
Even more so than a bureaucracy a corporation is about passing the buck until it disappears. Privatising profits, nationalising losses, externalising liabilities and shuffling responsibility until it all slips through the cracks. The ones that don’t play the game are sub-competitive and so are replaced by those that do.
If you followed James Hardie’s performance with regards to asbestos liability you will know exactly what I mean – even though they were only partially successful in the end. How could one man or even an entire board of directors hope to take responsibility for the tens (or hundreds) of thousands of premature deaths that were the direct result of Hardie’s coverup of asbestosis?
How many Hardie directors spent even one day in prison?
A few of them were banned from directing Australian companies for up to a decade and that’s it. I’m sure most of them immediately found positions in Hardie’s offshore subsidiaries.
It’s worse than if they ‘deterred’ convicted bank robbers just by telling them they couldn’t rob banks for a while.
“I’m all for the “unchecked accumulation of wealth” … as long as it’s “accumulated” legally.”
I’d suggest you replace “legally” with “morally.” If the country passed a Constitutional amendment (neatly sidestepping any argument that merely passing a law would be un-Constitutional, which it would be) saying everyone in the country had to give you $1,000, under penalty of death. You’d be a multi-hundred-billionaire. Would you have acquired your wealth legally? Yes, by definition. Would you have acquired your wealth morally? Hell no.
“Randian corporatists” … yeah *sigh*. The problem with the loudest Ayn Rand fans is that they think that every real-world Orren Boyle is a persecuted Hank Rearden.
(And a person who’s qualified to critique Rand, will know who those characters are … 😉 )
Unfortunately I earned my qualifications early. There were only a dozen or so books to read in my childhood home and one was Atlas Shrugged.
Blame my anti-US-libertarianism on childhood trauma if you like.
That rates some belly-laughter!! 😀
BTW, Maggie, in Australia the liberal feminist attack on whores is limited almost entirely to academia, with the media occasionally echoing their ‘sex trafficking’ propaganda. On the ground almost all anti-whore protesting and lobbying is done in the name of property values (oops – “resident’s rights”) and is targeted mostly at street walkers. Do you get much of that in the US?
Until the beginning of the “sex trafficking” hysteria in 2004, that was almost ALL anti-whore protesting in the US. When I was working, stings against escorts were occasional nuisances the cops did when they wanted to get their jollies by standing around in big groups bullying traumatized women, rather than frequent, full-scale, federally-financed, organized pogroms. Every “old-timer” like me who was in the business prior to about 2007 says she’s never seen anything like the level of escort persecution we’re seeing now; it’s the worst since the war on brothels that started during the first “sex trafficking” hysteria (c. 1910) and continued through Prohibition.
You’d probably know that The Guardian has several whorephobic (and transphobic and Islamophobic) neo-fems on staff and routinely invites others to do guest columns.
Since they started their Australian edition they’ve been working on a synthesis between neo-fem whorephobia and the sort whipped up by yuppies concerned about inner city property prices. A column I recently linked to from a comment to one of your posts is a case in point in which the writer deplores (her imaginings of) the oppression of St Kilda sex workers by (those she imagines are) their pimps but is pretty much upfront that her real concern is that it makes her uncomfortable and lowers the tone of the neighbourhood (in her view). That’s a neighbourhood that’s been a red light district since at least WWI by the way.
I don’t know if they’re onto a winner there but it’s probably something to keep an eye on.
Why do you use “catch fire” terms that do not accurately describe what you’re talking about?
“Whorephobic” … “Islamophobic” … “Homophobic” ???
You mean the writers on your staff live in abject fear of whore’s and Muslims? I’m sorry, but this one thing I’m gonna continue to call people out on. If you want to make a point – make it accurately with the correct words. When someone comes up to me and starts using deliberately fabricated inflammatory language – I see a big sign over their head that says … “I’m a bullshitter – just trying to reach you emotionally, rather than with logic.”
Boss … I HATE RADICAL MUSLIMS and I am highly suspicious of even “moderate” ones. At the very least, even “moderate” Islam is a joke to me (a bad one) and virtually every “practice” they have from that ridiculous prayer ritual all the way to the philosophy of “jihad” is ridiculous to me.
Does this make me “Islamophobic”? Before answering that – please realize that I VOLUNTEERED TWICE to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan operating against radical Muslims – and I would do it again.
“Phobia” – has a distinct definition. Sorry – but you don’t get to “co-opt” it just to score petty political points for the sake of “name-calling”.
Meh – sure “phobia” has a distinct definition. So does “gay” – it means cheerful and happy. Like it or not, ‹foo›phobia is becoming common usage, by way of phobias being by definition irrational by definition. If you want to actually debate people who use those terms (which is never worthwhile unless there are third parties watching the debate), you need to tackle that accusation of irrationality.
“There has been a subtle but noticeable change in the air over the past two years, and it’s becoming more pronounced with every passing month; within a few years sex work will be a full-fledged controversy like gay rights was in the ‘90s, and that’s the first step toward our inevitable victory.”
Yeah, I hope so.
The potential monkey-wrench-jamming-the-gears may be that it was easier for many people to consider homosexuality as “something sort of far removed that has little chance to do with me and mine anyway”; whereas, prostitution may feel more threatening as “closer to home because it may involve my husband/my boyfriend or my wife/my girlfriend/my daughter/my sister or my-poor-sister-feminist-potential-oppressees”.
For homosexuality, only the centuries of religious influence needed to dissipate; but, for sex work, neofeminism has freshly-established anti-sentiments.
You really outdid yourself with this article. Up on the FB wall it goes. Only if the activists for right and left took as much time to affect internal accountability as fight external goblins and extrapolate the consequences of all the (mostly useless and dangerous) laws they pass, they could see the prison they create around all of us.
Don’t forget those “the First Amendment has to go so we can ban pornography” types.
Point taken. But I’m using those terms according to their contemporary usage and I think everyone knows what they mean. I’m not living in France. There’s no Academy to keep the language pure. So I work with what I’ve got.
Really? So how many radical Muslims do you know?
Or do you just hate the ridiculous caricatures of them the media presents to you?
I’ve had a few Muslim friends over my lifetime and some of them would probably cop the ‘radical’ tag in the eyes of the media though probably none of them are interested in changing the world as much as I want to see it changed.
I find them to be just people like everyone else.
BTW krulac, care to estimate what proportion of terrorist attacks in the US over the last 20 years have been carried out by Muslims?
I think the difference between your guess and the true figure would give a pretty handy indications of how distorted your impression of Muslims is.
I’ll take 3 to 1 odds (against me) for any amount you like up to a grand that you don’t know what the philosophy of jihad is.
And from out here US religious practices look pretty damned ridiculous too. That doesn’t make me want to bomb you. (Other things make me want to bomb you ;)).
Even if you find their customs distasteful, why would you ‘HATE’ them if you’re not scared they’ll do something nasty?
‘Islamophobia’ sounds like the right word to me.
BTW, how would you get a sub to Afghanistan?
We certainly should lock up all the pedophiles (i.e. anybody who opposes the mental castration of little girls). First lock them up, then castrate them, then lock them up again in order to protect little girls from the unthinkable trauma of having a choice in whether or not to become sexually functional when they grow up. The Left certainly doesn’t want to be identified with challenging the traditional mental castration of girls. That’s going too far.
[…] by 2017, as I predicted three years ago; already we’re beginning to see skeptical articles from journalists and academics in addition to consultation of actual experts, prominent reporting on anti-hysteria […]