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Links #187

Posted in Current Events, History, Links, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged animals, Connecticut, cops, Europe, fascism, Germany, Greece, Illinois, Japan, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, politicians, surveillance, Things We Choose To Do Together, Utah, vaccines, video, Washington (state) on February 1, 2014| 11 Comments »

Whether it’s Barack Obama or some subsequent pathological megalomaniac, Republican or Democrat, the increasingly ceremonial and quasi-religious aspect of the presidency is unseemly. It is profane. It is unbecoming of us as a people, and it has transformed the presidency into an office that can be truly attractive only to men who are unfit to hold it. – Kevin D. Williamson

This wasn’t an unusually busy week for links, but it was a very good one for quality and variety. Everything down to the first video was provided by Radley Balko, and the video itself (a short sequence from an episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!) by Mancrack. Coincidentally, a link on the same subject was supplied by Furry Girl, and the other links between the videos by Grace (“pigs”), Caty Simon (“Sappho”), Violet Blue (“year”), Clarissa (“headlines”), Jason Kuznicki (“best essay”), Police Misconduct (“seizure”), and Aspasia (“together”).

From the Archives

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That Was the Week That Was (#405)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged Above the Law, advertising, Australia, bad customers, Bad Girls, Bell Hook & Kettle, Between the Ears, brothels, California, Canada, Catholicism, Challenge, condoms, cops, cosmetic surgery, dehumanization, Dirty Laundry, evidence, Florida, Germany, Google, hysteria, Indonesia, internet, Ireland, Japan, Japanese Prostitution, Kansas, King of the Hill, language, Missouri, New York, New Zealand, Norway, Not To Be Taken Internally, O Canada!, Obfuscation via Dysphemisms, Oklahoma, Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs, porn, Profound Ignorance, prohibitionist myths, rape, slavery, Sweden, Swedish model, Texas, The Course of a Disease, The Swedish Pimpocracy, The Widening Gyre, Tyranny by Consensus, Uncommon Sense, United Kingdom, video, violence vs. sex workers, Welcome to Our Updates, With Friends Like These on January 31, 2014| 29 Comments »

It [is] very easy for government ministers…to talk around “we will stop trafficking”, as a code for “we will stop immigration and protect your white land”. – Belinda Brooks-Gordon

Bad Girls

Men: Pay your hookers! Ladies: Get the damned money up front!

A prostitute and heroin addict desperate for money has been jailed for…stealing from her clients. Emily Ruth Tequilla Wyatt…conned one…into leaving his flat…so she could break in and steal a…television…Just days before, she had stole [sic] £40 and a CD off another customer who had refused to pay her…

But Emily’s amateurish efforts aren’t remotely in the same class as these:

…Subhanna Beyah, AKA Crystal…was arrested and charged with ripping off 13 men and making off with $1,281,769 in jewelry, guns, cash, and property including a Cadillac Escalade. Two other women — 25-year-old Johninna Miller and 27-year-old Keshia Clark — were arrested…and have subsequently bonded out. Ryan Elkins, the daughter of a police chief…is on the lam…

The Swedish Pimpocracy

A man on trial in…Sweden for allegedly raping a woman…has been freed because he “wasn’t aware” she was drunk…The…woman [said] the last thing she remembers…is falling asleep in the man’s apartment with her clothes on before waking up the following afternoon…locked in a room…Tests later revealed the woman’s blood alcohol-level was…more than ten times the legal limit in Sweden…Prosecutor Stefan Lind plans to appeal the verdict…

Bell, Hook and Kettle

Young boys were locked in a cage for days on end…at [Australian] Salvation Army homes in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s…and the…leadership…failed to discipline or remove the perpetrators…a Royal Commission…will focus on the alleged abuse inflicted by…Lawrence Wilson, Russell Walker, Victor Bennett, John McIver and Donald Schultz on boys aged from about six to about 17…”The boys were frequently punched…thrown on the ground with force, hit with straps until they developed welts or bled,” [Commission member Simeon] Beckett said. They were repeatedly anally raped and forced to undertake oral sex on their house parents. They were also abused by other boys…[those] who complained were often disbelieved and severely punished…

Marion Delorme

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Perception, tagged courtesans, dehumanization, France, Madonna/whore, politicians, prohibitionist myths, stereotypes on January 23, 2014| 8 Comments »

When one enjoys full liberty, one must use it with the utmost moderation. – Victor Hugo, preface to Marion Delorme

Last month, sex worker activists discussed the case of Patricia Adler, a sociologist who had promoted ridiculous whore stereotypes in her classes on “deviancy” for twenty years; she of course never bothered to consult actual sex workers or even fellow academics who had actually studied us, instead preferring to let students simply make things up under her (almost wholly ignorant) guidance. But while we were annoyed and insulted by her actions, we were by no means surprised by them; since time immemorial academics, artists, moralists, rulers and almost everyone else have considered prostitutes to be more like fictional characters than real people. As I wrote in “Projection”, harlots “tend to be dehumanized into symbols for other people’s psychological needs and problems…people project their own concepts onto us and imagine us as the external representations of those concepts.” The internet is the enemy of such projection because it allows us to speak for ourselves rather than allowing others to usurp that right, and because it allows real information about a person to be widely disseminated, thus disrupting the fictions. In modern times, myths and other tales about whores are thus limited to those told about fictional characters (including those played by real people in “sex trafficking” roadshows), and those we tell about ourselves (and can successfully bury the truth about). But it’s not always easy to separate fact from fiction when discussing the lives of courtesans who lived prior to the information age, and in some cases it’s practically impossible.

Case in point: Marion Delorme, a French courtesan of the 17^th century. A few facts about her are well-known and not generally disputed: she was born on October 3^rd, 1613, the daughter of Jean de Lou, sieur de l’Orme and his wife Marie Chastelain. She was rich, beautiful, well-educated and had little interest in conventional marriage, and her second known lover was Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis de Cinq-Mars, who was a favorite (and possibly lover) of King Louis XIII; she stayed with him until his death in 1642. In her twenties she became the hostess of a salon which after 1648 became a meeting place for the enemies of the powerful Cardinal Mazarin, and when he sent men to arrest her on July 2^nd, 1650 they reported back that she had died suddenly on June 30^th from an overdose of antimony she had taken to induce an abortion. And that is the extent of what we know for (reasonably) certain; everything else about her life is speculation, ranging from the highly likely to the highly dubious to the patently absurd.

Though she began working as a courtesan sometime after she began hosting the salon, it’s uncertain how quickly the former followed the latter; she is said to have been secretly married to Cinq-Mars, but presumably it was in both their interests not to reveal that so as to avoid interfering with their other partners. One of Marion’s was said to have been Cardinal Richelieu, who had first introduced Cinq-Mars to King Louis because he believed he could control the young nobleman and thereby influence His Majesty. But Richelieu had completely misjudged Cinq-Mars; instead, the young man told the King of the Cardinal’s treachery, pressed for him to be executed and tried to organize a noble rebellion against Richelieu. Alas, he was caught by Richelieu’s spies and executed in 1642. Marion was not implicated in the conspiracy, but it seems likely that her sympathies were aligned with those of her dead husband; when the civil war called the Fronde began in 1648, those who opposed Richelieu’s successor Cardinal Mazarin gathered at her salon. But some doubt her convenient death practically on the eve of her arrest; a legend claims that the officials sent to detain her were either deceived or bribed into reporting her death, that the elaborate funeral which followed was a sham, and that Marion fled to England, married a lord and lived to 1706.

None of those speculations test the limits of credulity, but they are only the beginning; other accounts claim she later had all sorts of adventures, eventually returned to Paris and died in abject poverty in 1741…which would have made her 127! And in his Illuminati, the writer Gérard de Nerval recounts a legend that she used esoteric means to delay aging, was actually 150 at her death, and was already involved in the circles of power when King Henry IV died in 1610. Furthermore, her involvement in court intrigue at a time later generations find fascinating ensured numerous fictional versions of her life; most notably, Victor Hugo wrote the drama Marion Delorme (1831) which was later adapted into opera by both Giovanni Bottesini (1862) and Amilcare Ponchielli (1885). It has also been suggested that the villainous Milady de Winter of The Three Musketeers is based loosely on Marion, which if true would be rather ironic given that Milady was the agent of the fictional Richelieu and Marion the (eventual) enemy of the real one.

In general, the lives of famous people who lived more recently are clearer to us than those who lived very long ago, and the more remote the era the more likely true biographical details are to be mixed with legends and myths. But when the subject is a whore, the truth tends not only to be harder to find (due to fabrications by the lady, her clients, her enemies and her clients’ enemies), but also harder to extract from the mythic landscape to which so many people would prefer to confine us.

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Imagine the Sky

Posted in History, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged brothels, consensual crime, cops, disease, harm reduction, Imagine the Sky, law, lawheads, prohibitionist myths, psychology, social purity, surveillance, Tennessee on January 20, 2014| 36 Comments »

Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master’s commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. – W.H. Auden

I have come to the conclusion that statism rots the brain. In order for a free mind to accept the delusion that someone else as human as himself has the right to tell him what to do, he has to inflict damage on his own psychic organs of self-determination; in order to accept the patent absurdity that such superiority can be conferred by merely putting on a special costume, carrying a little tin amulet or giving oneself an interesting title, that damage has to be severe indeed. And if the subject is to believe that this right of state functionaries to control him extends even to what he does with his own body, the damage has to be both irreversible and so dramatic that it renders the statist incapable of recognizing the truth about nearly anything in which the state is involved. The individual so afflicted not only identifies with the overlords, rationalizing that because they have the divine right to rule him they legitimately represent his interests (“Government is just a word for the things we choose to do together”); he will also obediently line up in front of the slaughterhouse and praise the wisdom and goodness of the butcher (for example, in the recent cacophony of bootlicking which began with and included a federal judge’s declaration that the NSA’s blatantly-unconstitutional universal surveillance is in fact constitutional).

In really advanced cases, the victim’s mind is so warped that he cannot imagine things another way from the status quo; if something is currently illegal, it must have always been that way, and when faced with evidence to the contrary he will misinterpret it to support his lawheaded perception. If he sees an example of government coercion inflicted upon something which was previously free of it, that simply will not compute because holy governmental control is, was and ever will be, forever and ever amen. Think I’m exaggerating? Let’s take a look at how historian William Moss Wilson recently described the imposition of a licensing regime on Nashville whores during the occupation of the city by Union forces in the early 1860s. Remember, prostitution was not illegal in and of itself anywhere in the US prior to 1910; it was often regulated, or restricted to certain areas, or banned from certain areas, and streetwalkers were often harassed by cops using laws against vagrancy and the like. But since a lawhead cannot imagine that something now regarded as “criminal” could ever have been seen otherwise, we get nonsense like this:

…By June 1863, the large numbers of soldiers hospitalized in Nashville for venereal diseases led surgeons and regimental commanders to…[attempt to] rid the city of its prostitutes. Deportation would prove no easy task; nearly every structure along…“Smokey Row”…was a house of prostitution, and other brothels were scattered about town…several hundred women were dragged onto requisitioned steamboats…but [other cities refused them]…and…black prostitutes…filled the void left by their white colleagues…Once deportation proved a failure, [officials instead] released orders that required all of Nashville’s prostitutes to register with the military government, which would in turn issue each woman a license to practice her trade…for a weekly fee of 50 cents…these women would receive a regular medical checkup, and if healthy, issued a certificate. Infected prostitutes would be hospitalized and treated at no additional charge. Failure to register would be penalized with a 30-day sentence in a workhouse…

Wilson’s brain is so warped by statism that he cannot see the imposition of licensing, mandatory health checks and pimping fees for what they are, the intrusion of government into a field with which it had previously been uninvolved; the very idea of an unregulated profession is anathema to him. Accordingly, he misnames the regime “legalization”, ignoring the fact that prostitution wasn’t illegal to begin with and therefore could not be “legalized”. The attempt at deportation was not, as he himself explains, the normal status quo in Nashville, but rather an act of martial law by the military governor of an occupied city. He is “shocked” by the fact that the press and city government viciously attacked the deportation plan but accepted the licensing scheme, and he willfully misinterprets the whores’ acceptance of the regime as a desire to be “protected by regulation” rather than as a welcome respite from the harassment which had preceded it.

This is not an isolated incident; for example, articles about Storyville usually describe it as a “legalized red-light district” when in actuality its establishment represented the restriction to a small area of a business which had previously been allowed everywhere in the city. I’ll bet that before most of y’all started reading this blog, you believed that prostitution had always been illegal in most of the US; most people are surprised to learn that criminalization was a 20^th-century notion, enacted in the same general time period as Prohibition and enforced by large, standing municipal police departments which had only existed for a generation. The fact of the matter is that prior to 1913, the US federal government was tiny and the state governments not much bigger; however, the busybody laws which began in the “Progressive Era” gave the swelling numbers of government officials many new excuses to meddle in people’s lives, and the new permanent income tax provided the funds with which to do it. Government began to grow at a pathological rate and has not stopped since, and the minds of most who were born, raised and conditioned to it can no more imagine another way than the members of a lost underground civilization could imagine the sky.

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The Forest for the Trees

Posted in History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged cult of the child, fantasy, hysteria, left-right myth, psychology, Texas on January 14, 2014| 10 Comments »

One of the hallmarks of a panic is that you don’t realize it’s a panic when you’re in the middle of it. – Debbie Nathan

Twenty years after the end of the Satanic Panic, its last few victims are finally being released from prison and in some cases even declared innocent, an extraordinary measure because it requires an organ of the State declaring that its predecessor was not only wrong, but committed a grave injustice. In just the past few months we’ve seen the release of the San Antonio Four and Fran and Dan Keller; only one more victim of a strictly-Satanic case remains in prison, Frank Fuster in Florida. There were, however, other hysteria-tinged cases near the end of the panic whose prosecutors avoided “Satanic” language because they saw the writing on the wall, and some of those victims (like Joseph Allen of Ohio) are still slowly dying in cages. From the safe distance of a generation, reporters – some of whom are young enough to have been peers of the children forced by cops, prosecutors, and other fanatics to make horrible accusations – are now writing stories confidently declaring that the ritual abuse never happened and branding the hysteria a “witch hunt”. But while I obviously agree with them, I find it both sad and telling that not a one of these reporters so smugly declaring their predecessors gullible have dared to denounce their generation’s revival of the panic, “sex trafficking” hysteria. Last week, Slate published a column on the Kellers (and the panic in general) entitled “The Real Victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse”, and I’d like to share an excerpt with you. I don’t think you’ll need much imagination to see how this applies equally well to the current popular hysteria, but to help you I’ve replaced words like “Satanists” with more general terms like “conspirators” [in brackets]:

…Why did psychotherapists and investigators conclude that these fantastic allegations were true? Because at the time, pretty much everyone else in America did…hundreds of children, usually after lengthy sessions with coercive therapists, came forward to say that they…had been [subjected to bizarre mistreatment such as being transported]…to random cities for sexual abuse, or countless other bizarre stories…Media poured attention on the claims…As televangelists prayed for deliverance from Satan’s scourge, talk show “experts” claimed that every imaginable form of abuse was happening on a massive scale in America and that [conspirators were hiding everywhere…media figures] claimed…that more than a million [villains] were plying their evil trade in America right at the very moment…[books about the panic] appeared in libraries and therapists’ offices…“It sounds laughable,” says Debbie Nathan, an investigative reporter who co-wrote Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt about the panic and is now a director for the National Center for Reason and Justice… “Children symbolize the good things about culture, the innocence and purity, the future of the culture,” says Nathan. When a culture feels under threat in some way, fear and anxiety focus on the safety of children…The fear…was perpetuated by both ends of the political spectrum…Most if not all of those involved believed they were acting in the best interests of the children—which meant that any healthy skepticism was interpreted as anti-child. But extensive investigations revealed little to no truth to the…panic…Even so, people still believed…[“experts”]…testified that [organized sexual victimizers] are real, that they are widespread…Common sense and level-headed investigation would have found [these] claims incredible if…panic hadn’t lent a “distorted lens of hysteria” to the picture…

I look forward to reading articles like this about “sex trafficking” hysteria in the late 2030s (there’s a fair chance I’ll still be around; I’d be in my early 70s), but it’s a safe bet that the reporters mocking or marveling at it will be just as oblivious to the absurdity of whatever moral panic is going on then as today’s reporters are to the absurdity of “sex trafficking”.

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The Second Day of Christmas

Posted in History, Holidays, tagged carnival, Catholicism, Europe, holidays, United Kingdom on December 26, 2013| 5 Comments »

On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Two turtle-doves and a partridge in a pear tree. – Traditional Christmas carol

We all learned the traditional carol as children, but did you ever stop to think of what it’s actually about? Other than a rather improbable inflation of increasingly expensive gifts, I mean; just imagine how much it would cost to hire ten noblemen to leap at someone’s party on three successive days. I’m sure most of you realize that Christmas was originally a twelve-day festival, but you may not realize what that actually means: pre-industrial European society essentially shut down for twelve days while everyone celebrated. Other than the Church, virtually every social institution – banks, businesses, governmental functions, the lot – was closed until January 6^th. Now, obviously things moved a lot more slowly in those days; crossing the average country took days rather than hours, and people (again, outside the Church) planned more by the calendar than by the clock. Considering that, the twelve-day hiatus was not much more inconvenient than a weekend was in my childhood, when virtually everything other than restaurants (and the Church) was closed from 5 PM Friday to 9 AM Monday. On top of that, it came midway through the slowest time of the year: though most modern people imagine that the agricultural lifestyle meant constant hard work, that was really only true in the spring and autumn; summers weren’t at all bad, and winter was basically a three-or-four-month vacation except for normal household chores.

That started to change with the rise of the towns in the High Middle Ages, but even then work during the festival was probably a lot like the Friday afternoon before a long weekend: lots of people out “sick”, and the ones who aren’t not really trying too hard. This was undoubtedly a large part of the reason dour work-until-you-drop-you-horrible-sinner-because-God-hates-you Protestants condemned the festival so relentlessly, even getting it banned in Britain under the Commonwealth from 1647-1660, and in Boston from 1659-1681. Industrialization and the breakup of extended families renewed the attack a century later, and though the influence of rural people and writers like Charles Dickens revived the holiday in the first half of the 19^th century, it only survived as a shorn, domesticated, factory-friendly one-day celebration rather than a two-week orgy of eating, drinking, games, music and most un-Puritan laziness.

But today, we’ve regained some of that leisure time we started losing in the 18^th century; though many of my readers returned to work today, many others did not (perhaps even using vacation or “flex time” to accomplish that). If you’re one of those lucky ones, I suggest you resist the urge to join the throngs at Boxing Day sales or returns counters; instead, indulge in the traditional activities associated with this day such as visiting friends or helping the less fortunate, or else just rest at home with those you love and eat Christmas leftovers. While it’s true that we can no longer put the entire world on hold for twelve days, I’m sure most of you can manage two.

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Guest Columnist: Jasper Gregory

Posted in Guest Columns, History, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged animals, censorship, dirty, Europe, imaginative fiction, nanny state, neo-Victorianism, neofeminism, pathologization of males, Pennsylvania, Prohibition (alcohol), racism, social purity, United Kingdom, yin and yang on December 9, 2013| 42 Comments »

Jasper Gregory is a citizen science advocate and gender activist in Oakland, California; for the past few months he’s been researching the development of modern feminism from the 19th-century variety, and his “tweets” on the subject were so fascinating I invited him to contribute this column. I think you’ll find it just as interesting as I do.

A new wave of sexual repression has swept through the lands of the Puritan Diaspora. Under the banner of Feminism sexual puritans have declared a war on prostitution in Sweden and politically incorrect words and images in the UK and North America; the new Puritans are on the rise and have wrapped themselves in a rhetoric of “True Womanhood” that seems more appropriate for the 19^th century than for the Internet Age. But the similarities between today’s prude feminism and the earlier Victorian age of moral regulation go far deeper than you might suspect: the radical “cultural” feminism of 1970-2013 is actually the continuation of a two century moral purity movement.

The English romantic sentimental novel became established in the 1730s during the evangelical Protestant “Great Awakening“. Under the label of “sensibility”, displays of romantic sentimentalism became the measure of good character; the more sensitive you were, the more civilized you were. According to True Woman ideology, they were the most pure and civilized and thus the most sensitive, which is they were always fainting away and coming down with cases of nerves. One outgrowth of Gothic romanticism was the science fiction novel, which first rose to international success in 1818 with Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, daughter of romantic novelist and women’s rights pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft. And soon the Utopian science fiction novel became a way for the early women’s movement to inspire collective action just as the earlier Gothic romance heroines had provided a template for individual reformist action.

The first American woman science fiction author published the Utopia Three Hundred Years Hence in 1836. In it, Mary Griffith imagines the Philadelphia of 2135, in which middle-class white women have attained more power in society. The novel displays many features which would appear in later feminist Utopias, but it also contains many elements which were more in keeping the Victorian separation of spheres. For instance, 2135‘s women do not have or desire the vote, for when they were given equal status under the law they retreated into a women’s sphere and separated themselves even more fully from the men’s sphere of politics and the university. They did, however, enter the realm of business, which they were suited to on account of their house-holding skills; in fact, quite prophetically, Griffith saw equal competition in the marketplace as the route by which women achieved equality.

Griffith lived in an era in which romantic movement activists were holding up women as especially pure and civilized within the separate women’s sphere of the home. Though it seems paradoxical to us, it was middle-class women who fought for their gilded cages as moral arbiters of the home and guardians of society’s manners and morals. Rather than being imposed upon women, the separate women’s sphere was fought for and attained by a Romantic Era women’s movement. This can be seen in Griffith’s Utopia; her 2135 Philadelphia is a world in which the women’s sphere had domesticated and civilized the male public sphere. All of the rough edges had been removed: the roads were smooth, and noisy, scary steam engines were banned once women began to guide technology. All dogs were also exterminated, a theme common in later feminist Utopias: dogs were uncouth, ill mannered and dead, though cats would be allowed to live. Griffith’s Matrons got together and censored the vulgar passages of Shakespeare, and in another flash of prophecy, once the actors had been censored they would go on to become major cultural figures. Mostly, Griffith dreamed of state regulation and a strong police to intervene and protect white middle class women from undignified situations and unscrupulous men. Liquor and smoking were banned; if a bachelor was found drunk three times his head was shaved and he was sent to the work camps.

These themes mirror the concerns of Romantic Era Christianity in which a highly artificial version of sentimental femininity came to dominate. As Colin Campbell wrote in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism,

…the rise of sentimentality went hand in hand with the rise of consumer capitalism and of middle class women’s new role as head consumer of household items. This is reflected in Three Hundred Years Hence, where all duties on imported luxury goods have been lifted. 2135 is a consumer paradise.

By the 1880s the women’s movement was picking up steam and had moved on from the creation of women’s space into the purity campaigns, the effort to impose what they considered to be feminine virtues onto all of society. Proto-eugenics was also becoming popular because as mothers, the reformers believed they could lay claim to special eugenic knowledge. These themes are especially noticeable in Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1881), the first parthenogenetic Utopia (this element would become dominant in 20^th-century feminist Utopias). In Mizora, our narrator descends inside the Earth to find a blonde, Aryan, all-female society; their forebears had decided that dark skin caused criminal behavior and had used eugenic breeding to “cure” this affliction, and men were regarded as an inferior dark-skinned race whose elimination had led to a perfect society (an idea familiar to readers of 1970s feminist Utopias). As in Griffith’s work, the Mizorans had tamed and domesticated uncivilized nature; animals had been eliminated and farming was held in suspicion because of the “deleterious” effects of earthly matter. Their engineers made food from chemicals, produced bread from limestone and were close to achieving their glorious goal of finding chemical substitutes for fruit and vegetables; in a sense, Lane was imagining the Hostess Twinkie Utopia. But besides being the first exclusively female Utopia where all of the turbulent and chaotic aspects of the men’s sphere had been tamed and made safe for proper ladies, Mizora was also a whiteness Utopia: even their architecture and clothing were all bleached white.

1888 brought the literary Utopia into the mainstream with the publication of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which contained many of the themes of earlier women’s Utopias. Looking Backward became the first international blockbuster bestseller and inspired the American Nationalist Socialist movement, the Nationalist Women’s Movement and later the Progressive Movement, the New Deal and Europe’s National Socialist movements. One early Bellamyite was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who in 1915 wrote Herland, a direct inspiration for 1970s women’s separatist Utopias. Gilman continued the dog exterminationist themes of Mizora and Three Hundred Years Hence, and like most feminists of the time was a strong believer in Lamarckian evolution and eugenics; the Herlanders “of Aryan stock” had made eugenics the focus of their society, and had perfected their race by eliminating males along with the dogs. The “Race Mothers” gave virgin birth to girls and were never subjected to the degradation of sex; women thus became supermothers and maternal passion was the only emotion left to them. Herlanders did not eat meat and cats had been eugenically engineered not to meow or catch birds; female cats were allowed to roam free, but males were kept in cages for stud purposes only.

Contemporary feminists consider Gilman one of the founders of American feminism, which is ironic considering that her eugenic feminism contained so much of the intolerance displayed by modern neo-Puritans. She is less known for the white supremacism evidenced in her 1908 “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”, in which she argued that the state should re-enslave African Americans to instill social hygiene in them and take away their right to reproduce; her proposal anticipates both the German solution to “the Jewish Problem” and the invasive social hygiene policies of the modern welfare state. Gilman was rediscovered in the 1970s and adopted as a feminist idol, thus supporting the idea that 1970s feminism was a white women’s power movement; her model of purified eugenic Utopia became a cottage industry as multiple generations of women’s studies students read and wrote these Utopias and used them as a guiding principle for action. The following graph shows the rise in use of the term “feminist Utopia” from 1970 to the mid-’90s:

The year 2013 has seen a renewed feminism which in the United Kingdom is busy banning rock music, men’s magazines, pole fitness and exotic dancing, while in California a new culture war is aimed at the traditional libertarian values of the high-tech scene. Without knowing it, a new generation is taking up the battle to civilize and domesticate the wild unruly natives and impose the traditional values of the Victorian women’s sphere on men and women alike.

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Links #179

Posted in Current Events, History, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Tyranny, tagged animals, California, cell phones, censorship, China, comics, cops, FBI, games, holidays, illegal aliens, imaginative fiction, internet, lawheads, lawyers, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, politicians, prisons, propaganda, surveillance, Twitter, United Kingdom, video, Washington DC, Wisconsin on December 8, 2013| 12 Comments »

Don’t worry about the price tag! – Erin McDonald

I suspect this will be the last Links column this year in which Christmas things are not a large proportion of items (whether that’s a good thing or a bad one in your view). Our top contributors were the guys from Popehat, with both videos and the two items before the first video. That one requires a bit of information to appreciate: it seems our increasingly-totalitarian government held a contest for the best propaganda song touting one of its massive government programs, and though the winner isn’t actually entitled “Don’t Think, Just Obey“, it might as well be. Well, Patrick Non-White created this video parody by dubbing the winning song over a clip from a cult movie which had an intriguing premise, but IMHO would have been dramatically better had it been exactly six minutes and twenty seconds shorter. The links between the videos were provided by Radley Balko (“headline” and “truth”), Jesse Walker (“mesmerism”), Jason Kuznicki (“welcome”), Violet Blue (“website” & “Microsoft”), Mike Siegel (“superheroes”), Grace (“singing”), Laura Lee (“naughty”), Furry Girl (“1%”), Molly Crabapple (“solitary”), Mike Riggs (“warrant”), Cop Block (“isolated”), Jack Shafer (“FBI”), PWW (“assault”), and Mistress Matisse (“Xmas”).

From the Archives

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Ignoble Experiment

Posted in History, Tyranny, tagged bogus studies, censorship, consensual crime, cops, drugs, hysteria, law, Prohibition (alcohol), prohibitionist myths, social purity on December 5, 2013| 24 Comments »

Beware of purity workers [who are]…ready to accept and endorse any amount of coercive and degrading treatment of their fellow creatures in the fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force. – Josephine Butler

Eighty years ago today, a so-called “Noble Experiment” that was anything but was forcibly shut down. At exactly 4:31 PM Eastern Time on December 5^th, 1933, the 21^st Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified, repealing the 18^th Amendment and thus putting an end to a massive social engineering effort which cost the United States over $1 billion (over $13 billion in today’s money) and resulted in the imprisonment, impoverishment and death of over 100,000 Americans. But despite the enormous economic and social costs (clogged courts, the rise of large-scale organized crime, widespread disrespect for all law, warfare in the streets and the birth of the modern police state, to name but a few), prohibitionists fought tooth and nail to prevent the dismantling of their mad scheme. Furthermore, politicians learned the wrong lesson from the experience: not “prohibition doesn’t work and has catastrophic effects on society,” but rather “start small and then slowly ratchet up the number and popularity of banned substances and behaviors, and spread prohibition across many bureaucratic regulations instead of investing it in one easily-targeted law.”

I’ve often discussed the nearly-exact resemblance between “sex trafficking” hysteria and “white slavery” hysteria; I’ve also compared the rhetoric of sex work prohibitionists to that of drug prohibitionists, and I won’t insult your intelligence by presuming any of y’all haven’t recognized the resemblance between alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition. But even though I’ve often said “All prohibitionism is the same,” I wonder if y’all have ever given any thought to how much the same the various colors of prohibition are. Today I’m going to share a few facts about the capital-P Prohibition whose end we recognize today; I won’t waste my time and yours in pointing out the modern parallels, because they really are that obvious an exercise in plus ça change.

To prohibitionists, human rights, happiness and even life are subsidiary to “sending a message”, and the cost of that message can never be too great. Various penalties proposed for the “crime” of drinking included torture, whipping, branding, imprisonment in Alaskan concentration camps, sterilization, enforced celibacy and even execution; some wanted the punishments applied to drinkers’ children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. Others preferred to execute drinkers stealthily by releasing poisoned alcohol through undercover agents posing as bootleggers; they understood that the death toll could be in the hundreds of thousands, but declared that damage a “price worth paying” for an alcohol-free society. And though that plan was not carried out, the government did intentionally poison industrial alcohol in a failed attempt to keep people from drinking it; over 10,000 people died as a result. Police and G-men raided homes and businesses (often without warrant), seized or destroyed property (including cash, vehicles and buildings), murdered citizens and even crossed into Canada for their “operations”. Nor were these depredations limited to government actors; die-hard prohibitionists formed groups to “assist” enforcement by spying on others, ratting them out to the police and even conducting raids on their own.

Since the very real threat of official violence was still not enough to stop Americans from imbibing, prohibitionists mounted a campaign of disinformation, sometimes producing bogus studies to “prove” their dogma. They claimed that any amount of drinking dramatically increased the chance of dying from edema, and that habitual drunks often died of spontaneous combustion. Drinking mothers (or even fathers) supposedly produced babies who were born addicted, and even the smell of alcohol was said to cause birth defects; some claimed these birth defects were inheritable, thus affecting multiple generations. Children were subjected to presentations “proving” that alcohol caused severe brain damage. The “anti-saloon” crowd also indulged in historical revisionism, censoring, reinterpreting or even retranslating documents (especially the Bible) to remove references to wine or other forms of alcohol, and altering pictures such as the one above (here’s the 1848 original) to retroactively turn historical figures into teetotalers.

The soi-disant Progressives wanted to remake society along “scientific” lines, to impose their idea of clockwork “perfection” on the human race; eugenics was a large part of this, as should be evident in the suggestion that “undesirables” be sterilized or their children executed with them. But though the Nazis gave eugenics such a bad name it was eliminated from “progressive” philosophy, the rest of its catechism is virtually untouched; neither Prohibition nor the four-decade “War on Drugs” has cured the adherents of that revolting 19^th-century cult of their dedication to the idea that, as Butler put it, “any amount of coercive and degrading treatment” of peaceful citizens is acceptable in order to force them to obey the cultists’ perverse notions of morality.

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The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Posted in History, Holidays, Philosophy, tagged anecdote, holidays, hysteria, New York, prohibitionist myths, rescue industry, Toys for Tots on November 29, 2013| 55 Comments »

It’s the most wonderful time of the year!
With the kids jingle belling
And everyone telling
You “Be of good cheer”…
It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

It’s the hap-happiest season of all!
With those holiday greetings
And gay happy meetings
When friends come to call…
It’s the hap- happiest season of all. – Edward Pola and George Wyle

When I was a wee lass, and the song which provides today’s title and epigram was a recent holiday hit rather than a hoary standard, today would be the first day in the American calendar year that one might be likely to hear it in a public place. For most of the 20^th century and perhaps earlier, the day after Thanksgiving was the agreed-upon beginning of the Christmas season in the United States; since most people (outside of retail) were off from work that day, it was a convenient opportunity to put up decorations, obtain and trim a tree or even go shopping. Macy’s department store in New York has reinforced this every year since 1924 (with the exception of 1942-44) by the inclusion of Santa Claus in its popular Thanksgiving Day parade, heralded as the “official” kickoff of Yuletide festivities.

But as the years rolled by, marketing became a science and advertising became ever more aggressive. Merchants began erecting early Christmas displays even before Thanksgiving, and were it not for Halloween’s growing popularity as an adult drinking holiday they might have broken into October by now. On November 1^st every large retail chain (anxious to sweep away any lingering thoughts of mortality which might have entered less-impenetrable consumer skulls from the rare horror imagery among the sexy Muppets, sexy foodstuffs, sexy police-state functionaries and sexy superhuman serial killers) rips down the Halloween décor, shoves it into closeout bins and plasters the entire premises with red and green, fake snow, creepy Saint Nicholas caricatures, incessant Christmas and winter-themed music (including modern arrangements of the eponymous tune), and unrelenting encouragement to buy, buy, buy! But the traditional launch date hasn’t been forgotten, oh no! Now it’s become “Black Friday”, the worldwide festival of conspicuous consumption which started out as an in-joke among Philadelphia retailers in the 1960s. Thanksgiving has been reduced to a sideshow, one of the less important events of “Black Friday Week” as advertising trash infuriatingly insists on calling it; those unfortunate enough to depend on retail employment for their livelihood are forced to skip the day altogether as their employers shift “Black Friday Sales Events” back further and further into Thursday and demand that the wage-slaves be on hand to deal with hordes of drooling morons who lack the sense to stay home and enjoy the sorts of activities that Christmas songs still pretend characterize the season.

As you can probably tell, I most certainly do not approve. We’ll be spending the day as we always do: finding a Christmas tree on our property and decorating it, and having Thanksgiving leftovers for dinner. Unless there’s some dire emergency, none of our vehicles are going farther than the mailbox, and we aren’t going to do any online shopping either, not today and not on the newest pseudo-event, the even-more-stupidly-named “Cyber Monday” (and no, not on Boxing Day either). I’ve already bought most of my presents, and will obtain the rest on my trip to New Orleans week-after-next; and though I do love this season for the festivities and the visiting and the gift-giving and the donations to Toys for Tots (my favorite charity), I will be staying as far away from retail establishments as is humanly possible for the next month. I also won’t be donating to the Salvation Army, who as I’ve explained before were one of the originators of “sex trafficking” hysteria and are still among its most vociferous and dishonest proponents. By all means, donate to the needy during this season of goodwill, but there are plenty of charities who manage to accomplish that without also funding crusades against human rights.

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