Month: May 2015

The slave morality of sexual liberation

In Lenin’s time, a considerable number of young Marxists eagerly awaited a post-revolutionary society where getting sex would be really really easy:

Youth’s altered attitude to questions of sex is of course ‘fundamental’, and based on theory. Many people call it ‘revolutionary’ and ‘communist’. They sincerely believe that this is so. I am an old man, and I do not like it. I may be a morose ascetic, but quite often this so-called ‘new sex life’ of young people and frequently of the adults too seems to me purely bourgeois and simply an extension of the good old bourgeois brothel. All this has nothing in common with free love as we Communists understand it. No doubt you have heard about the famous theory that in communist society satisfying sexual desire and the craving for love is as simple and trivial as ‘drinking a glass of water’. A section of our youth has gone mad, absolutely mad, over this ‘glass-of-water theory’. It has been fatal to many a young boy and girl. Its devotees assert that it is a Marxist theory. I want no part of the kind of Marxism which infers all phenomena and all changes in the ideological superstructure of society directly and blandly from its economic basis, for things are not as simple as all that. A certain Frederick Engels has established this a long time ago with regard to historical materialism.

Clearly Lenin wasn’t on board with it, but you get the idea that the desire for this type of sexual liberation was a peculiarly communist interest. I don’t think that the Tsar and his cronies had to worry about the supply of readily available sex. As every teen comedy has shown us, the inability to get laid is the mark of a loser. Communism is the revolt of the losers.

I definitely don’t subscribe to Nietzsche’s philosophy, but his concept of master-slave morality seems salient enough to (loosely) borrow. Slave morality is defined by the and values and wishes of an overworked peasant. A great illustration is the land of Cockaigne, depicted in the featured image of this article. From Wikipedia:

Cockaigne or Cockayne is a land of plenty in medieval myth, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. Specifically, in poems like The Land of Cockaigne, Cockaigne is a land of contraries, where all the restrictions of society are defied (abbots beaten by their monks), sexual liberty is open (nuns flipped over to show their bottoms), and food is plentiful (skies that rain cheeses). Writing about Cockaigne was a commonplace of Goliard verse. It represented both wish fulfillment and resentment at the strictures of asceticism and dearth.

…roasted pigs wander about with knives in their backs to make carving easy, where grilled geese fly directly into one’s mouth, where cooked fish jump out of the water and land at one’s feet. The weather is always mild, the wine flows freely, sex is readily available, and all people enjoy eternal youth.

All of this is what “good” is particularly from the perspective of someone with low-level physiological concerns.

For the man who doesn’t get laid, the most important thing about sex is how attainable it is. All other considerations are secondary. Increased supply of easy-access sex is the promise of sexual liberation. Some spillover is bound to happen, and the involuntary celibate wants to get splashed. He doesn’t care about the virtues of human sexuality higher up the pyramid as long as he is thirsty.

I’ve started calling this Mariani’s Law: In general, how keen someone is on sexual liberation and sex positivity is inversely proportional to how attractive that person is.

But are there virtues to sex beyond just having a lot of it? Faithful couples seem to think so, and for what it’s worth, so does the Catholic Church. Even from a utilitarian standpoint I think we need to look at this with some scrutiny. I bet that the average sexual encounter in Iran is hotter than than the average sexual counter in the United States, even though there’s more sexual encounters per capita in the US. The point is that there’s tradeoffs in changes of a society’s sexual mores. The side that favors quantity above all else are the “slaves.” The other side is concerned with values that transcend that calculation.

I’ve reaped the dividends of the sexual revolution, and in all probability it’s been a net gain. Sex is awesome per se, and that’s precisely why we don’t need a value system telling us that we should be promiscuous. That kind of value system doesn’t serve monogamous couples, it serves the sexually frustrated.

Awkward internet Marxists who get miffed about “slut shaming” definitely are at slave-level:

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Is Bernie Sanders a socialist?

Editor’s note: The following is an extended version of the comments quoted by Damon Linker in the Week. For less sympathetic coverage of Sanders, see Peter Dreier at HuffPo and Michael Kazin at Slate. C-SPAN will air the National Press Club event on Jack’s new book this Sunday at 6:45 Eastern, 3:45 Pacific, but the full video can be found here.

Is Bernie Sanders a socialist? I know from my mother who lives in Vermont that particularly at constituent events, he more often identifies as an “independent” than a socialist. At other times he’ll take advantage of his socialist reputation, such as appearing on an episode of the 2011 C-SPAN miniseries “The Contenders” on Eugene Debs. But of late, it is the media emphasizing the socialist label for Bernie.

In the context of the historic American Socialist movement, Bernie is squarely in the tradition of the Socialist Party politicians elected in the first half of the 20th century in places as far flung as Milwaukee; Schenectady, NY; Butte, MT; Minneapolis; Reading, PA; and Bridgeport, CT – success through delivering on core constituency service and clean government. His first election as mayor of Burlington in 1981 was due to a property tax revolt and the opportunistic support of the police union. In 2013, I attended the annual Fourth of July parade in picturesque Warren, VT, where respectful but modest applause for Governor Shumlin was followed by absolute pandemonium for Bernie (as he is known simply to Vermonters). The two things that have sealed this – and 70% of the vote – are an A rating from the NRA and zeal in securing veterans benefits.

Politically shrewd as he is, I hoped Bernie would decide to marshal his well-earned influence behind a candidate who can better replicate his model of success nationally such as Jim Webb. Maybe I was naïve to think he could do this without first running a campaign himself, and I imagine both Webb and Martin O’Malley are happy to have Bernie deliver the truly rough punches to Hillary. But perhaps what Bernie has been thinking is that he wants to replicate the Ron Paul model of inspiring and leaving a large activist organization in his wake.

This exact thinking is revealed in a blog by the editor of Jacobin (see Counterpunch for the truly nasty anti-Bernie argument on the left). My fear is that such a large opening for a consciously “socialist” politics in America today will inevitably be filled by the uber-PC Jacobin, which has been in the forefront calling for a merger of the various remnants of the Communist Party with the Democratic Socialists of America, along with such ideologues in the professional class of the labor movement who tend to look to the 1930s Popular Front as their usable past.

Here we come to the core arguments of my book: 1) that the reason radicalism has been so painfully irrelevant in the post-9/11 era is because it suffers the same affliction as liberalism, the idolatry of identity politics, and 2) that it was the Popular Front that displaced the historic Socialist Party, of the original middle American radical Eugene V. Debs and the quintessential progressive isolationist Norman Thomas, profoundly committed to the ballot box and to Jeffersonian virtue, with what became contemporary liberalism – the elevation of protest over politics at the expense of democratic virtue.

Yet the real turning point to contemporary liberalism was the civil rights movement and the new left, whose foundation was in the replication of this model by the Trotsky protégé Max Shachtman, whose followers took over the corpse of the Socialist Party at the end of the 1950s and ultimately became a core component in the forging of neoconservatism. The irony is that Bernie Sanders’ political pedigree runs against the grain of all this: beginning in a radical dissenting faction of the Shachtmanite Young People’s Socialist League in the early 1960s, and then squarely situated in the most impeccably small-d democratic segment of the new left, that hoped to revive the possibilities for a new party and a spirit resembling the historic Socialist movement.

I do not expect Bernie to substantially revive the old faith in the ballot – it is true that he is more Swedish welfare statist than Jeffersonian radical. At the same time, it is misleading to say that he would be perfectly at home in a mainstream European center-left party; the example of the 1960s was ultimately adopted by, and profoundly transformed, the European social democratic left and turned upside-down the Cold War-era question of “American exceptionalism.” Indeed, if only by virtue of the necessities of running for president, Bernie’s reliability on foreign policy and the surveillance state have risen substantially.

What Bernie can and likely will do, though it is not necessarily his intention, is pry open the contradictions in contemporary liberalism, as it is led by the force of events to emphasize economic inequality, civil liberty, and responsible government at the ultimate expense of its identity politics zeal. Bernie has made his displeasure with identity politics known in the past – though he may not push hard on a critique of contemporary liberalism, he will certainly provoke the discussion as Elizabeth Warren would not.

I wrote my book because my family background was in the labor movement and the increasingly forgotten non-Communist left, and that the historic Socialist Party denounced by some new left historians as “the left wing of McCarthyism” deserved to be reconsidered on its own terms a generation after the Cold War. The result may have been a book that greets most self-identified socialists in the United States of 2015 as something from another planet. Yet Bernie Sanders represents just enough of a link to that past to raise some interesting if not troublesome questions.

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Lindsey Graham: The neoreactionary candidate

Because democracy is a polite name for anarchy, we men of the right hate to vote. Voting is to power what porn is to sex; both are shameful and to be avoided.

Because democracy is fitful, however, every now and again it presents an opportunity, like a ray of sunlight piercing a violent storm, to restore stable and orderly government. Often this occurs when formerly respected institutions are breaking down, like the rule of law. In Chile, for example, military rule was legitimized by the lower house of their legislature, after Salvador Allende refused to enforce the rulings of the Supreme Court.

Given the current president’s penchant for governing by executive fiat and ignoring the duly enacted laws of this country — such as the fourth and fifth amendments, or immigration law (a full account of the administration’s crimes is beyond the scope of this article) — you should not need convincing that we are in a similar situation.

Only one man appreciates the need to bring military power to bear against feckless politicians, and he is expected to announce his campaign for president on June 1. If your goal is to hasten the demise of degenerate American democracy and bring about government by the strong and the virtuous, there is only one man in the 2016 presidential race for you; that man is Lindsey Graham. The senator is already frustrating other Republican hopefuls’ attempts to make inroads in his domain of South Carolina.

We want government to run like a business. There is only one man who has stated a willingness to sell cabinet appointments; that man is also Lindsey Graham. He let on recently that he may have the “first all-Jewish cabinet in America because of the pro-Israel funding.” It would be shortsighted to allow anti-semitism to get in the way of what would be the largest step in history towards running America like a joint-stock corporation.

His record indicates a capricious authoritarianism worthy of Caligula, and there would be no better pretext for crushing dissent at home than a new war with Iran.

The never-married senator has been hounded about his dainty patois, earning nicknames like “Miss Lindsey” and “Huckleberry Closetcase.” To his credit, he has let the rumors stay rumors, no doubt with an aristocrat’s sense that, no matter how baroque one’s sexuality, best to keep it private and don’t frighten the horses — or in his case, Carolina baptists and a casino tycoon. God may expect better of him; we mortals should not question our betters.

If you harbor lingering doubts about the act of voting, bear in mind that detractors could be punished in the new regime. Consider it an oath of fealty. Those who find him distasteful can be reassured that a man who talks like that won’t last long in a military government.

Vote for a coup, vote Lindsey Graham.

This is the #OfficialNeoreactionaryPosition.

There is no easy solution for Baltimore

The recent unrest in Baltimore is yet another sign of our trying times. More out-of-control than the chaos that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer, the looting and destruction in the city was another reminder that America is an increasingly divided country. And by divided, I mean split in more pieces than two.

As the media picks sides in the debate over keeping order and grievances about police abuse, I have a novel question: what, if anything, can be done about police brutality and inexcusable violence and looting? Is reconciliation possible, or is America fated to live with irrational destruction driven by corrupt policing?

I have my doubts. Complex issues – and the situation in Baltimore is anything but simple – are tough to weed through. They require looking at things through a kind of prism. All sides should be considered, as much as humanly possible. Of course, bias and predilection will always distort pure, objective reasoning. But we can make a good-faith effort to try and understand what is at the core of problem before formulating a solution.

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Of course Buzzfeed is pro-shaming culture, they make piles of money from it

I haven’t read Jon Ronson’s new book about shaming culture. But I suspect this Buzzfeed reviewer is giving it short shrift, since she thinks political correctness is such a risible concept that it belongs in scare quotes. Here’s the crux of Jacqui Shine’s review:

What makes this book an uncomfortable, if distant, cousin of GamerGate and men’s rights activist logic is that it, too, relies on a series of false equivalencies and muddy distinctions in order to elevate being shamed on social media to epic proportions. These sorts of distortions are dangerous because they minimize — and even threaten to erase — far more systematic and serious problems that have taken years to even reach the public consciousness. Based on the premise that everyone shares Ronson’s worst nightmare — an undeserved public flogging on Twitter — So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed shows a total disinterest, even disdain, for social and interpersonal power dynamics. Ronson seems to see every kind of public shaming as equivalent, no matter the audience (a handful or hundreds of thousands), platform (a courtroom, Twitter, a prison, a hotel conference room, newspapers and media websites), the identity of the shamer (a judge, a freelance journalist, an entire publication, a bunch of strangers), or even the cause (racist jokes, off-color photos, plagiarism, kinky sex, abuse of political office, sundry felonies).

She criticizes him for comparing the cases of Justine Sacco and Adria Richards, the donglegate shamer, for showing too much equanimity and failing to say, unequivocally, that one is bad and the other is good. That equanimity is, of course, “a major strategy of aggrieved white dudes, like men’s rights activists.” The last line is similar:

In a world where people who have historically been powerless have a new means with which to fight back — or at least make their voices heard — it’s important to notice when this empowerment is made out to be dangerous.

Perhaps shaming culture would be worth defending if it really was the social media equivalent of shooting kulaks. That seems to be what she’s saying. But when that sentiment is expressed on a site that makes piles of money by stoking these online mobs, it seems rather self-serving and unreflective.

When not teaching its readers how to perform anilingus via cartoon, a major source of content on the serious news outlet known as Buzzfeed is offensive stuff people are saying on social media. It’s one of those standbys that can be adapted for any media event people are tweeting racist stuff about. The reviewer says Ronson’s book “shows a total disinterest, even disdain, for social and interpersonal power dynamics.” Is a company seeking to profit from these shame-mobs part of those power dynamics?

For the sake of argument, I’ll grant that some people have it coming. Perhaps we could even come up with a set of agreed-upon rules, a celestial privilege abacus, by which we could decide the amount of shaming a person deserves given their social position. That’s not realistic, though, and in practice it falls to people like Shine to improvise them. When those people are writing for websites that make lots of money from the encouragement of public shaming, do you think we can expect them to do that in a fair way?