Ideology

A question of equal protection

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.

The above quote is from the majority opinion of the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, which just made gay marriage a right to everyone in the USA. This was done with a broad interpretation of the 14th Amendment; you can’t just prevent people who love each other from marrying, after all.

Well, not exactly. Notice the emphasis I placed on the quote. Two people in love have protections under the law that three or more people do not. If:

A. Marriage is just a weird thing people do when they love each other, and

B. It’s wrong to not let people participate in this ritual because of their non-traditional instantiation of the institution

How the fuck is that fair? Why don’t polygamous people deserve equal protection?

Chief Justice Roberts asked this very question:

I do not mean to equate marriage between same-sex couples with plural marriages in all respects. There may well be relevant differences that compel different legal analysis. But if there are, petitioners have not pointed to any. When asked about a plural marital union at oral argument, petitioners asserted that a State “doesn’t have such an institution.” But that is exactly the point: the States at issue here do not have an institution of same-sex marriage, either.

Obviously, the Supreme Court only rules on cases in front of them. It’s just as obvious that if an otherwise identical case about plural marriage reached the SCOTUS, it wouldn’t benefit from the same broad interpretation of the 14th Amendment that just made same-sex marriage legal. They wouldn’t use the logic of “but equal protection. But LOVE!” to protect plural marriage.

This is because fashionable people in urban areas think that same-sex marriage is cool. Fashionable people in urban areas do not think that that polygamy is cool. In fact, it’s downright icky to baby boomers. This preference that the intelligentsia have for gay marriage is obviously the reason that the court made the ruling that it did, and that’s the problem here.

The Supreme Court is only supposed to rule on questions of law, not questions of politics. Theoretically, judges aren’t supposed to have different rulings on otherwise identical issues because all the beautiful people agree that gay marriage is good but plural marriage is still kinda, you know, weird. Even if polygamists people are weirdos, they still fucking get equal protection.

This is the most worrying thing about a very broad interpretation of the law. We already have a legislature and an executive that exist to reflect the current fashions and tastes of the populace. We don’t need a judiciary to reflect the illogical dichotomies of public opinion with illogical interpretations of the law.

*****

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White privilege is real, but mewling about it isn’t helping

During the hot racial strife of 1968, author James Baldwin was interviewed by Esquire magazine on the status of race relations in the country. Baldwin, whose works offered keen insight into the worldview of black America, didn’t pull any punches. He was up front with describing the ineptitude of white Americans in alleviating racial animosity. When asked why the state of New York planned to erect a government building in place of a black nationalist bookstore in Harlem, Baldwin plainly told the interviewer, “the American white man has proved, if nothing else, he is absolutely, endlessly, foolish when it comes to this problem.”

“Foolish” is a good way to describe Lehigh University visiting professor Christopher Driscoll. Stupidly garrulous may be another. Dr. Driscoll takes political correctness to a whole new level with his blog Shades of White. After co-hosting a rap music symposium (totally appropriate for a university) with two hip-hop educators (such pedagogy), Driscoll decided to issue “The Ten Cracka Commandments” to teach his fellow whites how to view and interact with black culture. Like Moses descending from Mount Sinai, the totally conscious professor wants, I think, to make sure his people aren’t creating a golden calf out of racial misunderstanding.

First, I’ll give credit where credit is due: Dr. Driscoll is as “white” as can be. His website’s profile picture shows him wearing bright yellow pants and loafers. For being a college professor and dressing like a Capitol Hill staffer, I grant Driscoll the title of “expert on white people.” He better be welcome.

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Magicians of the Outer Right

It’s a common error to think that mystics and magicians are generally liberals or leftists. At least in America.

Most Boomer Americans, monolingual, insulated from the rest of the world and from history, associate “magick” with hippies, the “60s”, Tim Leary, pot and acid, and sexual freedom. When they think about it at all which isn’t often, these days. Most younger Americans don’t think about it at all, being too busy sexting, face booking and in other ways competing for visible status. Ritual, programmed self-hypnosis and other inner work are less common now, since they don’t yield outward signs of wealth or cool.

At least not right away.

I don’t know as much about Europe directly, but my impression is that there’s bit more attention to these subjects still, especially in Eastern Europe, and across the age groups. But as a rapidly shrinking population of young people plugs in, turns on and tweets out, I suppose the same thing is happening there, too.

In truth, ritual magick, symbolic meditation and related practices have always been the tool of a tiny, cognitive elite, in all societies and across all civilizations. They’re simply too difficult, too esoteric, too scary and too uncertain. And while I jest about status-signaling today, it’s always been important to most people, and occult practices have never brought the kind of status boost that killing the biggest buffalo, having the biggest automobile or (nowadays) being the biggest “victim” did.

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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?

The only attacks worth listening to are the ones nobody hears

Last night I was checking out a #gamergate meetup where Milo Yiannopoulos and Christina Hoff Sommers were appearing at, taking place at a bar called Local 16. I walk up the stairs and see the crowd, and suddenly memories of Magic: the Gathering tournaments come rushing back to me. I leave early, only to find out that at 12:15 people are evacuated for a “fire drill” which turns out to be a bomb threat. The threat was made by a throwaway Twitter account and not by phone call.

A lot of people implicated Arthur Chu, who was making cryptic tweets beforehand:

He also sent a weird email to Local 16, trying to shame them for hosting what he calls “a right wing hate group.”

These are definitely the kinds of bizarre communications you’d expect from an ideological fanatic, but overheated rhetoric claiming that Arthur Chu made the bomb threat is ridiculous and everyone should know better. Almost as ridiculous is claiming that anyone would give their ideological opposition the much-coveted victim card to wear as a badge of martyrdom.

Someone who hates #gamergate making this bomb threat doesn’t make sense. Without specific knowledge, we can only deal with general knowledge of who has what kinds of incentives. I can see two possibilities. It was either a third-party prankster trying to stir up drama or a pro-gamergate figure trying to get a slice of his the victim pie for his comrades.

In either case, there is going to be a rude awakening. It’s going to be interesting to observe the complete asymmetry in mainstream coverage of this bomb threat. Even the least credible threats to anti-gamergate personalities get massive mainstream coverage. That just isn’t going to happen this time or any time that the ideologically misaligned are on the receiving end of such things. Bias isn’t always a conscious thing. It’s often expressed by what the editorial board isn’t thinking about. No amount of social media flailing is going to change that.

While everyone else on social media seem to take the most unfounded threats with the grace of a diving soccer player, what’s actually interesting are the quiet attacks. The website that I edit for, TechRaptor, has been DDoS’d four times. Nobody announced it. The only reason I know this is because the owner of the site told me privately. The perpetrators didn’t announce their evil intentions on social media. We also gets threats in the comments which are quickly and quietly removed. TechRaptor doesn’t malinger about it. That’s what it looks like when angry fanatics are genuinely trying to silence you. It looks like nothing.

No, the “real victims” of false narratives are not the ones the narratives were made to serve

Are police officers are the real victims of unarmed black men being shot dead by the police? Of course not – that would be an insane thing to believe. Even though police officers might be coming under more scrutiny as a result of recent incidents, that’s not the same thing as actually being a the victim of those incidents.

The problem is that these incidents are probably facilitated by a police narrative. In the wake of the killing of Walter Scott, a Fox legal analyst revealed that planting weapons used to be standard procedure for cops. Does this mean that cops are pure evil? No. It means that within police culture there exists have a narrative that isn’t necessarily backed up by evidence specific to the relevant incident. The argument would go that criminals exist, and sometimes criminals get lucky and can get away with it due to a lack of evidence. It’s up to the police officers to tilt the scales in the favor of justice by bending the truth. And since black men commit a disproportionate amount of the crime, there is a problem that has to be solved with evidence-agnostic action that may break a few eggs to make the omelet.

Women actually facing harassment aren’t the “real victims” of Ellen Pao’s failure to achieve her dishonest shakedown of Silicon Valley. Businesses targeted by ideological profiteers are. The ideology is based on the specious claim of the culture of Silicon Valley is a “boy’s club.” Because Silicon Valley is like this, any specific Silicon Valley company is guilty by association. This claim that Pao’s company must have been guilty of discriminating against women was made by the media before they even had the evidence. They made an evidence-agnostic claim that if Silicon Valley is sexist in general, any charge of sexism made against any tech company must true. Every narrative like this demands that we make examples of those who embody its fears.

When UVA rape story broke, the media was already waiting for it to happen. After all, fraternities as institutions of white male privilege, and therefore “rape culture,” are a mainstay of fashionable progressive demonology. When the hysteria died down and the story came under scrutiny, it unraveled. It turned out that Rolling Stone just didn’t really check their facts on the ever so narrative-friendly incident. But while the story was eventually skewered by the media, there was no real desire to adjust the narrative of a rape crisis on campus. The “real victims” of the fanciful hoax were actually women on campus, since their claims will now be more easily dismissed. It’s not the men or fraternities that were falsely accused of rape. It can’t be. When the narrative has such an embarrassing failure, the only victims of such a failure can be those who the narrative was built to serve.

Thankfully, the media doesn’t have the same narrative in favor of police officers. Just because black people are overrepresented in crime doesn’t mean that every instance of a black man being shot dead means that he deserved it. Discrimination happening doesn’t mean that any given company is guilty of it and should be made an example of. Rape being a crime that happens doesn’t mean that every overheated story about it must be taken gospel. Evidence needs to come first in these kinds of situations, and victims need to be properly identified as the villains of an agenda-driven mythology.