The Cult of ‘Persynality’

My present relationship with the feminist movement is akin to one’s begrudging love for their loud old aunt Mildred who has too many cats and a nasty habit of getting drunk and telling offensive jokes at family reunions – she’s often a pain in the ass; but she’s your dear old pain in the ass. So, I’m at once cognizant of the fact that most self-described feminists are middle-class white people with gross, reformist politics and that my own ideological roots are in the feminist community – this is why I’m still willing to defend feminism from attacks by whiny outsiders¹, in much the same way that you might feel OK mentioning the fact that Aunt Mildred kinda smells like mothballs & Dr. Scholl’s foot pads; but hearing random strangers who aren’t family members laugh about it sets your blood to boiling. Yes, she’s weird and rude and smells like the bottom of her bedroom closet; but she’s my weird, smelly aunt and I love her despite her flaws, so back off.

Upon meeting large numbers of feminists in meatspace during my mid to late teens and onward, I encountered a likable enough community. Yes, there was no shortage of smug, middle-class white liberals and infighting about irrelevant crap; but generally, even online discourse was what I’ll call ‘outwardly-focused’ – talking about and/or planning on-the-ground activism, heated debates on how certain business practices and government policies impact different women, anecdotes from our daily lives, and so on.

..and then, like a careless chef dropping a head of lettuce behind the fridge and promptly forgetting about it, I was completely uninvolved with the feminist community for a couple of years. Upon my return, I encountered a big old rotting mess.

old crosspost: ‘Abortion is murder’

‘ABORTION IS MURDER!’ screams the ham-faced Christian lady outside the Planned Parenthood clinic, wielding a homemade protest sign covered with icky photos of late term abortions.

‘LIFE IS SACRED!’ whines some inconsistent so-and-so while munching on a chicken sandwich.

So for the next few moments, I’ll believe them. I’ll assume for a moment that abortion is murder and should be treated as such. A few wacky conclusions that logically follow from this position:

MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL DIE

An addendum, added several months after the fact – This is so..wow. Even though I still hate the same things you’d expect a green anarchist to hate, I no longer endorse many of the key ideas contained here & would actually argue against some of them. I really doubt (m)any people read this, but I felt like pointing this out. Ancaps still suck, though; that hasn’t changed.

Primitivists & anti-civ types are probably the most frequently strawmanned subgroup of anarchists; and as an anti-civver, I get rather sick of hearing the same arguments over and over again

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I was recently sucked into a silly facebook quibble with an ancap who regurgitated the usual, anti-primitivist tosh:

“free market” follies

A cross-post from the discussion group:

Anarcho-capitalists are often caught in a contradiction – in one breath, they define “capitalism” as an unhampered free market, arguing that the economic system we have isn’t capitalism.

..but in the next breath, they’ll engage in apologetics for features of our current economic system as though they’re defending transactions that take place in a free market – “But the tenant signed a contract!”, “But the disabled single mom voluntarily chooses to work at Wal-Mart!”, and so on.