Another argument I've got into on rigint

POsted here for backup, with the original coding intact.

[quote="Blue"]It's the exact same language used by religious fundamentalists who have gotten "Pro Life" into the mainstream conversation thus implying Pro-Choice adherents are actually "Anti-Life" which is of course absurd.[/quote]

I'd just like to take the opportunity to recommend Nick Davies' Flat Earth News at this point. Good book. Chronicles both the rise of the term "pro-life" and "pro-choice", both as the blatant propaganda they are. Also convinced me drugs should be legalised.

[quote="jam.fuse"]I am guessing one sufficiently wealthy and depraved could indeed purchase the actual sexual organs of another human; in the USA one could probably at some point legally purchase genitalia originally belonging to a slave or native american like some kind of trinket. [/quote]

You could buy a certain brand of anti-wrinkle face cream which contains foreskin fibroblasts extracted from the circumcised foreskins of male American infants. There's a clinic in the Caribean (cf. BBC Radio 4 "Stem Cell Swindle") where you can buy stem cells extracted from the dismembered corpses of murdered Ukrainian newborns, snatched by doctors from the arms of their mothers (literally), and have them injected into your face as a cosmetic beauty treatment.

[quote="82_28"]Peregrine, read that article McC posted (that was awful!). This is exactly what I have a problem with -- it has nothing to do with being "sex-positive". I've seen that final scene in Requiem For A Dream, I have happened upon a friend being raped and far too many of my friends relay to me that in their pasts, they too have been sexually abused, raped or molested. I have no problem with your "position" on this issue and I am not arguing with you nor do I want to come off as rude or caustic. But you do not know the minds of men very well. You do not understand how many men do not give a shit about you as a human and even as a guy myself, if I called them on it, they would kick my ass or worse. You do not know how many men and boys that are out there who are like that. Vacant eyes, predatory, opportunistic, unctuous. Obviously not [i]all[/i] men! Obviously not. But you reap what you sow I suppose. I simply do not like any human being put up to or putting themselves up to as an object in any way, shape or form. It sends mixed signals to psychopaths. This is all IMHO. Apologies for any offense. . . [/quote]

There are unpleasant and dangerous people around, female as well as male, but I rather doubt that to be news. And your pontificating on "the minds of men" contradicts you disclaimers of "not all men". You seem to mean to imply that men are a group of dangerous and atavistic savages, barring the chivalrous band to which you belong as one of those few to whom women can safely make themselves available. I also have trouble, in that I don't entirely comprehend, with this notion of objectification. Then I do have a tendency to anthropomorphise the inanimate.

[quote="Blue"]Blatant bigotry towards feminists. Would this statement be allowed to stand on RI if one replaced "feminists" with a racial minority or a homosexual? Broad brush hatred and all.[/quote]

The correct analogy would be to white supremacists or Black Panthers and Zionists. The difference is that these are political movements, not birth groups. One can't choose whether to belong to a racial minority, nor has any perfidiousness been provably linked to ethnic origin. The same can't be said for adherents of hate movements such as feminism.

[quote]What planet does Stephen live on?[/quote]

A common question, with only one answer: the only planet with wi-fi connectivity.

[quote]Such bullshit that you don't see all the high paying job opportunities available for men to take (name a job that pays women more than men other than the sex industry) that don't include selling their bodies and privacy in order to obtain a higher education while at the same time condemning the ugly women to just not having that career path available to them.[/quote]

I assumed I wouldn't have to specifically mention the existence of the ugly. As for wages, as you'd know if you'd done some academic research on gender issues, so-called, rather than just absorb the ambient climate of feminist rage, women doing the same work already get the same pay, if not more. Women also make up the majority of new university graduates and post-graduates. Unemployment figures are also higher for men. Wages for never-married individuals are also higher for women, in the same situation (ie, job). True, women earn x pence in the pound compared to men (the figure changes depending on who you ask and how old their figures are), because women choose those jobs which pay slightly less well (although recent legal actions in this country have forced local authorities to increase wages for predominantly female jobs to those of predominantly male positions, for example school dinner ladies despite doing a less unpleasant job and despite the bin men having won those wages through decades of concerted and democratic industrial action). And if women are willing to sacrifice a few years of seniority for a few years of staying home and looking after children, as I understand often happens, I'm sure you'll choose to see that as their conforming to pressures placed upon them by a patriarchal society, while I see it as women being in the privileged position of having a choice as to whether to work or to stay at home and do what any sane person would much prefer doing, while men don't have that choice (well not here anyway, I don't have a global expertise on rights to parental leave allocations). These two positions are unlikely to come into accord.

[quote]This is the epitome of sexism.[/quote]

For those reasons enumerated above, and others, I was having similar thoughts about yourself. Of course I suspect my definition of sexism is somewhat different to yours. Definitions are something of a pet hate of mine. Poplarism, defined by the dictionary as a policy of irresponsibly high taxes, was actually the opposite, an attempt to lower taxes on the poor which were being used to subsidise the rich. Sexism, often defined as prejudice against women but which my habitual use of the English language leads me to believe may in fact indicate any prejudice upon the basis of sex, whether against men or women. Or hermaphrodites, for that matter. Not sure about those who undergo the sex change operations, probably a matter for debate. A movement for equality would probably shy away from a term so similar to "womanism", too. And feminism is generally defined as a movement seeking equality for women, seemingly a comical error in that equality, by its nature, must be for both men and women or neither. Would be less of a concern if it, like Ronseal, did as the packaging describes, but alas it does not. Would create difficulties. Would all those money spinning feminist authors be so well off if they wrote books advocating joint custody of children in cases of parental seperation? Would Women's Studies colleges attract students to read about women handing out white feathers to men who declined to fight unjust wars, while themselves of course refusing to fight? No, if feminism sought as a movement to bring about equality it would find hard work in recruiting women who wished to worsen their own position in society. Hence the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment.

[quote]Oh, and Stephen has many, many posts here at RI which are hateful towards women. Wonder why he's allowed to continue to do this?[/quote]

I suppose somewhere there's someone who recognises my position as a simple love of reason, freedom and democratic socialism. I'm certainly not paying bribes to anyone. Could be my winning personality I s'pose, but I'll stick with option one: someone reads my posts and sees that they aren't hateful to women. Maybe they even have some bizarre ideas about people not being censored for holding unfashionable political opinions. Sepka's still here, after all, and his opinions are fashionable around this place. Well, I don't like them anyway.

[quote="barracuda"]In my opinion, Stephen's discourse has bordered on, and edged up on, and sometimes crossed the border of, hate speech towards women.[/quote]

Well, I disagree with your opinion.

[quote]My suggestion to you is that you flag offensive posts using the little button in the lower right hand corner of the post box, which allows you to tag such comments and report them to the admin. If you are persistent, hopefully there will be some action. A pm to Jeff might prove just as forceful if not moreso. [/quote]

You didn't give her Jeff's e-mail address, that might have been useful too. Perhaps if you were to picket his home with a brightly painted placard that might bring about what they call in government circles "favourable regulatory action".

[quote]I am all for dissuading Stephen from his less likable self, and am certain his anti-feminist polemic would survive some self-restraint with no diminishing effect on its power to repulse.[/quote]

More which is beyond my comprehension. Firstly I don't have more than one self. If you look you'll see I basically do two types of post, one is a short post containing information I believe to be relevant to whatever I'm replying to which that replyee has elicited from my mental archive, the other is an entirely civil post denouncing the evils of anathema political movements such as capitalism, zionism and feminism. These latter posts often bring about equal and opposite denunciations, although only the feminists go so far as lobbying to have me banned. These posts, nonetheless, have the same motives and ideological and intellectual backing, and are in the same tone. The only difference is my "target", if you will. So if my conduct is unobjectionable when I'm on your side, perhaps you are merely biassed against this one of my positions, causing your subjective experience of my conduct to be more visceral than it has reason to be. Too psychologically identified with feminism. Well, with being left wing and freedomist, which people tend to misguidedly associate with feminism. I'm not going to list the evils of feminism again, which I'm sure you'll be glad to hear, but it is both an inherently authoritarian, moralist and capitalist movement and, as is usually the case with so called identity politics, both a distraction from true socialist advancement and a divisive concept which serves only to split and isolate groups which would otherwise tend to work towards more desirable goals.

[quote="simulist"]Do you have a travel agent?[/quote]

No. I'm too cheap to go on holiday, I prefer cold weather and even when I was a child I always hated holidays. I mean, if your daily life is so miserable either do something different or just top yourself and get it over with. Don't go defiling the parthenon with your burger wrappers. I don't like theme park rides either. Even when, as a child too small to physically resist compulsion, I was dragged unwillingly to Skegness and Ingoldmells I'd just spend all my time in the arcade on those slot machines for the coppers that they only have at the sea side. The bells and whistles make it easier to alienate oneself from the crushing masses of humanity. Find me somewhere cold, dry, twilit, cheap and near my house and I might think about it, as a new home rather than a holiday, mind. And it would have to not require anything to do with travel agents, as travel agents form part of the humanity that, as I pointed out, I'm very enthusiastic to avoid.

Sunkissed nudist beaches with roller coasters, plentiful recreation drug supplies and a lively night club scene is pretty much how I imagine the abode of eternal perdition. Keep 'em. Even those places it would be not unpleasant to become acquainted with, such as the cathedral of Simon Stylites or the catacomb churches of Lallibella would be ruined by the people, or the heat, or that funny foreign food. They don't do chips in some parts of the world, you know (I like reading about exotic climes, even if I would prefer to avoid them in actuality). Make bread out of funny things. Millet. Oats. Manioca. Make cheese from milk of animals other than jersey cows. And I understand Jaffa Cakes and proper tea are impossible to put ones hand upon in the uncivilised lands past the Folkestone ferry terminal. Might catch malaria. Or guinea worm. Or yellow fever. Dysentry. Existentialism. Typhoid. Yes, you can keep your Buddhism and your olives and your horsemeat and your "fun". Let those of the horse riding, chinless, inbred classes do what they like with their "gap years" and "grand tours", I'm staying here where the food is agreeable bland, the weather agreeable moderate, the waters agreeable free of disease and at almost all times of year the most agreeably clothed. As am I, of course, very agreeably clothed. I've got a nice black t-shirt, serves me well both in the blessed winter and those terrible months of warmth.

And let this be a lesson, simulist, not to get me started when I'm in one of those moods.

You too can reduce your carbon footprint, bills, and stockpile of sins, engrams and/or "things to work through with my therapist" by avoiding holidays and simply cheering up. Your therapist, that is. I was once coerced into discoursing with a psychiatric professional, but that was worse than going on holiday and I made successful endeavours to avoid a repetition of the event.

But I was planning on denouncing the counter revolutionary nature of feminism, rather than the id-centric nature of the holiday culture. Maybe another time.