Just Say "No" to Handmaids

Cataline Sergius throws himself on the grenade to watch the new version of the Handmaid's Tale.

I raise a glass to his sacrifice, so that the rest of us don't have to.

A Handmaid's Tale was cobbled together out of random bits of 1984 and Revolt in 2100 back in 1985, by noted crackpot and winner of the Extreme Canadian Award, Margret Atwood.

As I indicated the setting is stolen.  As is the plot and subtext.  The bad sex scenes are all Atwood's however.  She owns them.

For some reason when Feminists have decided they are feeling oppressed, like in the Eighties when Reagan was holding mass executions, they start passing this one around and saying, how important it is.  It's not of course but there's no telling insane Lefties that.

The book is about an extreme theocracy that takes over the United States and renames it Gilead.  This has to do with some kind of infertility plague, which isn't explained.  Anyway, fertile women are rounded up and put in a red robe to remind them of...sin?  Maybe Eve's?  Maybe their own?  I'd look it up but who the fuck cares?

In the meantime, his post on "Leaving Libertarian" echoes a lot of my experiences and reasons.  I will say that Libertarians are slightly less out of touch with reality than Marxists. Sure, we'd still need angels to make it work, they're stuck on materialism in a world that doesn't even need a supernatural creator to prove that insufficient, and so on, but at least it acknowledges the distributed decision making that occurs in the real world at many different scopes including ecologies, rather than worshipping at the altar of central control.

Growing out of Codependence

While my dad was not perfect, it was courtesy of female teachers, and far too much feminist propaganda growing up, that I all too readily believed my mother about his faults, or failed to see the role she played.

One result was a long-delayed and ongoing struggle to outgrow "nice-guy" and codependent behaviors (as an aside, No More Mr Nice Guy by Dr Glover was a total eye-opener, and I'd already started the journey well before). Thus this recent piece by Aurini caught my attention, and is worth considering. One excerpt:

People treat you the way that you allow them to treat you.  In the case of ToastedCookieOats, he tolerated behaviour that was utterly beyond the pale, and then rewarded her for it with a “Thank you!” message.  If she hadn’t blown him off, he likely would have showed up for a second helping of being ignored.  The Navy Seal who’s terrified of his wife didn’t become that way after he put the ring on her and she revealed her true face.  There were always warning signs – worse than warning signs, he’d been actively encouraging her to behave this way during the earliest phases of their courtship.  Rather than worrying about her emotional needs, he’d been worrying about the trappings of their relationship.  He’d chosen appearance over essence, time and again.  Maybe he wanted a hot piece of arm candy.  Maybe he wanted a Traditional Life™ complete with two SUVs in the driveway, and a McMansion off base.  Despite the great instincts he’d developed for operating in the field – or in business – or in the meat market – his personal life was nothing but a consumer product.

The article leading up to it is worth reading as well.

Victim Blaming

QuQu does another (as usual excellent) video on Internet Harassment.

I've personally been banned from sites/conversations, the first time of which was because I pointed out (early in Gaga's fame, after someone had gushed about a recent single) that yeah, that one was OK, but I really had a problem with the song "just dance" because the behavior of the viewpoint character was horribly irresponsible.

Think about it - drunk off her gourd, lost her phone, purse, wallet, etc., separated from her friends.

Yes, I was driven out for "victim blaming" - especially after I pointed out that, yes, a mugger is responsible for his decision to mug me, but that doesn't mean it's wise to walk through the bad part of town (as most clubs are) drunk, alone, and holding out a wad of cash.

Also see the response Larry Correia and a certain beauty pageant winner have gotten for suggesting women should learn to defend themselves from potential rapists.

You Know That Shortage of Battered Mens Shelters?

The one that made Erin Pizzey persona non grata with feminists?

Meet the solution:

In Canada this week, a Kelowna homeless shelter for women kicked two female clients out and then permanently banned them. The problem? They were uncomfortable sharing a room with a man who identifies as a woman and is in the midst of transitioning.

“He wants to become a woman. I mean that is his choice, but when a man comes into a women’s shelter, who still has a penis and genitals, he has more rights than we do,” Tracey, one of the women who was thrown out, said.

After sharing their tale with the media, the two women were permanently banned.

“They told me sorry, if a person identifies themselves with female, then we have to go with that,” Tracey added.

The other woman, Blaine, was also staying at the shelter. As a victim of an abusive relationship with a man, she felt very uncomfortable sharing a room with a man, even if he is transgender. The shelter is described as a women’s only facility.

On a Related Note

Sky Hernstrom comments on Jeffro commenting on a post he shared by Kevyn Winkless commenting yes, yet another article on how the old days of SF hated women.

I'm at the point now where I just don't give a shit. Articles like this come out on a weekly basis. Other movements follow the same pattern. Articles and articles, Grievance + Something Must Be Done. The point is to read it, savor the delicious righteous rage, bonus round, enjoy the feeling of moral superiority. How the fuck as a writer am I supposed to make space at a table? Isn't that horribly patronizing? Here you go little missy!  

Write what want. If it sucks you fail. SFW. 

It comes down to feminists never considering that while they (assuming they are women) may want to write or read science fiction, other women may not, and that interest - or lack therof - does a lot more to explain the relative percentages than anything else.

It's the same in the computer community. At one point I was at least willing to entertain arguments about brogrammers in corporate culture, though thinking - evidence since has borne this out - it was much ado over trivialities. What really puzzled me in my more blue pill days was the argument that men were keeping women out of open source.

I get it. When I grew up, computers were expensive. I was fortunate in that regard to be in an upper middle class family and got exposed earlier than income would not too much later allow. I dug into the innards of the family II+ heedless of static straps, getting the various add-ons working to enable a lower case keyboard and the 80-column graphics card for features that would later become standard with the IIe. I also learned - and have since forgotten - the ascii tables.

But here's what's important. It wasn't just something I spent some time on for games - though there was quite a bit of that - it was something I tinkered with, as opposed to the car, or in addition to plastic models, because it interested me.

Trust me, if we there were more girls interested in the stuff, we would have welcomed them.

These days you can get a computer for a few hundred bucks, less, even, if you're willing to go used, with far more than enough power to run a linux gui and compile software, and this has been true for at least a decade. The only thing keeping anyone from learning computers, and writing software, is a lack of interest in doing so for its own sake, and the willingness to budget a year or less worth of coffee or the cost of a gaming console, if even that much. I've known schools that donate their old machines to needy families, and companies offload a lot of their old gear at auctions - I literally bought a PC perfectly capable of running windows 98 in 2002 for $15. Had to add a $30 stick of RAM and a modem.

There are a lot of places the complaints about brogrammers or men keeping women out ring hollow because all they have to do is show up, and for that, all they have to do is want to enough to set aside the time.

David Weber and Womens Lib

I still remember when I first stumbled into a copy of Honor Among Enemies at the base library.

No, I didn't start David Weber's epic mega-series at the beginning.

So it's not with great sadness anymore - as this decision was made over a year ago - that I'm basically buying nothing of his anymore. I may - may I repeat - get the Zahn prequels, but the overlapping stories of the two main current-time branches are losing me, and he did two things that really turned me off on an author I've otherwise greatly enjoyed (and you can pry my copy of Death Ground out of my... you get the point...) and who is frankly a far more skilled storyteller than Scalzi.

It's always been pretty obvious that, despite being fairly conservative in a number of ways, he also is the archetype of the churchian feminist. Sure, he hangs a lampshade on most of his earlier instances, but case after case after case he goes for the female supergrrrrllll, not the least of which was Honor herself. Nevertheless, a lot of it was kept to a dull roar or otherwise lampshaded, while he wove stories integrating the closest thing space opera offers to technothriller weapons porn with a sweep of history and politics that showed a significant fundamental understanding of how people, trends, ideas, and technology impacted the great sweep of events.

So I was highly disappointed to hear him on the D6Generation making the comment that he's quite happy to see societies be ignorant enough to not let half their population participate and join the workforce, because they would be ruled by his daughters. I wasn't even that red-pilled at the time and that struck me as simply wrong. It amazed me even more because he had earlier pointed out how it was technology that gave women the opportunity to compete on a more level playing field.

My very first thought was - what if the technology becomes unavailable? What happens if you suddenly don't have all of those "equalizers" and men and women suddenly have to play to their strengths when it comes to combat, work, and raising kids?

I can also state that, technology is nice, but you'd have to have a practically magic set of power armor to render differences in human strength, endurance, and reaction times moot in giving people an edge over the other. Sure, a lot of the absolute differences can be made relatively small - guns take away a huge degree of the difference in size and strength, and to a lesser degree, skill and reactions - but it will still exist. There are still too many places on ships, and modern vehicles where raw strength is needed to get something moved into place quickly.

And freeing up half the workforce?

Lets imagine we have artificial wombs. Great. So you managed to cut down pregnancy related downtime to a month or two at most. Let's also imagine this has no long term hormonal, endocrinal, or other effects.

So?

Who takes care of the child? A parent has to, and overhead costs in "thread switching" between parents will cause them both to be less efficient at their work than if one worked and the other did not.

Well, day care! Right? I'd have to dig up the studies, but Stefan Molyneux cites that leaving a child in daycare most days of the week has the same impact on them as if you had simply abandoned them.

Besides, attentive childcare does not scale. Yes, one daycare nanny can take care of or watch a larger group of kids, but not by giving them attention. Dedicated attention is something that will be rarely given out - and larger families ensure sufficient attention by enlisting the older kids to help with responsibilities, babysitting, etc. - something a "everyone is the same age" daycare setup cannot handle. It's basically a hellhole of same-age kids running around largely unsupervised, already emotionally hurt because they feel like mommy abandoned them.

And who the hell is he to denigrate the work done by those mothers? Who is he to put down the generations before technological assistance who made the choice that worked for their societies and shaped their children?

Finally - who the fuck is he, or anyone, to say that it's perfectly OK to have a career in childcare but not OK to raise your own kids instead? Someone's got to do it, and do it right. It doesn't scale well done right. Done right, the people not doing childcare get to concentrate on their work and be more productive.

To get that "extra 50%" - more like 90%(update: 90% total, more like 40%), means a massive drop in the productivity in the parents, and problems with succeeding generations. Suddenly, one wonders if only having 50% "working" may not actually be better.

So that was the first item.

The second?

One of the Tor-published "Safehold" books - which I'd since stopped buying because "Tor."

That and it had started wandering off the rails in "the story never ends" sense too.

Nimue is a superpowered, immortal,  grrrlll power AI android carrying the personality of her source human, disguised (the bodies can transform) as a man. Several other woman characters were also brilliant spymasters, etc.

I could deal with that, easier even in more blue pill days. The "building up technology" path was cool.

There comes a scene several books in where a rescued princess is being taught how to shoot, and the horribly oafish - as bad as any L&O:SVU episode - misogynistic guardsman is "taught a lesson" by android Nimue, as a girl, who using superior mass, speed, strength, and near indestructibility takes him apart in hand to hand combat, breaking bones, etc. in the process.

If one wanted to make a point about "girls can", one could have had her show off shooting skills, or teach the princess and have her show off shooting skills.

No. In a society that was still largely steam driven, and even that was a recent advance, where muscle power was still a huge factor in combat, instead of showing off how well an equalizer could be used, she took apart a much larger man that no other woman on the planet could match, ever.

And the "good guys", who watched it via surveillance, gave their tacit approval.

That, for me, right there, lost it. Period.

I'm not getting rid of the Weber books I do have, but I'm never buying another one.

Equitable?

The internet, of course, gave us Poe's Law: without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers or viewers as sincere expressions of the parodied views.

So of course, given the rise of social justice warriors, race baiting, feminism, etc., more and more things become normalized enough that they cannot be parodied.

Take this recent article from the Huffington Post, about a new app called "Equitable":

The app, called Equitable, is designed to split group restaurant bills based on gender and racial wage gaps. So if you’re a white man brunching with a black woman and a Latina, be prepared to pay a little extra for that avocado toast. Hey, it’s not our fault! It’s the patriarchy.

According to the app’s website, “EquiTable helps you avoid the entrenched discrimination that exists in our society. It doesn’t split the bill equally — it splits it equitably. You pay what you should to balance out the wage gap.”

The app uses Bureau of Labor Statistics data in order to calculate who should pay what at the end of dinner or brunch, ensuring that those with less privilege (anyone whose not white and male, basically) pay less to eat.

Yes, it exists. This is not a parody - the app is on the app store.

Now, any self-respecting shitlord will immediately take the example of Shaun King (aka Talcum X*), and Rachel Dolezal to heart, and make sure they are trans black lesbian women with some additional trans handicap while eating lunch.

That is, if they bother to do more than look at the people around them and say "how are you going to make me pay more?"

* Even Snopes could only defend his claim to being black on the technicality of because "he said so" and the one drop rule - the latter assuming he truthfully threw his mother under the bus for being a slut.

Blast From the Past

One of the reasons I will effectively drop anything and everything to read a book by Larry Correia, aka the "International Lord of Hate", is that he not only is nearly as prolific as John Ringo, but is, if possible, even funnier when he goes off on a rant. Given the high bar needed to exceed the utterly inspired Ravencon AAR, that is saying something.

So, in part due to slow blogging activity over at Monster Hunter Nation, an old facebook discussion was brought to the fore by one of his intrepid minions to explain the background of the expression "justify the moon ferrets".

It starts:

Brad, I apologize in advance that I’m about to use bad words on your page, but I simply don’t have the time, nor the patience to deal with this fucking troglodyte imbecile in an amicable fashion.

Instead I’m going to mock him, berate him, insult him and his fundamental philosophy, maybe call him some more names, rejoice in my giant majority, maybe add a few more insults, then go to bed, in my giant house in the mountains with my hot athletic wife. I won’t bother to wait for Forest’s response, because it will consist of some poorly thought out sound bytes regurgitated from Mother Jones and a series of links, and I’d rather suck start a 12 gauge than listen to one more fucking doofus tonight.

And after discussing (at a first grade level given he's an accountant) the "why" of the mythical gender pay gap, he really gets rolling:

You are basically a Speak and Spell, and instead of when pulling the string you get “THE COW GOES MOO” you get “LINK TO HUFFPO” or “WHY WON’T YOU ANSWER MY QUESTION”. Only the Speak and Spell has a use. Children need to learn which animal says moo versus which one barks. You on the other hand, are completely fucking useless, and when it comes to entertainment, my money is on Fisher Price.

There are far, far too many good lines to quote. Don't read it while drinking, or unless you want worried onlookers concerned that you lost your sanity.