As a Survivor of a Political Cult Myself, I Had to Watch This Video

As a survivor of a political cult myself, I had to watch this video when I saw it on YouTube: BAMN Are A Violent Cult

BAMN Are A Violent Cult By Any Means Necessary are a dangerous cult operating in Berkeley, organising Antifa riots and indoctrinating st...

The descriptions are chillingly reminiscent of what I've heard about other groups, and some of what I experienced in my own. (In fact I'd already heard of the cult-within-the-cult, the RWL, and knew it was ultra-sectarian, so the connection came as no surprise.) There's a private website on WordPress called Secret Survivors of BAMN, and I've submitted a request for access to its administrator. Below is the written version of the video, which includes a link to the private group:

 BAMN Are A Violent Cult

BAMN Are A Violent Cult By Any Means Necessary are a dangerous cult operating in Berkeley, organising Antifa riots and indoctrinating st...

As is quoted from one of the ex-members, like other political cults BAMN either turns people into "drones" incapable of autonomous political thought or action, or tends to burn them out and make them give up on activism altogether. Hence it is both personally and politically destructive.

Visibility, Disruptiveness, and Effectiveness: What Actually Counts in a Demonstration

NPR ran this story the other day about research on which intuitions are correct about what makes a demonstration effective:

http://www.npr.org/2017/04/18/524473948/researchers-examine-the-psychology-of-protest-movements

A couple notes: while this research shows the importance of protesters' not putting themselves in a negative light, it doesn't mean they should never do anything that could make people uncomfortable. As Nick Cooney points out in his book Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us About Spreading Social Change, disturbing images (as of animal abuse, for instance) may move people to action more effectively than warm-and-fuzzy ones. The key is whether the context makes viewers associate the unpleasant images with what's being protested or with those doing the protesting.

Another point: it's stated in the interview that sometimes there's a trade-off between visibility and effectiveness, with the latter being the bottom line that should determine protesters' choice of tactics. But there's also a sense in which they correlate, since the expectation of disruptive or violent tactics can reduce participation in an action. And, all other things being equal, a smaller action is a less visible one, as well as probably less effective.

An Unfunny Satire on "the MRA" Is Taken Down

After also reading the original written version of the piece, and the post on r/exredpill it was largely based on -- and as someone who has a particular interest owing to my adolescent involvement with a political cult -- I think it's important to make a distinction. People in the cultic studies field say there as many groups as there are people in the group; one member may have a cultic relationship with it while another doesn't at all. And the groups themselves are on a continuum. This is why those in the cult awareness field prefer to speak of cultic processes rather than of "cults" as a discrete category of groups.

The r/exredpill poster in question evidently developed a relationship with r/redpill (which, by the way, has basically nothing to do with actual MRAs or men's rights activists -- a common conflation in the feminist milieu) that had significantly cultic characteristics. But, as Alison and Karen point out here, this wasn't because anyone at r/redpill was using deceptive/manipulative recruitment tactics -- as are characteristic of "cults" in the strong , distinctly negative sense of that term -- but simply because he was desperate to find something that would make him feel like less of a loser. The cultic aspect of the relationship came mostly from him and not from conscious, covert manipulation by the group, as you would find in something more deserving of being called a destructive cult.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFEvB3C-YVA

Greens Play by Our Rules, Not the Establishment's

There's a story in the most recent Public Record on how some people are pushing the city Democratic Party to devolve endorsements from ward leaders to committee people, among other reforms, to address endemic corruption. I sent this letter in response:

As part of his exercise in denial about Democratic Party dysfunction, Bob Brady made this false statement: "The Republicans have the same rules, the Greens have the same rules."

In fact the Green Party does not have the same rules. Unlike Democrats and Republicans, the Green Party has no ward leaders, only a City Committee, which as a matter of policy does not endorse candidates for party nomination. The party's philosophy is that the individual Greens who attend monthly membership meetings are capable of deciding on nominations for themselves, without any need for "guidance" from party officers. All the City Committee does is inform the members in attendance of who is seeking nomination, as well as invite the candidates to appear and make their own case.

If you're a progressive who doesn't think party apparatchiks are entitled to be protected from competition with grassroots activists, as former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz openly stated, then you should consider joining the Greens.

Save Dina Ali Lasloom!

A Saudi woman who sought asylum in Australia was taken off her plane in the Philippines and is now being returned to Saudi Arabia where she faces execution for traveling without a male companion. Please join me in signing the petition to stop this!
https://secure.avaaz.org/ar/petition/mnZm_lfw_ldwly_Amnesty_nqdhw_dyn_ly_save_Dina_ali/?aQeaOjb
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/888504/saudi-woman-seeking-asylum-in-australia-repatriated-from-ph

You only need to put your email address in the circled area.

Pinky Agrees with Me

No, not the mouse. I just watched this video by Steven Pinker on why some fear the rise of Artificial Intelligence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gimu5nXWaWU

This is pretty much identical to what I wrote on my blog a couple years ago: http://stripey7.blogspot.com/2015/09/extant-has-gotten-entirely-too-silly.html One criticism: it's too sweeping a generalization to say women are a counterexample to the idea that high intelligence goes along with megalomania. I'm not even sure that it's statistically true, and there are certainly counterexamples: female cult leaders like Marlene Dixon and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, for instance.

I Try -- and Fail -- to Get a Straight Answer from My State Representative

Last night my state representative, Stephen Kinsey, held a town hall meeting featuring representatives of various government departments and agencies.

For the past couple months I've been researching the question of whether there are any shelters for battered men in Pennsylvania. A public assistance form I filled out last summer made reference to "a state program for abused women and children," but made no mention of abused men. This was not long after I had confirmed that PA has an equal rights amendment, so the failure to provide for some victims based on their sex would clearly be unconstitutional as well as unfair.

I had brought a clipboard and sign-up sheet to the Philadelphia-area premiere of  The Red Pill, Cassie Jaye's documentary on the men's rights movement, on which several people supplied their contact info to stay in touch. By the first ensuing group meeting in January, I had decided the apparently non-existent services for battered men would be a good issue around which to organize, if I could confirm my suspicions about it.

What I had ascertained by last night's town hall is that, of the four agencies listed by the PA Coalition Against Domestic Violence as providing services in Philadelphia county, only two provide shelter, and in both cases it's only for women and children. At this point I should compare what's provided to the level of need: according to data published by the Centers for Disease Control and the Psychological Bulletin, over half of those experiencing domestic violence in a given year, and about a third of those requiring medical attention, are male. So, even if Philly had only three shelter beds, one of these ought to be for a man. And Philly is the most populous county in the state, so even if services aren't evenly distributed, we should expect to find at least some of those for men here.

So, I related these concerns to the person speaking when I arrived at the town hall, a police captain. Her response was that shelter exists that moves from place to place, but locations aren't disclosed out of safety considerations. I explained I didn't need to know locations, but would just like to know how many of these shelters there are. She said they wouldn't tell me that either.

Rep. Kinsey spoke up at this point to explain that he didn't know that he wanted to engage his staff in looking into this if it was only for research as opposed to constituent service, and also repeated the point about safety considerations. My repeatedly pointing out that safety considerations obviously weren't preventing the existence of shelters for women from being publicized on the Web seemingly didn't register with them; they just repeated the same language without acknowledging the logical inconsistency of their statements.

A moment later, when the captain had moved on to another constituent's question, a staffer handed me a note saying, "The federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) protects information not being disclosed regarding shelters." While she was still within earshot I commented, "Inconsistently, it would appear. They're not hiding the existence of shelters for women." She offered no reply.

It appears overwhelmingly likely to me that the reason they wouldn't give me any information about the purported shelters for battered men is that they actually don't exist. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that they do, the rationale for not publicizing their existence makes no sense; you're not going to convince me that they're actually more careful about men's safety than women's. Rather, the only practical effect hiding the existence of such shelters could have is to make it less likely those who need them would know to look for them -- especially when combined with how all the advertising about this issue relentlessly frames it in terms of male perpetrators and female victims. The message an abused man gets in these circumstances can only be that he doesn't exist, or doesn't count. It's invalidating.

I will want to spend a little time checking on whether there are men's shelters in other counties than Philadelphia. If not, that makes it a statewide issue. But even if there are, it's a serious misallocation of resources to have none of them here.

Ottawa SheForHe: Four Women Discuss Men and Boys' Issues

Real-life gender privilege, heard on a playground and related by panelist Meg Warren: "I can punch you, and you can't punch me back!"

Something that particularly interested me as someone who's had personal experience with a cultic group was her observation, as someone who's experienced both psychological and physical domestic abuse herself, that many women exert subtle, incremental control over their male partners in a way that wouldn't be tolerated if a man tried to do it to a woman. This gradual process of entrapment sounds remarkably like the brainwashing of a high-control group.

One criticism: here, as in many other egalitarian/men's rights forums, I hear some participants describe what they're up against as "cultural Marxism." This is the sheerest nonsense and only tells me that these people know nothing about Marxism. Radical feminism is based on a kind of ahistorical, idealist sociology that has nothing in common with Marxist dialectical materialism. In terms of program, they advocate treating people as representatives of a group assumed to have a uniform experience, whereas the Marxist dictum, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need," starts from the understanding that everyone is an individual. I hope that more Marxists will get involved in groups like this not only on the merits of their issues, but to educate the activists in a better understanding of what Marxism is; the current faulty usage is doubtless putting off some people on the left who would otherwise be open to the information they're discussing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh4XP_KeZ2E&t=1203s

Gender as Moloch?

Recently, my Less Wrong meetup group (affiliated with the "community blog dedicated to cultivating the arts of human rationality") used as a discussion prompt Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch." That essay uses a section of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" -- in which the demon Moloch serves as a personification of industrial capitalism -- as the takeoff point for a consideration of  how competition between agents to maximize some single value results in the inevitable ultimate sacrifice of all other values.

It occurs to me now that the same kind of analysis might be applied to the social system of gender. Notwithstanding variation between cultures, a similar sexual division of labor can be seen in all human societies, and many before me have cogently argued that this division reflects the interest, over evolutionary time, of each community in maximizing its reproductive fitness by putting priority on protecting females as the limiting factor of reproduction, and on a willingness to sacrifice the relatively overabundant males to this end.

This can be seen as an example of Scott Alexander's generalization of Moloch: the end result of the competition for communal reproductive fitness is, averaged over all societies, a wash with respect to their relative position, but a reduction of their absolute well-being in the sense that everyone's options are limited by the gender role to which they're assigned based on their sex.

One weakness I see in Alexander's essay is that he doesn't reckon with the way evolutionary competition has favored the growth of cooperation; the rise of eukaryotes, then multicellular organisms, then ever-higher levels of social organization as ways one aggregate of replicators (genes/memes) gains an advantage over others. In fact the beginning of consciousness, whereby our ancestors transitioned from experiencing mere pain, to suffering, is what makes it possible for us to conceive and coordinate strategies to overcome it, ultimately by evolving a unitary consciousness transcending internecine competition, as previously occurred on lower biological levels.

In the same way, we can imagine that the conscious awareness we are now starting to develop, of gender as a system that developed unconsciously in conditions of intercommunal competition, will allow us to collectively decide to transcend it through a cooperative project to that end -- that is, if we consciously decide to do so. I hope this essay may serve as part of that process.

A friend to whom I sent the above objected that sex roles have been around for a long time and so we should expect to have genetically adapted to them. I replied as follows:

I'm not claiming there's no organic basis for sex differences in behavior. But since memes can evolve much faster than genes -- and especially since we've been through a bottleneck or two -- I posit that we've developed socially/legally enforced norms that are often more extreme and rigid than is comfortable for many individuals. Now that we're in a period of relative abundance and safety, and especially with the much freer and more abundant flow of information apprising people of the existence of more than one way of life, people acquire growing consciousness of the ways gender roles act as fetters on their individual aspirations, and start acting individually and collectively to break out of those fetters. I think that's precisely why we now see men's and women's rights movements.

The "ATO Incident" Revisited

At a candidates' forum in Fishtown last night, I met Councilwoman Helen Gym, whose campaign I had supported. I expressed my appreciation for her role in initiating the protests at the Philadelphia airport, but also my disagreement with the fact that one of her criticisms of Betsy DeVos was for supporting FIRE's advocacy for due process in university adjudication of sexual assault allegations. She cited former Penn President Sheldon Hackney's conduct in a case while she was there as an example of why changes in procedure had been necessary. Here's the rejoinder that I've posted to her Facebook page:

In our conversation yesterday at the Fishtown candidates' forum, you cited the so-called "ATO incident" at Penn as an example of what motivated policies like the "Dear Colleague letter," which has skewed adjudication in campus sexual assault cases against the accused. You claimed that President Hackney "sided with" the alleged rapists in that case.

Well, I was an undergrad at the time and I clearly remember that claim's being made. I wrote a letter to the Daily Pennsylvanian explaining why it was nonsense: Hackney didn't ask the accused to his mansion; they came uninvited, and all he did was make himself accessible. And all he told them was that he would assure they'd be treated fairly. There's no reason to think he'd have done any differently if their accuser had shown up at his doorstep.

And, by the way, he didn't even keep his promise: they were punished despite the faculty adjudicator's NOT finding them guilty of rape, simply based on his paternalistic judgment that "multiple seriatim sexual intercourse" wasn't "appropriate conduct" -- applying the concept of in loco parentis quite literally by treating those involved, including the accuser, like children who couldn't decide for themselves what sexual activities they wanted to engage in.

What the "ATO incident" actually shows is that many universities were running roughshod over due process rights even back then [in 1983]; the "Dear Colleague letter" has only made it worse.

Disability Rights Protest Requested

My friend Deborah Kosak has been facing repeated denial of service to her as a disabled person by SEPTA at their Swarthmore regional rail station. It's supposed to be a handicap-accessible stop, yet trains persistently fail to stop where a person can board from the handicap platform -- even, in the most recent case, when she was accompanied by a reporter. She's been on WPEB's Jasper Jones show twice and hopes people and groups concerned about disability rights will organize a protest at the Swarthmore station.

Ask Secretary DeVos to Restore Due Process Protections for College Students

Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) is asking its supporters to urge the new Secretary of Education to rescind the "Dear Colleague letter" issued in 2011 by her predecessor. I've already written her and I hope that you'll join me.

Hello,

Since the release of the infamous Dear Colleague Letter in 2011, the federal government, through the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), has eliminated procedural protections. Through their guidance letters, OCR has made the campus disciplinary process unreliable, thereby undermining the seriousness of sexual assault allegations on our college campuses.

Now, with a new Secretary of Education, we have a chance to drain the swamp at the OCR and restore due process and fairness to campus procedures. This week, we are asking you to reach out to Secretary DeVos and urge her to make meaningful changes at the OCR. Some suggested requests:

• Allow students to have active attorneys during their hearings;
• Use justice centered investigations;
• Raise the standard of proof to "clear and convincing"

You can contact the Secretary at her direct email:

Betsy.Devos@ed.govor

You can call the Department of Education at: 

1-800-872-5327
Thank you for your continued support,

Jonathon P Andrews

Project Coordinator

Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE)

What Real Integrity Looks Like

The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn's student-run newspaper, ran an editorial today expressing dissatisfaction with the fact that one person chosen for an upcoming panel, a patient ambassador named Lori Alf, has been accused of ethnic discrimination. I submitted this comment:

To the editor:

The DP's opinion board writes, "We merely wish to attend a university which institutionally and consistently places accountability and integrity over reputation and expedience." But they have a strange way of showing it.

The fact is, it would be more expedient for Penn Medicine to have chosen someone other than Lori Alf as an ambassador and as a panelist. Obviously it makes things easier if you don't have to be distracted by questions about a representative who has had allegations leveled against her. It's easier to protect one's reputation that way.  Easier, more expedient -- but wrong.

The presumption of innocence isn't just a legal principle, but a moral one. Just as the father of liberalism, John Stuart Mill, argued that unpopular opinion, no matter how odious some may find it, must be free not only from legal, but also social and economic sanction -- lest an unpopular truth be suppressed, and society left unable to benefit from knowing it -- so, likewise, it's not enough that the legal system doesn't penalize someone until they've been proven guilty of a crime. It's also necessary that social penalties not be imposed until guilt is proven. Otherwise, anyone with an ax to grind has an incentive to make false allegations against another, since they could expect this to hurt the person even if they're eventually found to be false.

Such perverse incentives are to be avoided wherever possible. And it's easy to do so: just establish as policy that unproven allegations will not be a consideration in assigning any benefit, honor, etc. Only in this way are those with malicious intent denied any payoff for defaming others. And only through such a policy can Penn consistently place accountability and integrity over reputation and expedience.

Paternal Responsibility and Class Privilege

In one of her recent videos presenting her unique and thought-provoking ideas on where we are in history, Alison Tieman made one statement I thought was seriously off, which provided a good occasion for putting down some thoughts I'd had for a while about the relation between gender and class. I won't claim they're original -- to a large extent they're probably just a rewording of things I've read in Marxist texts. But that was long enough ago that I no longer remember with certainty which texts they were. Anyway, here's what I posted in the comments under the video:

Your characterization of the "left" position -- as completely socializing the support of women -- is inaccurate. The mainstream left combines the worst of both: men are denied access to their children while still having to pay for them. That's exactly what's brought so many men into the MHRM [men's human rights movement]. The radical., i.e., fringe left -- revolutionary socialists -- is for completely socializing the support of children. But that's not taking from men as a group except insofar as we less often elect to take personal responsibility for them -- in which case it's our own free choice.

The bourgeois-feminist position isn't "inconsistent" or "halfway" -- it corresponds perfectly to the class standpoint it reflects. Capitalists may no longer see any need for intact heterosexual families in the working class, but they absolutely won't give up on the principle of paternal responsibility. To do so -- especially given that women earn less on average on account of taking time out of the paid labor force to raise children -- would by default shift the discourse toward the idea of collective responsibility for the young through the political process, where democracy would create pressures for progressive taxation to pay for it in an equitable fashion. By contrast, as long as children remain their parents' private responsibility, capitalists must pay for workers' children only to the extent they're compelled to through the private bargaining process with mostly unorganized individual employees. Hence, even the most liberal bourgeois ideologues will fiercely resist any abandonment of the concept of paternal responsibility -- to permit that would threaten the very foundations of hereditary class privilege.

Good to see you acknowledging the classical Marxist formula -- "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" -- as individualizing and nondiscriminatory. It's what some of us still believe in. And for those who don't know, it's worth pointing out that the author of the most brilliant punking of postmodernism ever, Alan Sokal, is neither conservative nor libertarian, but rather a self-described "old-fashioned rational leftist," a phrase I loved as soon as heard it.

Male-Shaming on WBEZ's _Sound Opinions_

The latest edition of Sound Opinions, WBEZ's talk show about popular music, was on the theme of "First Impressions," and one of the picks in this category was The Doors' "Hello, I Love You." Yet at least one of the hosts felt compelled to describe it as "objectifying" and "very silly," and to call Jim Morrison a "male chauvinist pig." I left this on their comment line:

Hi. Enjoy your show, but I have a bone to pick with your discussion of Jim Morrison's "Hello, I Love You." There's nothing "silly" about honestly portraying sexual desire, and nothing "chauvinist" (which, need I remind you? means supremacist) about responding to someone's visual characteristics, especially when that's all you know about them. In fact the one desired holds the power, especially if the other doesn't hide his desire. At the same time, I never hear you criticize female singers who sing similar lyrics. So, let's stop with the shaming of male sexuality, and let's stop with the double standard. Thank you.

Interestingly, another song discussed on the same show was The Exciters' (girl group) original rendition of "Do-Wah-Diddy," which arguably describes more aggressive behavior (touching without asking permission first, as opposed to merely verbalizing) Yet, because it's sung from a female point of view, they don't criticize it.

Review: The Red Pill

Surely the most important documentary released last year is Cassie Jaye's The Red Pill. I mentioned before seeing it that I'd write a review, and now I've seen it twice.

I learned of it two years ago, while it was still being made, after some of the online comments under an NPR story pointed me toward the website A Voice for Men. The story was about the "red zone," a period early in a college semester in which freshmen women are allegedly especially vulnerable to sexual assault. The emphasis on the role of alcohol particularly drew my attention and desire to comment, since I'd noticed logical inconsistencies in the most prevalent feminist narrative about this for decades, since the notorious "ATO incident" that occurred at Penn in 1983, while I was attending school there.

While my initial reaction to reports about this alleged gang rape was the intended queasiness, after a few months of coverage in the campus paper I was wondering: why did (most) everyone seem to think that drunkenness, while still conscious, made a woman unable to judge whether she wanted sex -- but didn't make a man unable to judge whether a woman was too drunk? For that matter, I wondered why a person's desire in the moment, even if influenced by a substance they'd knowingly ingested possibly for the precise purpose of becoming less inhibited, should be considered less important than how they might feel about it later, or even whether they would remember it.

It was even more disturbing that -- when the faculty member appointed to adjudicate the matter ruled there wasn't proof of rape but only of "multiple seriatim sexual intercourse," yet still penalized the fraternity with expulsion because he found this to be "inappropriate conduct" -- campus "liberals" objected only to the fact that the sanctions weren't heavier and not to the fact that the university was treating its students like children (quite literally, invoking the in loco parentis doctrine).

Such thoughts were amplified a few years later after I got back in touch with a slightly older woman I'd known while I was in the Young Socialist Alliance; we'd been pretty close, talking at length on the phone most days about this and that, particularly what was going on in the group. When I brought up my thoughts about the ATO case, Amy (who, by the way, identified quite strongly as a feminist) shared her opinion that "many women just aren't willing to take responsibility for their own sexuality." She proceeded to describe a few incidents from her personal experience. In one, a couple had been on the other side of a thin wall, allowing her to hear their hot and heavy lovemaking very clearly; in another, a couple had been in the back seat of a car while she was in the front seat, able to see as well as hear what was happening. (This was during a period when she was doing a lot of partying.) When I asked if it was clear the sex was consensual in these cases, she said it was "enthusiastically" consensual --  and this conversation was long before that became a catch phrase. The kicker was that in both cases, on the following day the female half of the couple complained to Amy about how she'd been "raped."

In a third instance, the boyfriend of a woman who went to the same class as Amy approached her out of concern over his girlfriend's having been raped by a man in the same class. Amy hadn't heard about this from the woman and asked him for details. He gave a description of the assailant that didn't correspond to anyone taking the class. Amy's opinion in this case was that the woman had invented the story to evoke a protective response from the boyfriend and thereby secure his attachment to her. (It's interesting that the primary assailant described by Jackie Coakley in her UVA rape hoax appears to have originally been invented for a very similar purpose.)

In the intervening years, I'd noticed some other seeming inconsistencies and hypocrisies exhibited by feminists, but was never focused on them because my own activism was in different areas. Still, this made me receptive when for the first time I actually visited a men's rights site, and soon discovered that it seemed to offer a pretty coherent alternative view about gender relations that was more consistently opposed to sexism regardless of whose ox was gored, and also articulated better with evolutionary theory. And, as it happened, the very first article I saw on AVfM, when I first visited it, was about this movie that was still being made called The Red Pill, which would be the first documentary ever on the men's rights movement. I was favorably impressed by the fact that the author, Paul Elam, seemed willing to believe that Jaye was trying to make an honest, even-handed documentary, notwithstanding her identification as a feminist (although some commenters were certain she wasn't).

So I started paying a lot of attention to the men's rights movement, particularly as represented by AVfM and the Honey Badger Brigade, and soon was starting to think of myself as an MRA and not so comfortable with the label "feminist," although for a while I was still thinking it might be possible to salvage a consistently anti-sexist version of it. I learned about other issues than those I mentioned above, such as the ideologically motivated belittling and "disappearing" of male victims of domestic and sexual violence, and the double standards concerning genital mutilation. And so it was saddening, though none too surprising, when about a year after first hearing of it, I learned the film was in jeopardy of not being completed because foundations that had previously supported Jaye's work had demanded she concede creative control if she wanted funding -- something they hadn't done for any of her previous works. I read on the Honey Badgers' website that a Kickstarter had been launched, but it looked unlikely that she'd reach the goal by her deadline. And I didn't feel I could afford to contribute anything myself, which made me even sadder. It was with great happiness that I learned several days later that the film had been saved by a sympathetic article by blogger Milo Yiannopoulos and a flood of donations from his readers and others that followed, literally overnight taking the Kickstarter from something like 27% to over the goal.

With this backdrop, you can understand my eagerness when I learned the film was completed and a world premiere announced, on 7 October in Greenwich Village. Although I'd never left the Philadelphia area just to attend a movie before, I felt that I absolutely had to be at this historic event --  and the possibility there might be disruptive protests, as by now I well knew from things I'd seen on Youtube, only made it more essential that I be there, to help defend the public's right to see it.

So I purchased a ticket for the very first screening (1:15), on the first day they became available.(That day was 26 August, also known as Women's Equality Day; I don't know if this was intentional.) As the date approached I learned there'd be a Q&A after the 6:15 screening, too late to get a ticket for that; fortunately the management said they'd let me in for it once the film itself was over. In the meantime, the small crowd (of five) for the 1:15 (unlike the 6:15, which was packed) meant I actually got to meet the producer, Nena Jaye, before even seeing the film.

So, for the film itself: I definitely think director Cassie Jaye made the right choice by framing the film with her own journey into the subject. Especially for those with a feminist background, this should make it easier to open their minds to a different perspective on current gender relations. It shows her going back and forth between MRAs and feminists, hearing unfamiliar (but well-documented) information about all kinds of issues from the former, and little more than summary dismissals from the latter, usually in a way that conveyed they knew nothing at all about the actual MRM, instead basing their statements on negative stereotypes. And we're not talking "coffee shop feminists" here -- we're talking prominent, presumably informed figures like scholar Michael Kimmel and Feminist Majority leader Katherine Spillar. And the information from the MRAs isn't just dry data -- there are also several individual cases of outrageous injustice, some of which she learns about directly from the men affected. (As well, there's a clip from an instructional video about circumcision that may have some averting their eyes.)

And since Cassie Jaye had identified strongly with feminism for many years, this means we also see her struggling with great difficulty to absorb the new information, and with the quandary of her own resistance to it. Again, showing that this can be a challenging thing to confront, but also that it's possible to own that difficulty and work through it, should make it easier for others to do the same. She models real strength by wrestling with what challenges her instead of shrinking back into a comfortable ideological shell.

It's no longer a spoiler to mention that, at the close of the film, Jaye announces that she no longer calls herself a feminist, because she finds that that ideology is incapable of looking at gender issues as they really are in a balanced and intellectually honest way. Given the chronology, my evolution on this was probably over approximately the same period, although mostly just from reading and hearing MRAs online, not traveling to interview them in person. When I started preferring the designation gender-egalitarian over feminist, I explained it purely in terms of wishing not to be misunderstood: I no more wanted to be thought an endorser of "affirmative consent" laws or Twitter mobs against someone for a shirt his woman friend made for his birthday, by calling myself feminist; than to be presumed an opponent of abortion rights or employment opportunities for women, by calling myself anti-feminist.

But a few weeks before seeing this film, I learned a Meetup group I belong to called the Greater Philadelphia Thinking Society was going to have a meeting on the topic, "We should all be feminists." This forced me to think a bit harder in preparation for defending my position, and I came to this understanding: it doesn't do merely to insist that feminism live up to the dictionary definition it always trots out in self-defense, the gender-neutral "equality of the sexes." Even if someone who self-identifies as a feminist sincerely believes that that's what they're supporting, the very fact that it's called feminism will get in the way of their being consistent about it. To say you have a movement for gender equality, and then name it "feminism," is to imply that being for gender equality is fully satisfied by "carrying a brief for F," as I saw it defined once in a philosophy journal. And that would be true if and only if the gender system were really all about one group having supremacy and across-the-board advantages over the other, as is more or less true for some other categories such as class and caste.

But that's actually not true at all about gender, and so to name a movement that purports to simply be for gender equality after just one gender, is to mentally blind oneself to all the information that contradicts that one-sided view of things. One can very much, in other words, be both "an MRA and a WRA," as a fellow attendee at the world premiere put it. But one ultimately cannot be both an MRA and a feminist -- to which it should be added that one can't really be a feminist and a consistent WRA either, since feminism has a systematic tendency toward infantilizing women rather than really freeing them. So, by the time I heard Cassie Jaye saying she no longer calls herself a feminist, I was on the same page with her on that.

To summarize: The Red Pill is a powerful film that I strongly recommend to anyone who cares about the state of our society.

A Civil Rights Bill for Georgia Students

A bill has been introduced in the Georgia house of representatives that would restore constitutional protections to students in the state's universities. This would correct the current lack of due process protections that has not only damaged or ruined the careers of some students, but also has a chilling effect on consensual relations by imposing on them an insuperable burden of second-guessing. I've just sent a note of support to the five sponsors as follows:

Dear Rep.-----,

I'm very pleased to learn of your sponsorship of H.B. 51, which will help restore fundamental constitutional rights to Georgia students. It's refreshing to see that some elected officials still care about them.

Support GA House Bill 51 to secure due process in universities

You can find contact information for the sponsors, whose names appear at the top of the bill linked from the above article, at http://www.house.ga.gov/Representatives/en-US/HouseMembersList.aspx.

An Anti-Death-Penalty Candidate Is Now Challenging Seth Williams for Philadelphia District Attorney

A defense attorney who's represented many protesters has joined the Democratic primary for DA:

Krasner jumps into Philly DA race By Dave Davies Defense attorney Lawrence Krasner has entered the race for Philadelphia district attorney, and he's one cand...

None of the other challengers is a clear progressive alternative. I hope people will get behind him.

Justice Democrats Announce a Push to Take Their Party Back from the Corporatists

This certainly looks like a worthy effort. I'm going to suggest they run Sherrie Joyce Cohen​ for Congress.

Run, Frederica!

I'm pleased to read that friends of Hon. Frederica Massiah-Jackson are leaning on her to join the contenders for District Attorney. In addition to already having my sympathy after her coming under unfair right-wing attack in the past is the fact her entering the race would considerably reduce the chances of another contender whose actions I've protested in the past.

Wimminworsting Strikes Again at NPR

Discussing the role race may have played in the different treatment of sexual misconduct allegations against two Hollywood figures in a story on Weekend Edition Sunday, Ailsa Chang and Anne Helen Petersen couldn't resist bringing gender into the discussion quite illegitimately. I commented:

In comparing the two celebrity rape [sic] allegations, you slipped in a bit of ideological nonsense with the claim that these cases illustrate different attitudes based on gender as well as race -- patently impossible since the celebrities, though of different races, are the same gender and so were those who accused them.

The reality is quite the opposite -- our society more readily acknowledges and acts on sexual violence against women than against men, as documented here for instance: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/male_rape_in_america_a_new_study_reveals_that_men_are_sexually_assaulted.html

This compassion gap is also visible in how the world expressed outrage at Boko Haram's kidnapping of girls -- after the same politicians and celebrities had completely ignored their gruesome murders of boys.

These are both examples of a pervasive assumption, without any regard for evidence or even the need to look for any, that women always get the short end of the stick -- an unexamined faith that men's rights intellectual Alison Tieman has dubbed "the Church of Wimminworsting."

This was a little differently worded when I originally posted it here because I was writing from memory. Subsequently I've received an email acknowledgement from NPR including the text of what I'd sent them, which I've used to correct the text here.

What's Really Un-American About Kerry's Speech

It's remarkable how Secretary of State John Kerry, in the name of "America's values," skillfully excludes from consideration the only real Middle East solution, modeled on America's own example. Here's what I wrote in response to NPR's story:

The most strikingly false note in Kerry's speech -- repeated implicitly thereafter -- is his statement that Israelis can't achieve peace by choosing democratic pluralism over ethno-religious nationalism within a one-state framework. Why on Earth not? That's precisely how we've (more or less) kept the peace here in the States for the past 150 years.

One has to wonder what he has in mind when he says, "We have long known what two states, living side by side in peace and security looks like." Really? That's not how we've done it ourselves, so to what could he be referring?

He similarly misleads by omission when he says, "It is not in U.S. interests to help anyone on either side create a unitary state." This is the fallacy of the excluded middle: what is in the interests of Americans and all humanity is to help people on both sides, working together, to create a unitary state. This is already prefigured in binational Israeli-Palestinian groups working against the occupation and the apartheid wall.

Indeed, there can be no more effective way of "working to change perceptions and build up belief in the possibility of peace" between populations that "no longer see the other side as people, only as threats and enemies," than for unity-minded members of both to work together in a common political movement whose logical endpoint is a common state.

Kerry's speech (rough transcript): http://time.com/4619064/john-kerrys-speech-israel-transcript/

Quote of the Day

How dare anybody contradict that by saying all lives matter because unless black lives matter, all lives don't matter. -- Sarah Yacoviello, conservative Christian and York, PA, Trump voter

www.npr.org/2016/12/15/505658455/york-voter-who-backed-mccain-in-2008-angsted-over-voting-for-trump

Use Crowd Wisdom, Not Censorship, to Combat Fake News

Linked below is a piece by Cathy Young on Facebook's response to concerns about fake news.

 

I'm pretty leery of an kind of "official" fact-checkers, even if supposedly "balanced." I'd rather rely on collective filtering like they use on Less Wrong, where people can vote something up or down and if it's downvoted enough, it's hidden unless you choose to unhide it on your own feed. Of course opinions about veracity aren't the only reasons for up or down votes, but people can comment at the same time on why they're voting something down, for the viewing of anyone who's interested.

 

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/media/310849-who-will-check-facebooks-fact-checkers

The Right Doesn't Own Cultural Freedom

Over the past couple years, it's been quite dismaying to realize the understanding of the phrase "social justice" has wandered far from its origins -- that to many it now signifies a kind of cultural authoritarianism based on group identities, rather than the old humanist maxim, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need."


It's equally dismaying to discover that on the other hand, antisocialists are now trying to monopolize the term "cultural libertarian," as one can see from a group they've created on Facebook. They seem quite unaware that classical socialism is very much rooted in humanism and committed to individual liberty, and a society in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

On the BBC, a Feminist Yet Again Exploits an Actual Rape Victim to Protect Hoaxers

On this morning's BBC Newshour, the recent revelation that Maria Schneider actually didn't consent to the rape scene in Last Tango in Paris was discussed with someone from a group called Women in Hollywood, who seized this as an opportunity to repeat yet again the feminist article of faith that this is "something that women just don't lie about." I've submitted this comment to the BBC:






  
   The guest you spoke with for your story on the rape scene
   in Last Tango in Paris made a statement of ideological faith,
   not fact, when she said that rape is "something that women
   just don't lie about."





  
   Not only do women lie about rape, it probably happens a
   good deal more often than many people realize. A female
   friend of mine once related three different instances of which
   she had personal knowledge. In two, a woman had what she
   described as "enthusiastically consensual" sex -- long before
   that became a catch phrase -- close enough for her to clearly
   hear, and in one case see, what was going on (this was when
   she was rather heavily involved in the party scene). In each
   case, the following day these women talked to her about they
   had been "raped." In a third case, the boyfriend of one of her
   female classmates related his concern over having learned
   that she'd been raped by a man in the same class as the two
   women -- a man not matching the description of anyone
   actually in the class. My friend believed that in this last case,
   the woman invented the rape to secure the boyfriend's devotion
   via a protective response (which looks similar to the probable
   root of the rape hoax recently at the University of Virginia).
   In the other two, she put it down to some women's being
   "unwilling to take responsibility for their sexuality." It should
   be emphasized my friend wasn't in any way condemning these
   women for being "loose," as she was much like them in that
   respect; she was only criticizing them for refusing to own their
   own choices.





  
   Janet Bloomfield has compiled a list of documented false rapes here:

   12 Women Who Lied About Being Raped And Why They Did It





  
   While this article doesn't directly demonstrate how frequent such
   false claims are, the fact the women involved all evidently thought
   they could get away with it, combined with the observable fact that
   so many people, like your guest, keep perpetuating the assumption
   that women never lie about rape -- an attitude that would, in fact,
   make false claims easy to get away with -- suggests that these
   documented cases are just the tip of a possibly much bigger iceberg.





  
   The flip side of this attitude is the assumption that rape of men by
   women is either impossible or exceedingly rare. Like its counterpart,
   this assumption results in very distorted public perceptions, as the
   best recent research indicates that it's actually pretty common, but
   much more rarely reported:


   Men Are Raped Almost as Often as Women in America. We Need
   to Talk About This.

The "We-ness" We Need Is Planetary

Although sleeping when this interview aired 11/25, I nonetheless caught much of it thanks to being in the dream state.

One thing Lilla doesn't say is that a chief reason American liberalism has become preoccupied with identity issues is that this has served as a way of running away from class, as the Democratic Party became increasingly beholden to corporate money -- whereas major parties exist in Europe that explicitly define themselves in class terms, none such exists here. And the one kind of "otherness" that FDR very much did talk about was precisely class, saying that "economic royalists" "hate me, and I welcome their hatred." The post-identity "we-ness" we need is planetary, not just American.

http://www.npr.org/2016/11/25/503316461/columbia-professor-says-democrats-need-to-move-beyond-identity-politics

Need a personal greeting card? Try this artist!

                                                   https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/theGAEstudio/

John Pilger gives an interview to Going Underground on the US election.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1Ho8OrBzig

Another Rewarding Visit to New York

Last night I attended a graduate information session at the New School. I was pleased to learn one of their psychology faculty has an interest in cultic issues.

The person sitting next to me had a Stein/Baraka button on her bag. She said a CUNY schoolmate is the Green candidate for US Senate there. 

Another, Unexpected Reason to Like Scott Aaronson

Wow. I hadn't realized that the person behind MakeMineCount is the same as the one behind the Nader Trader website in 2000 -- let alone that that person was Scott Aaronson.

I voted for Nader in 2000, but it was the Nader trader effort that got me rethinking electoral strategy and led me, by early the following year, to support tactical voting and strategically selective ballot placement for third parties like mine (the Greens).

This further enhances the moral contrast in my eyes between Aaronson, promoter of such an eminently useful idea especially in the context of this crucial election, and feminist Amanda Marcotte, who led a vicious Twitter harassment mob against him early last year.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/can-game-theory-save-voters-from-ourselves-and-donald_us_57f35f4ce4b0f482f8f0bca4

Quote of the Day

"If you have no solutions in mind and don't want to meet and dialogue and only want to protest, then it looks like you're interested in ego, not in creating change." -- Mark Segal, Philadelphia Gay News

Flyers have appeared all over Penn saying, "GET OFF THAT F&IN PHONE!" But I fear most of those at whom the message is aimed won't see it.

A Rapturous Day in New York

My Friday was devoted to attending the very first screening anywhere of Cassie Jaye's new documentary on the Men's Rights Movement, The Red Pill.

I was one of only five in the audience if I counted right, of whom two were Jaye's mother and producer, Nena Jaye, and her stepfather, whom I got to meet before the movie started. Shortly afterward I got to meet Cassie herself.

The day tickets became available, I'd purchased one for the premiere screening at 1:15; by the time I learned there'd be a Q&A with Jaye and guests after the 6:15 showing, it was sold out. Fortunately, the management let me attend anyway once that screening was over.

There was a pretty interesting, if too brief, discussion in the theater, though it could have been more interesting if more than one feminist (Michael Kimmel) had agreed to be on the panel. But lots more discussion occurred informally afterward, and I got to meet a bunch of people, in particular some I'd known/known about for a couple years but only via Internet -- including Alison Tieman, comics artist and creator of Honey Badger Radio, whom I adore on account of her courage, her intelligence, and her compassion.

Before leaving the theater for the last time, I purchased an 11"x17" movie poster on which I subsequently got her autograph and those of Cassie and Nena Jaye, Paul Elam, and Karen Straughan, as well as a promotional T-shirt. I also presented Alison with the big handmade pink heart I'd waved when she'd appeared on the screen, which she liked.

Jaye, guests, and a number of attendees repaired to a hotel dining lounge to continue the conversing and socializing, which was quite stimulating, giving me the opportunity to discuss thoughts and experiences I hadn't had the occasion to previously, and to learn those of others. Because people didn't decide to go to bed til after midnight, it was too late for me to catch the last affordable non-reserved bus back to Philly that night, so I had to wait for one leaving at 7 am. Consequently I suspect I'm too tired to do justice to the film with a review at the moment, and will have to return to that later. For now, it will suffice to say that I was highly impressed and strongly recommend it.

Linked below, Jaye shows the poster outside the cinema the day before it opened.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BLOy06gD-kZ/

Mass Action Stops a Bad Bill in Poland

The Polish people have fended off a draconian abortion bill through mass action:

https://www.rt.com/news/361715-poland-abortions-ban-reconsider/

Apparently there wasn't very widespread awareness of this action here: I wore black in solidarity as many in Poland were doing, but I didn't see more than the usual number of people dressed that way, and received no comments about it.

Selective Service: "Extend It or End It?" Is a False Dichotomy

The latest newsletter from Courage to Resist, a group that builds support for military resisters, features a graphic captioned, "Do not extend draft registration to women. End war registration for everyone!" I submitted this comment under a related post on their Facebook page:

I noticed your graphic about this in the latest newsletter and wish to comment. "Extend it or end it?" is a false dichotomy.

Years ago I worked with an anti-militarist resource center called Stop the Pentagon/Serve the People or Project STP. One of the co-directors, Harold Jordan (now with ACLUPA), told me how during the Vietnam era, he and like-minded activists had opposed the college deferment on the grounds that it amounted to an exemption for white, middle-class men. I couldn't deny the logic of that.

And in fact, such men's susceptibility to the draft, even ameliorated somewhat by the deferment, was doubtless a big factor in the scale of the antiwar movement. The US rulers' reliance since then on an all-volunteer force has allowed them to continue their militarism and imperialism with much less popular opposition. Likewise, women's susceptibility to the draft would contribute greatly to public questioning of the law, especially given how women's lives tend to be viewed as more precious. It would compel many women to introspect about their values in a way they haven't previously had occasion to.

Rather than counterpose ending the female exemption against ending the Selective Service system, we should welcome the former proposal as something that may help pave the way for the latter.

Good Cause, Muddled Argument

The first item in the Philadelpia Gay News LGBTQ Youth Supplement is an essay titled "The case for gender-neutral bathrooms in Philadelphia high schools." The argument is less persuasive than it might be because of the author's insistence on trying to frame it in ideological terms that don't really fit, as I argue in the letter-to-the-editor below.

Matthew Zarenkiewicz advocated for a good position in his recent article, but muddled the argument by trying to conform it to ideology bearing little relation to reality.

He claims current practices are "derived from misogyny, heterosexism and homophobia," yet fails to specify how. It's true the main objects of traditionalist fears are (transgender) women. But they're feared not because they're women but, on the contrary, because they're perceived to be men.

For comparison, consider another story in the news recently: the way some airlines discriminate against men by forbidding them, but not women, to sit next to unaccompanied minors (http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/14/travel/unaccompanied-children-flights/index.html). If you peruse this story, you'll find no mention at all of gay, bisexual, or transgender people, and women figure only as perpetrators, not victims of discrimination. Yet the underlying issue here is in fact the same as with resistance to gender-neutral bathrooms: namely, the bigoted view of male sexuality as inherently predatory. Zarenkiewicz does mention this attitude in his piece, but fails to name it. It has a name, but its name isn't misogyny, homophobia, or transphobia -- it's MISANDRY. Learn the word, folks!

Urge Your University to Preserve Due Process

Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) is urging its supporters to write their alma maters about the worrying trend toward so-called "victim-centered investigations." I've written a letter to Penn's President Gutman laying out the case against this approach:

I am very concerned about the threat to due process rights and the presumption of innocence posed by the trend toward so-called "victim-centered" investigations, primarily being promoted in connection with accusations of sexual assault on college and university campuses.

By substituting partiality toward the accuser -- even to the point of deliberately refraining from gathering evidence in some circumstances -- this approach not only increases the likelihood of false convictions, but ultimately can only undermine the public's confidence in judicial processes, and make it more skeptical even of true accusations.

Indeed, inasmuch as the push for this approach is mostly restricted to the context of sexual assault investigations, it could end up making the public even less willing to believe these allegations than those of other crimes.

Please commit Penn to maintaining neutral fact-finding as the standard for all its judicial processes.

Leaving and Recovering from Cultic Groups and Relationships: A Workshop for Families and Former Members

Posting this for anyone to whom it may pertain -- and you or someone close to you may have been involved in a cultic group without realizing it yet:

http://www.icsahome.com/events/localevents/los-angeles-workshop

So... Now I Know What to Do with Myself

I've been wrestling with which way to take the rest of my life since I was laid off a few months ago. Today I attended an Idealist Grad Fair, half not believing it could do me any good, and fully undecided about which of numerous fields I might pursue. By partway through, after mentioning to one rep that psychological issues had got in the way of pursuing post-baccalaureate education or even a suitable job, it hit me: the one area I can make the most  difference is helping people dealing with the same issues that got in my way, especially the aftereffects of cult involvement. So now I am going to pursue a career in psychology where I can specialize in that, as a too-small handful currently do.

We're Here, We're Queer, and We Like to Say Hello

That was one of the chants by a crowd on Gollege Green today as I was heading toward Penn's Van Pelt Library.

When I first saw it I worried it might be part of the recent neo-puritan reaction to the "scandal" about a sexually oriented email sent to some freshwomen inviting them to a hookup party. It turned out instead to be a pro-LGBT protest in response to a handful of fundamentalist street preachers. The latter had a sign reading, "No one is born homosexual." After the chant under way as I approached, "Love trumps hate," died down, I volunteered through cupped hands, "No one is born a bigoted fundamentalist!" Another protester commented, "No, they have to be brainwashed!"

Speaking of brainwashing, while the term is probably apt for most homophobic street preachers, it isn't so much for people who are simply propagandized by right-wing talk radio. So, in preparation for an event this evening featuring a documentary about the rise of such media, I've printed out a number of copies of Margaret Singer's article "Thought Reform Exists: Organized, Programmatic Influence," incorporating a table comparing and contrasting the different varieties of social influence and persuasion programs, and will make them available at the event.

Of Paranoids and Pollsters

A friend made a point today that hadn't occurred to me: because paranoid people are apt not to answer pollsters -- and because, for the first time, a major-party Presidential nominee is aiming his message largely at paranoid people -- it's likely Trump will do better in November than the polls indicate.

He also noted that prediction markets, which historically have done better than polls, are predicting a closer race as well.

A Tale of Two Docs

This being the first day of school in Philadelphia, it seemed a fine time to put up some posters for Cassie Jaye's documentary The Red Pill. And where better to put them than where they'll be seen by fresh, bright young minds just turning back to academic studies, possibly just starting to take an interest in social issues, but not yet indoctrinated? So I started this morning with the environs of Central and Girls' High Schools, both of them geared to the academically gifted. I'll try hitting others in the coming days.

I got news yesterday about another film I'd taken an interest in, Kamala Lopez's Equal Means Equal. Between the trailer and the reviews I've seen, unfortunately, it looks as if this one is shaped by a deeply ingrained, totally un-self-aware gynocentrism. For instance, one question we hear in the trailer, apparently intended as an example of why we need the Equal Rights Amendment, is, "How is it that the United States has more homeless women and girls than any other developed country?" Where to begin? How about, "Because we have more homeless people than any other developed country"? That, in turn, is because we have much less of a social safety net -- but most of those many homeless we have are men. Indeed, the ERA might help us address this problem, because arguably much homelessness is caused by public laws and policies biased against men, which that amendment would prohibit. But that's not what the film is evidently suggesting, unless the trailer is intentionally misleading. I was holding some hope for the latter when I saw earlier versions of it, but those hopes are dashed by the fact there's no hint at any surprise twist in either of the reviews I've read.

Quote for the Day

Beware of "anti" formulas. They are always inadequate because they are purely negative. One cannot conquer a principle except by opposing to it another principle -- a superior principle.

This statement by Daniel Guerin appears in the 1945 preface to his Fascism and Big Business. I've chosen to read this for the next meeting of my left book group, at which fascism will be the topic.

Guerin may here be seen as anticipating frame theory, whose application to politics has been expounded on in recent years by cognitive linguist George Lakoff. Of course Lakoff is a social democrat whose political perspective remains within the horizons of capitalism and statism, whereas Guerin was a libertarian Marxist. But the psychological principle expressed is similar -- with Lakoff's version actually being somewhat more robust in that he suggests "anti formulas," by implicitly restating and thereby reinforcing the nominally opposed frame, are not merely inadequate but directly counterproductive.

Logically, One Shouldn't Need to Trade Votes to Be Pragmatic

All one need do is weigh the trade-off between the instrumental vs. expressive value of one's own vote, and choose accordingly. I came to that conclusion about fifteen years ago, but the argument is summed up well in this recent piece: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/08/youre-responsible-for-what-happens-because-of-you.

But I suppose some people may need to frame it as trading votes with a fellow citizen to allow them to be pragmatic without feeling they're "selling out."

At the same time, we can continue to work for proportional representation (PR) and instant runoff voting (IRV), which would render such trade-offs unnecessary.

Woo Hoo!

I just secured a ticket to the world premiere of Cassie Jaye's documentary on the men's rights movement, The Red Pill.

Looks Like I'm Still Looking

I did my first, training, day today with Community Voters Project, which turned out also to be my last. Possibly this had something to do with the fact that there wasn't much actual training.

We were given a talk about what we were supposed to do and how, and then assigned to teams. Once arriving at our sites, however, we each worked on our own.

True, my team leader asked if I'd like to spend some time watching him, and I declined since, in past experience, I've done well on things like registering voters, petitioning, etc. as a volunteer. Still, you'd think an organization that's serious about training wouldn't just let someone go because he overestimated how well he'd do unsupervised on the first day. You'd expect them to say, "Next time spend some time watching me so you can see how it's done."

Also, it seemed a little disingenuous of him to acknowledge that luck can be a factor but "rules are rules," since in fact, of those coworkers who gave me a precise figure when I asked how many people they'd registered, neither of them had met the quota either, although they'd come closer.

In this context it was interesting that, when I left the building, I saw someone sitting nearby with a sign reading, "Community Voters Project discriminates." He told me he thinks they wouldn't hire him because of his age, and I suppose that could have covertly been a factor in their letting me go, too. Another factor, perhaps in combination with bias, may be general incompetence. You might think, for instance, that leaders of an organization based and operating in Center City Philadelphia would be familiar with its streets. Yet, when I left with my team leader to go to our target site, he initially started us in the wrong direction, until I pointed out it was the other way.

Looks Like I Have a New Job

A few months ago I was laid off from the courier job I'd held for a long time. Today I interviewed with the Community Voters Project, which aims to increase registration and voting in communities of color, and the interviewer seemed quite enthusiastic about me, especially when she asked me to come back next week for training. So, unless I do poorly at that -- which I don't expect, since I already know I'm good at this sort of thing -- I suppose this means I'll have a new job. The starting pay will be slightly higher than my last one, with opportunities for advancement for which I likely will qualify.

Goggles

I've completed another piece of math art. In "Goggles," the color of each cell reflects, to the nearest whole number, the product of that cell's center-to-center distances from the two foci.

Another Kind of Political Principle

Ont the latest On the Media, a Canadian advocate for strategic voting explained how it helped that country elect a more progressive government without reducing the Green vote:
http://www.wnyc.org/story/voting-head-not-heart

Getting Refocused After the Cult

Last weekend I attended a workshop for those recovering from an experience with a high-demand, high-control group and its aftermath. Although a delay in the bus trip got me there a few hours late on Friday, and I didn't recover full alertness until Sunday, I still got some important insights I expect will help me make the most of the rest of my life. Even though my cultic experience was a long time ago, I'm still dealing with some of the aftereffects, especially since I didn't start to understand what had happened until relatively recently.

If you've had an experience with a high-demand, high-control group, it may likewise be affecting you in ways you don't yet recognize; such groups never advertise themselves as cults, and are very good at convincing you that if you leave -- voluntarily or otherwise -- there's something wrong with you, not with the group. I recommend that if you even think this might apply to you, or someone you know, you should check out the resources provided by reFOCUS and the International Cultic Studies Association. For that matter, these are things everyone should learn about to help them avoid psychological manipulation in the first place.

Remember, no one ever joins a cult. People join groups of friendly people who seem to be doing important things, and only later find themselves stuck in a cult. Asking what kind of person would join a cult is like asking what kind of person would step in quicksand.

An Unprecedented Rally in Defense of Trans People in Philadelphia

I spent part of this afternoon at The Great Wall of Love, a peaceful mobilization called in response to the Westboro Baptist Church cult's plans to protest the LGBT-oriented Mazzoni Center clinic, and its transgender patients in particular. The purpose was not to confront WBC, but rather to shield patients from having to see or hear their hatred. To that end music and songs were played by the Philadelphia Freedom Band, including my friend Erin Worrell whom I hadn't seen in several months.

I especially liked the WBC parody signs with messages like "God Hates Single Ply," "God Hates the Schuylkill Expressway," and "Legalize Gay Marijuana."

As it was winding down, I heard an organizer call it the largest specifically pro-trans rally ever. Apparently no more than five cultists actually showed up and they only stayed for about five minutes, so that most of us never saw them.

NPR Does Another Totally Gender-Biased Story About Sexual Harassment

In the wake of Roger Ailes's dismissal from Fox (So-Called) News, NPR ran yet another interview that blithely assumes men can only be sexual victimizers and women only victims. I posted this comment:

Another thoroughly sexist story about sexual harassment. If you'd thought to check your assumptions, you might have discovered articles like "Male Rape in America" (http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_rape_in_america_a_new_study_reveals_that_men_are_sexually_assaulted.html), showing that women's capacity for sexual abuse is comparable to men's. Given this fact, what reason is there to believe West's claim that "when women are in power, this kind of thing will stop"? None whatever; more women in power would just mean a larger proportion of female abusers and a larger proportion of male victims.

Abuses of power aren't about gender; they're about power. If we want to eliminate sexual harassment, we have to end the class stratification that gives some people power over others.