The Skepchick Serenity Prayer – click to embiggen

A twelve-step program is a set of guiding principles (accepted by members as ‘spiritual principles,’ based on the approved literature) outlining a course of action for recovery from addiction, compulsion, or other behavioral problems. Originally proposed by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) as a method of recovery from alcoholism, the Twelve Steps were first published in the book Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism in 1939. The method was then adapted and became the foundation of other twelve-step programs. — the cesspit of lies

Powerlessness, Twelve-Stepism, and the Siege Mentality

    “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol–that our lives had become unmanageable.”

The idea that he is powerless over alcohol lets the user off the hook by absolving him from personal responsibility for his addiction while simultaneously granting ultimate power to the addiction itself, power so great as to be invincible by human standards. Only the supernatural is credited with having power enough, not to defeat the addiction, but to hold the monster at bay under caveat that the individual must completely relinquish personal autonomy or die of his addiction. The drug itself, in this case alcohol, is anthropomorphized. It is not only characterized as being powerful, but is imbued with the skills to be cunning and baffling. These concepts are so basic to Twelve Step theology that they have become ritualized and are read at the opening of virtually all A.A. meetings. This flawed premise, impotence of the individual, forms the basis of all A.A. indoctrination and must be reinforced constantly, not only in group meetings, but also in the day to day lives of the membership at large.[...]

Firmly entrenched in this irrational mind-set, the AA’ers circle the wagons, rigorously proscribing all communication which may question cult teachings, even to the point of ritualistically defining the method of expression and framework within which anything may be said in a meeting. “People disagreeing with [the] ideology…are likely to be criticized, punished, and eventually excluded or shunned by the group.” — morerevealed.com, casting a skeptical eye over 12 step programmes

Having had a privileged perspective on the cult (I say that deliberately) of 12 step programmes, both by being in the belly of the beast of actual detox centres and knowing numerous people battling the personal demons of chemical dependencies¹, I feel more qualified than many to actually comment on them.

While I acknowledge that they may work for some, I most strenuously object to the idea that they work for all – and it is this insistence by zealous evangelists from the various whatever Anonymous organisations, that it is the one and only recovery programme that works, is what tips them over from being helpful support networks for those in need into the territory of genuine cults.

These evangelists that make the claim that any of these *.A groups are not religious in nature are fucking liars and need to be called on it up front. Their most basic doctrines are firmly rooted guilt ridden xtianity, more precisely Calvinism and it’s noxious concepts of “total depravity” as expressed in its 5 points (aka TULIP) -

For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person — Mark 7:21-23

You see, when you arrive at any *.A you are to consider yourself abject and broken; you have no will of your own; you have no power over your world; you need to be saved, and salvation comes only through submission and faith. It is spelled out quite clearly in the first step of any 12 step programme -

1. We admitted we were powerless over (insert vice) – that our lives had become unmanageable.

Translation: you are a worthless husk with no mind of your own. You must open your soul and let the collective fill it. In practice, you must strip your individual and cultural identity and replace it with an identity that is approved by the group. This identity transplant is facilitated largely by the group meetings one is expected to attend – 30 meetings is 30 days is the mantra chanted to you after a stint in any detox unit. Failure to comply is a symptom of backsliding – and may invite intrusion into your world from other members fully of the faith to nudge you back on track, for your own good of course…

The majority of meetings themselves are more akin to Pentacostal revivals than sessions with any intrinsic therapeutic merit. You are initially surrounded by strangers, none of whom have any formal counselling training, and the meetings revolve around a perverse voyeuristic / exhibitionistic ritual of group confessional – again, why deny the theistic foundations? Speakers stand in front of the assembled flock and divulge their personal tragedies, griefs and transgressions in lurid detail (it is in no way unusual for those volunteering to “share” to one up the previous speaker in an unpleasant downward spiral)… and little more. There are cheers and tears and the whole event is bracketed by an opening ceremony, usually a roll call and a reading from the Big Book and closed by the traditional serenity prayer. You really can’t get closer to being in church without actually being in a church. It is a perverse spectacle.

And oh so reminiscent of freefromthoughtblogs, Skepchick and their mutant love-child, atheismplus. All *.A groups invest their substance of choice with a degree of insurmountable, demonic evil – power so great as to be invincible by human standards – much in the way that FTB et al frame The Patriarchy™. It is an evil so great that the only response is the mentality of the siege, to circle the wagons, rigorously proscribing all communication which may question cult teachings, even to the point of ritualistically defining the method of expression and framework within which anything may be said in a meeting. “People disagreeing with [the] ideology…are likely to be criticized, punished, and eventually excluded or shunned by the group.”

The parallels don’t stop there. Then there’s the neo-Calvinist putrescence of restoring guilt, fear and shame to sexuality itself. And let’s not forget the morbid confessional theatre… Surely not? Oh yes indeed. This A+ thread from its origins is still as barf inducing now as then -

Effects of not having privilege(Trigger Warning: Oppression)

But really, there is more than enough evidence and words written to date exposing the unspoken religiosity of the toxic thinking that has so thoroughly poisoned the minds of Myers and Watson and the troop of groupthinking monkeys that dance around the organ they grind. What interests me here is the 12 steps themselves – and as I revisited them, the realisation of how easily they can be adapted and repurposed. So, in honour of Becky Watson, the well poisoning queen herself, I present -

The Skepchick 12 Steps

1. We admitted we were powerless over mundane reality – that our insecurities had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could drag others down to our level and restore our safe space.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of The Sisterhood of the Oppressed as we understood Them.

4. Made a searching and fearless victimology of ourselves.

5. Admitted to The Sisterhood of the Oppressed, to ourselves and to the entire Internet the exact nature of our self-pity.

6. Were entirely ready to have The Sisterhood of the Oppressed remove any remaining dignity or strength of character.

7. Humbly asked The Sisterhood of the Oppressed to remove all fortitude and substance.

8. Made a list of all persons that could be framed as harming us, and became willing to assassinate the characters of them all.

9. Made direct efforts to smear such people wherever possible, except when to do so would would involve face-to-face contact.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and, when we found further circumstances to exploit, promptly gossiped, tweeted and blogged about it.

11. Sought through self-mortification and scab-picking to improve our conscious contact with The Sisterhood of the Oppressed as we understood Them, crying only for knowledge of Their will for us and the dogpile to carry that out.

12. Having had a narcissistic implosion as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to unenlightened Oppressed Sisters and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

[Handy Skepchick 12 step graphic]

Addendum for 12 steps true believers -

Please read before you send me your sermons telling me how dumb I am. I stated explicitly that your program does work for SOME people. I take objection to the “ALL PEOPLE” part. I will cut you a deal – if you can summon the humility and grace to clearly state *.A works for “some” people when you speak with people that are newly seeking help, AND that it may not necessarily work for them AND provide them with details of available alternatives (such as SMART Recovery) – basic steps any responsible help group should follow – then I will desist from calling you a cult. Until that happens though, if it quacks like a duck…

¹ – Of course nowadays, chemicals are optional. These programmes have extended to other non-deliriant based vices such as gambling and sex.

There are no good pics… [image from Sydney Morning Herald]

The time was 1994 and, downunder at least, it was when the last great wave of gender feminist lunacy was peaking before sanity once more prevailed and it disappeared back up its own asshole to hibernate for a decade or so.

Reclaim the Night rallies were still drawing enough numbers to embolden some to splash porn stores with red paint and the great fear-n-loathing du jour was date rape…

The mood of the time, and the surreal deformation of conventional reality that accompanied it, was captured quite creepily in this passage from Christina Hoff Sommers in Who Stole Feminism? -

Recently several male students at Vassar⁰ were falsely accused of date rape. After their innocence was established, the assistant dean of students, Catherine Comins, said of their ordeal: “They have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. ‘How do I see women?’ ‘If I did not violate her, could I have?’ ‘Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?’ These are good questions.” Dean Comins clearly feels justified in trumping the common law principle “presumed innocent until proven guilty” by a new feminist principle, “guilty even if proven innocent.” Indeed, she believes that the students are not really innocent after all. How so? Because, being male and being brought up in the patriarchal culture, they could easily have done what they were falsely accused of having done, even though they didn’t actually do it. Where men are concerned, Comins quite sincerely believes in collective guilt. Moreover, she feels she can rely on her audience to be in general agreement with her on this.

The idea of collective guilt may sound like the theological doctrine of original sin, but in Christianity, at least, it applies equally to all human beings. Racists and gender feminists are more “discriminating.”

Sound familiar? It should. At least to those that have followed the contemporary babblings of Amanda Marcotte, particularly regarding the Duke lacrosse case – calls to discard all conventional legal procedure if you happen to have a penis; suspension of habeas corpus; the presumption of guilt with the burden on proof of innocence… “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.

Of course the date rape hysteria of some 20 years ago did not just happen by itself. It was built upon the foundations of the porn wars of the ’80s and the resurgent wallowing victim, neo-puritan, sex-hating, fear-breeding, gender feminism with its laser sites targeted on pornography specifically and adults doing adult things in general. The two loudest and most destructive voices were those of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon – the true spiritual forebears of atheism+, FTB and Skepchick.

And of course, then as now, there was a resistance against the madness. Hoff Sommers spoke up first, but was soon followed by others similarly unwilling to succumb to the role of the fragile, weak willed, perpetual victim woman at the mercy of the amorphous, yet all powerful, patriarchy – such as Katie Roiphe who voiced her disgust at the date rape victimology loud and clear in The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus. Yes, they were branded gender traitors back then too, amongst other terms – they were examples of nasty pushback, as Michael Nugent puts it in regard to the current nonsense being peddled by the Watsonista jihadis… “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.

There was somewhat of a grassroots uprising as well in the nascent public access internet – both pre- and post world wide web. The loudest and angriest of these proto-bloggers by a mile was the eternally wonderful Misanthropic Bitch – and her shameless venom unleashed a horde of the like minded, equally loud and angry, but none anywhere near her class. But the bitch herself was predated by earlier, though lesser, efforts primarily on Usenet, but also on BBS systems and university FTP sites. One of these was I Bleed For This? which operated from 1994-1996. It was a hit or miss affair, though mostly miss, but it did shoot out one piece of timeless vitriol that is now more pertinent than ever – Fucking Andrea Dworkin.

The piece was picked up by Jim and (the late) Debbie Goad and published as part of the ANSWER Me! 4 Rape Issue and achieved a fair bit of notoriety in its own right. I reproduce the entire thing below, a la Ophelia Benson – only I’m not doing it because I’m an intellectual vacuum desperately scrabbling for filler content, but as a public service. The original article was written when a fair number of the readers here were still in nappies, or still a load in daddy’s balls waiting to squirt, and as such may not be aware of parts of the history of the times. This version has plentiful links to external sources, footnotes and, of course, obligatory eye candy. The article could well have been written today with very little changed – the description of the obsequious male feminists and the symbiotic relationship between loopy feminism and fringe right theism are the same then as now… “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.

Enjoy!

—————————- I Bleed for This? ——————————
——11.26.94—————————————————–#035——

Fucking Andrea Dworkin
Appreciated by Jason Farnon

From ANSWER Me!: Issue 4
Goad2Hell@aol.com

You’ve seen the section in the bookstores – “Women’s Studies,” a jumble of lesbian propaganda disguised as clinical research into straight sex lives; the “blessed-be’s” and hairy-legged tracts of so-called “white witches”; cunt coloring books; coy celebrations of menstruation and other uterine mysteries; spurious archaeology fabricating a golden, peaceful age of matriarchy; and, most entertainingly, violent screeds calling for male gendercide.  Very few males blunder into this “pedagogy of the oppressed,” and fewer still actually ingest the suffocatingly righteous blithering.

This is what a man should look like according to A+, FfTB and Skepchick – the clown prince Setar.

Not that they’re invited to.  Women’s Studies are by women for women , a gender-exclusive club appropriating the wardrobe of third-world rhetoric. This is in the language of the victim, a screeching vocabulary of complaint and revolt against the despotic tyranny of men.  Male despots are not welcome to enter into dialogue with the Women’s Studies club unless they check their testosterone at the door, guiltily accept the “bad guy” rap, and cluck their tongues against the miscreants of their own gender who stubbornly deny female moral superiority.  These de-juiced specimens can be viewed to best advantage in college towns, their concave chests cuddling the bastard offspring of Birkenstock-shod mates who are busy passing out petitions for the removal of Penthouse from convenience stores.

During my own college days, misspent in a feminist stronghold ninety miles south of San Francisco, I observed backsliding impulses among even the staunchest “sisters,” a yearning, one might even say craving, for men who weren’t (I often heard them use the word) wimps.  Gloria Steinem would go ashen at the sight of this river of liberal-arts cooze virtually throwing themselves at males who hadn’t succumbed to the program and were thus capable of ardor in their fucking, men who were (by feminists definition) pigs.  In fact, the weak-willed males, hand-dog looking with scraggly beards and wire-rimmed glasses, so sympathetic to the feminist struggle, received the major share of female contempt.  They were tolerated as toadies and taken to be as cut-rate dildos.

A dozen years have passed since those disheartening days spent under the specter of stentorian vaginas and pipsqueak penises.  Since then, there seems to have been a gradual return to male and female archetypes, to scenarios of mystery and seduction.  Of the former feminists, the more attractive of them got down to the business of finding and keeping a mate, while, in most cases, the less attractive grew more sophisticated and militant in their man-hatred. Do not presume, amidst these generalities, the disappearance of victimized rhetoric from the lip-glossed mouths of erstwhile suffragettes.  That would be asking too much.  A feminist litany remains ever at hand to badger and browbeat husbands and boyfriends into sheepish admission of egregious maleness.

The browbeaters are what I term the Intergrationist Feminists, those who like their cock on call.  The Segregationist Feminists are harridans who don’t like cock at all.

Intercourse – rare 1487 edition

Pachydermlike Andrea Dworkin may be the uncrowned queen of Segregationist Feminism in its present incarnation.  Her book Intercourse has become the touchstone of contemporary feminist theory.  Part literary criticism, part propaganda, and all elegant hysteria, Intercourse was written to further a simple program: to intellectually convince women to avoid the admittance of the male generative organ into connective friction with the vagina.  And that’s not all, fellas.  Don’t touch, but for God’s sake, don’t look, either. Pornography, Dworkin’s earlier tract, advanced her conviction that hardcore pornography and softcore men’s magazines together fuel homicidal violence toward women.  And for all her leftist caterwauling, Dworkin’s authoring of anti-pornography legislation with comrade Catharine MacKinnon has earned her ovations on the dais with the likes of Edwin Meese and Phyllis Schlafly.

Don’t make the mistake of confusing Dworkin’s underdog vocabulary with empathy for anyone but her own kind.  In Intercourse, Dworkin bases her equation of racism with heterosexual sex on the work of James Baldwin, a black homosexual.  (The phallic braggarts of the Black Panthers school she must, of course, pass by without so much as a word.) This is the same Dworkin who spells America with a “K” throughout her books, masking her own tyrannical will to prohibit other people’s happiness with the argot of the oppressed.  She descends to calling vital males “National Socialists” and the women who love them “collaborators.” “That collaboration,” she rants in Intercourse, “fully manifested when a women values her lover, the National Socialist, above any women, anyone of her own kind or class or status, may have simple beginnings: the first act of complicity that destroys self-respect, the capacity for self-determination and freedom – readying the body for the fuck instead of for freedom.” What Dworkin wants is an inversion of loyalty, for women to run to the call of Sappho and Sisterhood and to tar and feather their male oppressors.

It is clear that the abolition of pornography will not suffice as the end goal of Ms. Dworkin’s program.  What will it take to calm Andrea Dworkin, to quell her tirades, to fill the yawning chasm of her sense of injustice?

Men, flop your tube steaks on the chopping blocks.  Dworkin wants your cocks for mulch. Fucking, dilates Dworkin, annihilates the woman, overwhelming her with a sense of possession that ultimately leads to degradation and death. (That is, she allows, when the sex is good.) “That loss of self,” writes Dworkin in the chapter entitled “Possession,” “is a physical reality, not just a psychic vampirism; and as a physical reality it is chilling and extreme, a literal erosion of the body’s integrity and its ability to function and survive… This sexual possession is a sensual state of being that borders on anti-being until it ends in death.  The body dies, or the lover discards the body when it is used up, throws away the old, useless thing, emptied, like an empty bottle.  The body is used up; and the will is raped.”

Intercourse invokes the propaganda technique popularized by Julius Streicher. The enemy is portrayed as a vampire that is at once morally subhuman and yet preternaturally powerful and dangerous.  Dworkin’s full-tilt fictions are not some private exorcism of grief and rage, but rather bellows to fan the flames of righteous hysteria in order to seize, ban, burn, and extirpate.  Because she plays the role of a violated victim, Dworkin is given license to practice what she assails in the penised people, that is, the unleashing of sadistic vengeance on an entire gender and sexual preference.

Ed Meese – stealth feminist

Remember that Dworkin contributed to the Meese Commission’s inquest on pornography and helped Catharine MacKinnon to enact Canada’s Tariff Code 9956, to ban importation and sale of materials “which depict or describe sexual acts that appear to degrade or dehumanize…” This incredibly broad and subjective code could be interpreted in such a way as to proscribe most books published, including the Bible and Dworkin’s own screeds.  (A Canadian customs agent once seized a shipment of one of Dworkin’s books for several hours but then quickly released them, apologizing for the “mistake.”) In practice, Tariff Code 9956 anally penetrates publishers too penurious to initiate costly lawsuits to fight government seizures, as well as pro-sex lesbian bookshops that made a living selling the now-banned works of Pat Califa and Susie Bright¹.

According to the blurbs of praise that fill Intercourse’s book jacket: “…Dworkin analyzes the institution [!] of sexual intercourse, and how that institution, as defined and controlled by patriarchy, has proven to be a devastating enslavement of women” (Robin Morgan); “Dworkin’s prose is elegant, her passion for truth profound, her longing for justice both lyrical and unrelenting, her use of literature and history stunning, her understanding of racism, antisemitism, and misogyny lucid, palpable” (Phyllis Chesler); “The book is outstanding, original, and an act of forbidden rebellion” (Shere Hite²).

Shere Hite, perpetrator of The Hite Report on male and female sexuality, is described by Dworkin in Intercourse as “the strongest feminist and most honorable philosopher among sex researchers…” Dworkin is, of course, grateful for Hite’s statistics which claim that only three women in ten attain orgasm during intercourse.  Dworkin brandishes this statistic to underscore the uselessness of cock for women’s pleasure.  Later, she again quotes Hite’s suggestion for heterosexual sex in which “thrusting would not be considered… necessary… [There might be] more a mutual lying together in pleasure… vagina-covering-penis, with female orgasm providing much of the stimulation necessary for male orgasm.”

Hite’s prescription for thrust-free, “mutual lying together,” “vagina-covering-penis” sex demands complete passivity from the male.  As Hite suggests in bold type in a later chapter of her Hite Report, “Intercourse can become androgynous.” No thrusting and exploring for Hite’s males, no sir, this is woman’s eminent domain.  A man is to lie on his back, hold his breath, and stay perfectly still until the woman has squirmed her way to a cum atop a station and never-threatening-to-be-dominant ding-dong. This is the only mention of a male-female sex procedure that Dworkin even mildly approves of throughout the entire length of Intercourse.  One must assume that Dworkin sanctions this ridiculous posture only as an interim measure designed to wean women of their desire for cock entirely.

One wonders, however, what the porn-thwacking Dworkin must think of nude, cunt-splayed photos taken in 1968 of the massive-muffed and Tampax-stringed Hite that were eventually displayed in Hustler’s April 1977 issue.  Or what Dworkin has to say to Germaine Greer for her toes-to-the-ceiling, cunt-to-the-camera, shenanigans in the Amsterdam sex paper, Suck, in the mid-seventies.

Beware the Troll Queen

I suppose Dworkin was not about to split cunt hairs over the issue, especially with ideological comrades.  All this taken into account, how are we to take Germaine Greer’s blurb on Intercourse’s front cover: “The most shocking book any feminist has yet written.” Shocking in what sense³?  In the quality of the fantasy, its idiocy, or its hatred?

At the risk of contradicting Ms. Greer, the most extreme feminist tract has got to be Valerie Solanas’ S.C.U.M. Manifesto, the handbook of the society for cutting up men.  Solanas, who shot and almost killed Andy Warhol in the late sixties, pleads for women to “destroy the male sex.” Norman Mailer, who quotes from the Manifesto in his meditation on feminist writing, The Prisoner of Sex, provides insight into why the S.C.U.M. Manifesto was reprinted in the popular feminist anthropology, Sisterhood is Powerful: “…the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, while extreme, even extreme of the extreme, in nonetheless a magnetic north for Women’s Lib.” Though Dworkin neglects to list the S.C.U.M. Manifesto in her extensive bibliography at the end of Intercourse, the spirit of Solanas’s mandate is ever-present.

Just as humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over men.  The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy.  (The S.C.U.M. Manifesto, p. 67.)

Magnetic north of the women’s movement?  Consider the Bobbitt case, in which Lorena’s psychotic cock-cutting episode was elevated to a heroic call to action by various feminist groups⁴; consider that bootleg pamphlets of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto have been circulating in women’s bookstores for more than twenty years.  Dworkin doesn’t have Solanas’s humor or her damningly explicit methodology of attaining an anti-male utopia, but she possesses the ingenuity of a modern major general.  She knows how to employ all the weapons of a propaganda war; how to incite, persuade, and, most of all, bully.

Although Dworkin resembles the steatopygous Earth Mother, she doesn’t pay much attention to the technology-equals-patriarchy argument of Wiccan feminism.  For Dworkin, technology will provide the way out of heterosexuality and intercourse:

It is not that there is no way out of it, for instance,if one were to establish or believe that intercourse itself determines women’s lower status.  New reproductive technologies have changed and will continue to change the nature of the world.  Intercourse is not necessary to existence anymore.  Existence does not depend on female compliance, nor on the violation of female boundaries, nor on lesser female privacy, nor on the physical occupation of the female body.  Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women; but that contempt can turn gothic and express itself in many sexual and sadistic practices that eschew intercourse per se. Any violation of a woman’s body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.

It is indeed strange for the morbidly obese, pus-ugly Andrea Dworkin to localize sexual intercourse as man’s greatest expression of contempt for women.  If forced at gunpoint to fuck Andrea Dworkin, my “contempt” for her would not reveal itself in a robust erection; to the contrary, my shrivel-dick would require the services of a geeklike proxy, such as those seen servicing the glandular atrocities in the Life in the Fat Lane porn video series.

John Stoltenberg -
DIY eunuch

In one of those weird twists of fate, Dworkin’s real-life “platonic” live-in mate, John Stoltenberg, is rumored to be a biological male⁵.  Stoltenberg is infamous in New York City’s publishing community as Dworkin’s rabid lap dog, conveying threats and intimidation to those who do not indulge the whims of his tyrannical mentor.  Dworkin’s big-footed imprint is seen all over Stoltenberg’s unintentionally hilarious books, Refusing to be a Man and The End of Manhood, which rather vainly inveigh against such biological verities as male genitalia and testosterone.  Stoltenberg is the embodiment of one of Valerie Solanas’s “Men’s Auxiliary” members: “S.C.U.M. will conduct Turd Sessions,” wrote Solanas, “at which every male present will give a speech beginning with the sentence: ‘I am a turd, a lowly, abject turd,” then proceed to list all the ways in which he is one.”

Perhaps it is unfair to lump Dworkin in the feminist category, for her turgid hysteria has more in common with Carry Nation or the Maquis de Sade than Susan B. Anthony.  Nowhere in Dworkin’s writings or public appearances does she argue for the accumulation of rights or opportunities.  That would be too dull for her.  Recently I enjoyed the opportunity of seeing Dworkin lecture at Portland State University, where she recounted atrocity stories, cried, and flapped her arms, screaming for vengeance.  But the shrill passion didn’t succeed in whipping up inquisitional hysteria in the pampered and comfortable middle-class femme contingent, probably for many of the same reasons why the JDL hasn’t yet convinced Beverly Hills yentas to assassinate Holocaust Revisionists.  Only a small portion of Dworkin’s audience later participated in a march to a local jerk-off arcade, where a handful of bulldykes startled the raincoat rats with unladylike epithets.  Too bad Andrea was too circumspect to take the axe to the poop booths.

Those who most treasure Dworkin’s hysteria aren’t mainstream feminists but prohibitionist paper-pushers and the fundamentalist right.  I’ve envisioned a scene fit for a Jodorowsky movie in which Richard Viguerie and Jesse Helms go down on Dworkin and MacKinnon on a bed of severed penises.

In the end, it is understandable for Andrea Dworkin to wield the cudgel of victim politics against men.  In our “rape culture,” women like Dworkin aren’t worthy of the trivialization accorded sex objects.  They are rejected utterly.  This rejection has obviously left its mark on Andrea Dworkin; it has honed a vengeful and crusading intelligence bent on evening the score. Let us not weaken and pity the Gorgon; the fig leaf of victimization is creating victims of us all.

==============================================================================
IBFT: If we hate you, you don’t deserve to know why.

Information:
bleed@unix.amherst.edu
ftp.etext.org:/pub/Zines/IBFT  The Eleventh Hour
==============================================================================

⁰ – From the Vassar College newspaper archives:

http://newspaperarchives.vassar.edu/cgi-bin/vassar?a=d&d=miscellany19900413-01.2.27

¹ – The Canadian laws spawned by Dworkin/MacKinnon essentially created the same climate of hysteria, idiocy and fear that is currently being rammed down our throats by PZ Myers and Becky Watson. Whilst some will argue that “obscene”, “hateful” and “threatening” publications do need some kind of regulatory controls, the problem has always been in defining what constitutes such material. What Dworkinnon achieved further confused the problem to ludicrous excess – in effect, they greyed the boundaries of such material to the point that, given a little imagination, any material beyond the bounds of a vanilla, middle-class sitcom could be framed as obscene or hateful. This scenario is straight from the Myers/Watson play book. The demographics that were impacted the most, paradoxically, were not those of the PatriarchalConspiracy™ – but of the gay, lesbian and trans communities… The path to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions.

Dworkinnon, of course, denied any responsibility to the point of issuing a press release -

STATEMENT BY CATHARINE A. MACKINNON
AND ANDREA DWORKIN REGARDING CANADIAN CUSTOMS
AND LEGAL APPROACHES TO PORNOGRAPHY

Others, such as former ACLU president Nadine Strossen disagreed -

Big Sister is watching you (The Advocate 14 Nov 1995)

There is also a plethora of real-time documentation to be found in Usenet postings from that period -

http://www.mit.edu/activities/safe/results/canada-more-gay-ban

² – Hite is a curious endorsee. She is generally pro-sex, and while a keen advocate of non-penatrative female orgasm, she is not against good old fashioned bestial fucking either. And as mentioned further on, she got her baps out for Playboy and flaps out for Hustler. These notes are, and should be, irrelevant to everyone in a non-insane society. BUT, they do need noting as clear examples of the double standards and selective blindness typical to all gender hystericists in their selective application of patriarchy smashing hellfire. Dworkin found extracts from Hite to be bias confirming and cites her liberally – therefore a blind eye could be turned. Absolutely NSFW link -

http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/t29315-p204-big-hairy-pussy-challenge.html

³ – Seriously… who knows what Germaine actually thinks about anything? She is the Queen of Trolls. She yanks chains and sniggers at the knuckleheads that take her preposterous outbursts as though they are secret wisdom from the Delphic Oracle they are too dumb to understand, so it is best to stay silent. I have a love/hate relationship woth Germaine, always have. The pendulum is currently biased towards love after her comments on Julia Gillard’s arse -

.

⁴ – Not that much has changed. Two peripherally relevant links -

http://haveuheard.net/2011/07/sharon-osbourne-says-dont-cut-mans-penis/

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

On a historical note about how gender neutral the legal system is – Lorena Bobbitt was found not guilty due to insanity. Around the same time, Jeffrey Dahmer’s insanity plea was denied.

⁵ – Stoltenberg is one of the poster boys for the Conscious Men movement (aka – toilet slaves).

terrorists

I have previously written of Taqwacore in a blog post that has vapourised. I also briefly mention it here. Primarily Pakistan based, but it has spread elsewhere, as have the various bastard strains of metal. Music is a revolutionary force – you can have all the military interventions you want, but they will never seed social change like angry young folks with guitars. Deny it all you want, but the Sex Pistols did change the world.

Afghanistan has a little known rock subculture too. While not Taqwacore per se, Kabul Dreams echo the sentiments. Three Afghani kids from three separate tribes that spend most of their time butchering each other. There is hope. They have released an album.

Last.fm. Tardbook. WasteOfSpace.

Buy

There are worse things to throw a few bucks at.

Click. Duh.

80 minutes of typhos -

The abortion that is Australian politics; Julia Gillard and homos; piracy, privacy, surveillance states  and why Hollywood must be destroyed; islam, Geert Wilders and why Sam Harris needs to read more; and a shitload more.

]]> http://greylining.com/2013/05/03/franc-speaks-with-robert-darby-on-dumbed-down-atheist-again/feed/ 1 franchoggle robertdarby http://greylining.com/2013/04/26/parrhesia-typhos-atyphia/ http://greylining.com/2013/04/26/parrhesia-typhos-atyphia/#comments Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:38:07 +0000 franc hoggle http://greylining.com/?p=8699 ]]>

The original dog

Several months ago on the slymepit – in a rare lull between rape jokes, posting pornographic photoshops of Ophelia Benson and plotting patriarchal domination of atheism – Rocko2466 presented an uncharacteristically serious question:

Hey slymepitters

I gots a question. If you had to write a book your kid for when s/he’s say 20 – 25, what topics would you include?

Atheism and ethics are two obvious ones, but any ideas (even if they’re within those two broad categories) would be appreciated.

This got me thinking. I would not to seek to impart knowledge per se - that would be tedious and not really special. Knowledge is what any kid with curiosity and motivation will find for themselves. I would instead try to seed habits to cultivate – method and attitude for intellectual integrity; a framework to train yourself to apply to all information you may transmit to others and, more importantly, to apply to all information you apprehend. To instill a mindset that tries to avoid the pitfalls of deception of the self and dishonest manipulation of others. My response to Rocko is reproduced below, with minor corrections.

Three concepts that need resuscitation from ancient Greece. Typhos, atyphia and parrhesia. All have their roots in ancient Athenian Cynicism circa 400–300 BCE and are all largely lost, or more probably eradicated, as they are heretical to every ideology that has ever stained our species – no exceptions. These words have no modern equivalent in any language that I am aware of.

Parrhesia to an extent has been revived, most prominently by Michel Foucault in his last lectures. At it’s most superficial, it is simply free speech. More correctly, it is fearless or bold speech. Absolute frankness, truth and clarity, even at the expense of hurt feelings or personal consequences. The Foucault extracts from the cesspit summarise it fairly well -

So you see, the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course, this risk is not always a risk of life. When, for example, you see a friend doing something wrong and you risk incurring his anger by telling him he is wrong, you are acting as a parrhesiastes. In such a case, you do not risk your life, but you may hurt him by your remarks, and your friendship may consequently suffer for it. If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity because his opinions are contrary to the majority’s opinion, or his opinions may usher in a political scandal, he uses parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the “game” of life or death.

and -

To summarize the foregoing, parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.

Typhos has been completely lost – to the point it doesn’t even exist in google. But, to me, it is the most important concept of the three. It has nothing to do with the monster in Greek mythology that even the god’s feared, nor the disease. It is so obscure, I have had to make an effort to reconstruct its meaning from quite a pile of sources. At its superficial level it translates as nonsense, but again, there is a lot more to it. This is my interpretation -

typhos – Archaic Greek, literally “smoke, vapor”. A cloudy, misty, befuddled state of mind; intellectual smog; the delerium of popular ideas and conventions that are thoroughly divorced from reality or merit.

Typhos sees no difference between religion, homeopathy, conspiracy theory, personality cultdom or the gibberish that spews from the baboons. It is all the product of a mind that is fogged by the indistinct mist of concocted realities and incapable of either objectivity or clarity.

Luis Navia, probably the best living Cynic historian puts it this way -

The Cynics persisted in the conviction that most people live as if immersed in a cloud of smoke (typhos) that prevents them from seeing clearly and does not allow them to use that which distinguishes humans from animals—namely, the capacity to reason. In abandoning this capacity, people forsake their true nature. Diogenes often said that the human world is an enormous madhouse in which every sort of madness is found everywhere: cruelty, greed, deception, mendacity, brutality, uncontrolled hedonism, and the rest of the all-too-common diseases that afflict humanity and have become endemic in the form of things such as religion, patriotism, tradition, and other manifestations of irrationality.

It is no extravagant claim to say that every fuck up this planet has ever made has been the direct result of typhos.

Atyphia is the simplest. It is the antithesis of typhos. It is clarity and simplicity in expression, the removal of ambiguities from meaning. It is the engine that drives parrhesia. Plain talk, calling a spade a spade, fuck your feelings, this is how it really is. Pure and bullshit free, if somewhat painful.

I think everything else that we have – from reason to ethics to logic – is built upon the foundation stones of these concepts. And certainly, if atheism and skepticism as a whole had a grip on these ideas, we would not be as susceptible to the nonsense that is currently poisoning our various communities.

Footnote -

Several people have expressed surprise that I appear to champion Foucault. To be honest, I don’t know what to make of him. What is apparent is that he is responsible for a hell of a lot of nonsense that has poisoned much of academic humanities with post-modernist / post structuralist (and whatever else you call it) typhos over the last half century. Truth be told, I have never read him. I have made several attempts, but really, he is mostly an impenetrable morass. Camille Paglia summarises him with her usual delicious venom.

What I hate about Foucault

I never met or saw Foucault in the flesh. (He died in 1984.) My low opinion of him is based entirely on his solipsistic, mendacious writing, which has had a disastrous influence on naïve American academics.

I miss no opportunity to throw darts at Foucault’s scrawny haunches because he is the last standing member of the Terrible Triad of French poststructuralists, whose work swept into American universities in the 1970s and drove out the home-grown radicalism of our own 1960s cultural revolution.

[...]

Foucault-worship is an example of what I call the Big Daddy syndrome: Secular humanists, who have drifted from their religious and ethnic roots, have created a new Jehovah out of string and wax.

But, what confuses me about Foucault are his Last Lectures – a large part of which revolved around Athenian Cynicism – which to me is antithetical to much of his other philosophy. I think if Diogenes were alive to witness Foucault’s other lectures, it would be safe to say he would have gotten up and taken a dump on stage. Foucault is definitely not a practitioner of atyphia.

I only referenced Foucault because he revived the word parrhesia and gave a reasonable account of it. As I stated, these are long dead words and concepts – beyond the reach of even google.

REFERENCES -

1. Foucault’s 1984 lectures: a summary [215kb .pdf, via augustinian.wordpress.com]
2. A History of Cynicism: From Diogenes to the 6th Century A.D. – Donald R. Dudley; free and legal download; FYI – if purchasing, there are plenty of 1967 and earlier editions to be found second hand and cheap – avoid. They have pages out of sequence and no annotation or translation for cited Greek texts.
3. The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy — various; google books scan
4. Diogenes The Cynic: The War Against The World — Luis E. Navia
5. Cynics (Ancient Philosophies Vol. 3) — William Desmond

The last two are excellent and highly readable for the amateur Freethinker that is curious about genuine (as opposed to dictionary) Cynicism.

Adria, could you please explain what the t-shirt means?

.

Not a lot I can say about this that hasn’t been said elsewhere, and frankly, it’s not my horse race anyway. Yet another example of gender fem-bot Jacobinism rearing it’s ugly head – the godless and the gamers are far from the only ones under siege. I’ll leave the concise summary to ArsTechnica -

“Donglegate” is classic overreaction—and everyone pays

Adria Richard’s (her site looks like it’s currently being DDoS’ed) version -

Forking and Dongle Jokes Don’t Belong At Tech Conferences

I would have let this idiocy slide and left it to the propeller heads but for one item in the commentary on Richard’s piece -

http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont-belong-at-tech-conferences/#comment-834921384

And it’s not the only comment flying around specifically comparing Richard’s to Watson. Becky, it is no longer just the godless community that knows you for the unfunny clown, fraud and vandal that you are. Your name is pretty much mud nowadays anywhere outside your MeanGirls clubhouse and the male chumps you can still lead around by the balls.

And in case anyone doubts the comparison to Watson, Adria is happy to confirm it herself -

https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/313945779666550784

Really, it doesn’t matter where you go – all of these professional victims are cast from the same injection mould. Nothing ever changes. Behold, the product of the US education system. And then they wonder why the Chinese are eating them alive.

Also of interest -

Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost — Amanda Blum shares her previous encounters with Richards

A Difficult Situation — SendGrid’s response

.

Has Ophie ever done *anything* of value *anywhere*?

link whoring – (Internet, idiomatic) The practice of going out of one’s way to place links to one’s website on someone else’s webpage.

21 Ways to legally steal traffic to your blog from the big boys –

#3. Rant Aloud: Ranting to steal traffic legally is a great way you should go if you desperately need traffic to your blog site. Here, you go to where the sites you need are. All you need to do here is to rant…

Let’s face it – blatant link whoring is a vile practice, probably as old as spam itself (and it is, in effect, little more than spam). Many of us, at one time or another, have experienced spikes in blood pressure from repeat infringements by its more shameless abusers.

Link whoring reached web ubiquity with the advent of pay-per-page-view “citizen journalism” portals such as Examiner.com – which are a two-edged sword. Yes, they do play a crucial role in the landscape of what is loosely termed new media – they do disseminate information of high value that may not be available via conventional media, but more often than not, they also disseminate emotion driven opinion pieces, seed new urban mythology, peddle new age mumbo-jumbo, conspiracy theory and even tread into borderline hate politics.

The business model for these kinds of portals is that there is zero retainer for the writers – remuneration is based strictly on number of page views. No views, no pay. Dead simple. There is no obligation for the management to promote the work of their budding journalists – it’s sink or swim. Nor is there any management accountability for the resulting published content. Perfect little Libertarian microcosms.

click to embiggen

And the result is what most folks are now all too familiar with, and probably sick to the gills of. Every piece of free online whitespace – discussion forums, article comment sections, ‘tardbook, Twitter etc. – is now constantly peppered with items that offer a few lines of pseudo-relevant nothingness appended with something along the lines of “I have far more to say about this here [link]“…

These are the link whores plying their trade. Using other people’s web real estate, gratis, as their own private billboards to try and syphon legitimate user traffic back to their own sites – and perhaps earn a few coppers in the process. Do often, do everywhere. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a sordid little world, not all that far up from penis enlargement spammers on the overall internet slimebag scale.

To put it bluntly, this kind of behaviour is tantamount to theft. It is arriving uninvited into a site catering for a regular community of users and then attempting to steal the site user traffic by redirecting it elsewhere. It is akin to sitting down for a meal at your favourite restaurant and, as you are midway through your appetizers, being interrupted by waiters from the restaurant across the street offering you their menu. It’s just not on – it is raw, unsolicited boorishness¹. And theft… So it should not surprise anyone that, quite often, the reaction to this kind of behaviour will result in the target site’s administrators, moderators and users irritation, if not outright hostility.

This hostility tends to be proportional to a site’s overall traffic flow and size of user base – the larger these are, the more tolerance to link whoring will approach zero. There are two factors involved -

• The larger these factors are, the greater the potential benefit (or size of the stolen loot) is to the link whore. And link whores not only steal traffic, they also drain the site’s genuine revenue streams. The attitude is that if the link whores want to advertise, then fine - so long as they damn well pay the same going rate as regular advertisers do.
  
• The larger these factors are, the more overworked and cranky the site moderators will be. The last thing they want to have to be dealing with are hit and run link whores (aka spammer/thieves).

This should all be a no brainer to anyone that has been interacting with or managing dynamic, user driven sites for any degree of time. It shouldn’t even need to be expressly stated – it is both pragmatic in a business sense and basic online etiquette. If you are a guest at another’s house, behave as you would expect them to at yours.

Link whoring is a damaging nuisance that falls outside the realms of any debate about censorship or speech – it is not “value add” content, quite the reverse. It is parasitic in nature. It depletes the host without replacing what is taken. And the bottom line boils down to this – high profile dynamic content websites cannot afford to turn a blind eye to the practice. If they do, they are only inviting a flood of similar opportunistic parasites to capitalise on easy-to-steal user traffic, risk diluting the value of their own content and risk alienating the user base that is critical to the site’s health and longevity. Users, once alienated, are virtually impossible to lure back.

So… enter Ophelia Benson and her latest self-absorbed and reality independent babbling at RichardDawkins.net -

Sexual Apartheid in University College, London

As anyone that has observed Benson, or any of the other foot stomping and hyperventilating toddlers at freefromthoughtblogs / Skepchick, for any length of time will know only too well, simple things like rules, etiquette, ethics, acceptable behaviour and minimum standards of evidence don’t apply – all of that pesky stuff is just for the commoners who have to eat cake when there’s no bread.

The Dawkins article was on imposed audience gender segregation at a recent debate featuring Lawrence Krauss and some unnamed Muslim spokesman at University College, London. That such idiocy can now exist in a country that can lay claim to founding much of modern western civilisation (and not to mention Suffragettes) is beyond simply appalling – it also shows how far down the toilet the Euro-humanists have dragged us with their demands for “tolerance” and shrieks of islamophobia!!! at anyone that dares to criticise anything islamic. But this is not a debate I want to get into here – this is all about Ophie, because everything is always about Ophie… The Pruney One chose to jump into this article with both boots on -

You can almost feel Ophies indignation that some uppity pipsqueak moderator had the gall to do s/h/its job and suppress information from such a preeminent intellectual as herself. Information probably beyond s/h/its abilities to grasp…

Undaunted, she tries a second time. That effort is deleted without so much as a note. I guess Ophie assumed it was probably a forum error… Nevermind, she tries a third time. *Poof* it vanishes into the void again…

But, where there’s a will there’s a way… Ophie by this stage has probably fired off a furious complaint email to RDF management and then tries a fourth time -

Ophie is simply amazing. The sheer inertia of narcissistic hubris that keeps her going each new day in the face of such blatant, and obviously patriarchal, oppression. She’s a one woman army. At any other site, this kind of behaviour would have seen her cooling off for a week after the second strike – but she never wavered. Though at strike 4, she finally did get the message, but in her own unique and perverse way -

http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2013/03/a-war-on-information-now/

Uh, maybe for link whoring? You fucking link whore. She continues -

I took a look at the Terms & Conditions, and I can’t find anything that forbids links to blog posts.

No you didn’t you crapulent bag of onion farts. Or maybe you did, but the assholes deliberately buried it in an impossible to find place with the ridiculous name of “FAQ”… where they know no one will ever look -

http://www.richarddawkins.net/home/faq#faq_discussions

10. Don’t include any form of advertising, whether it is for a commercial service or your personal blog.

What a bunch of devious cunts eh? They did it just so they could screw you over. And I bet they’re still giggling like maniacs and dancing merry jigs all at your expense. Because they are far, far too clever for stupid old Ophie. ::cough::

She continues -

I’m not surprised not to find such a thing, because that would be an incredibly stupid policy for a website to have. Blog posts can be informative, so it would be ludicrous to make a general policy against links to blogs.

So then why?

Not “blogs” Ophie. “Your personal blog”. Subtlety is a bitch. It should be banned. Benson marches on with mounting indignation -

I have no idea. The Friday post is relevant because it documents that the organizers were on the record as having agreed to Krauss’s insistence that there be no gender segregation. It documents that this was public information on Friday.

Why on earth remove that?

There are a couple of interesting points here. The first is that if this had happened to any member of the unwashed plebeian masses, they most likely would have clicked to the immediate problem and, rather than re-linking the personal blog and hoping for the best, and assuming it was important enough, they would have instead re-written their reply and copied the relevant blog text across into the body of their post. Duh. But Ophelia is FfTB nobility – this was evidently beneath her.

The second point is more interesting, and becomes obvious when you view the blog post Ophelia was attempting to link whore -

http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2013/03/women-over-there-please-no-exceptions/

The post is an entirely stock standard Ophelia Benson production – meaning, it has bugger all actual content written by Benson and consists entirely of block text dumps of other peoples material interspersed with a few irrelevant comments from Ophie to create the illusion of substance. This one is probably not as bad as most, but still, when you remove two irrelevant updates, it’s make up is as follows -

You can see Ophie’s conundrum. If she was reduced to having to do the shameful thing most commoners would do – copying the pertinent writing across – all she would be doing is quoting herself quoting other people. The charade that she had something to contribute to the debate would vanish in a puff of vapour. As would curious incidental readers wandering over to her place.

Of course, instead of link whoring her own copy-n-paste “blog” entry, she could have directly linked the original source material, thus avoiding any moderator irritation – but that would entirely defeat the point of link whoring in the first place wouldn’t it? What a pickle.

What a pitiful place it must be for Ophie to be in. What a pathetic and abject shell of a human being. All she can do is spit and snarl while suppressing the awful realisation that she has never achieved anything of note – indeed, she only is where she is having ridden into town on the coattails of Jeremy Stangroom and the baboon king, amongst others. Most of whom have penises…

And now she’s reduced to spamming RDF in a sad attempt to clock up some blog hits – with the icing on the cake being her denialism that her posts were not being removed due to blatant link whoring / spamming, but instead, concocting a Munchausean fairytale of a “war on information” at RDF that was suppressing her crucial contributions…

I could almost feel sorry for her… Almost… And then I remember what a vicious and malignant viper she is and all the baseless attacks and slanders she has launched at me and countless others. My sympathies are finite – I’ll use them instead on the deserving.

¹ – Of course, there are exceptions to the general rule. In rare cases link whoring can be justified if arguments are of a highly complex nature, or have prerequisite background knowledge to state the case. But genuine situations where a position or rebuttal can’t be stated within a normal forum setting are rare – and NIL in cases of cut-n-paste sausage machines like Benson.