Soulchanger's Journal

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Is there, in fact, stuff?
I'm reading Sartre's Being and Nothingness, and I have to say, I'm not finding it convincing so far. It's a bad sign when an author fails to convince you that things exist. Because honestly, before now, I wasn't really in doubt. I was pretty sure that things, you know, were. That there were things. But now, having seen how thin the evidence in favor of the existence of - well, existence - really is, I'm beginning to wonder. Are there things?

And really, since he's basing all of his arguments so far on phenomenology, and I'm not a huge believer in trusting the things that we are conscious of to give us information about the world, I'm not finding any of this particularly meritorious.

Ah well. I guess it's called "Being and Nothingness" and not "Being and some other stuff" for a reason. I wonder what "Being and Stuff" translates to in French...

My Day
I don't post about my day very much anymore. However, today was an interesting one.

I hiked Breakneck Ridge, with four friends. It was awesome. I actually did all the hard rock scrambles - the advanced ones that I'd never done before. I think my new hiking boots made a difference. Also, my friends didn't have to take the bypass trails, which made me feel good because I had a fear that we would get there and people would think that I had fooled them into thinking that it would be much easier than it actually was. So the fact that the trail was well within people's climbing abilities made me feel vindicated. And everyone had a good time, and wants to do it again. Which seems to be a universal reaction to the trail.

After the hike I went to meet

odilesseduction by her school, and there was a bookseller there (actually three, at least.) I bought the following books:

Sartre, Jean-Paul, No Exit and three other plays
Fleming, Ian, The Man With The Golden Gun
Dick, Philip K., Radio Free Albemuth
de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex
Vonnegut Jr., Kurt Player Piano
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, The Idiot
Vonnegut, Kurt (sic) Hocus Pocus
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, One Hundred Years Of Solitude
Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Rand, Ayn, Anthem
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt, The Souls of Black Folk
Johnson, Aristotle, Ethics

Okay, so Aristotle's last name isn't Johnson. But I kept looking at the last line and thinking that there just weren't enough commas. Also, I have no idea why Vonnegut is not listed as "Jr." on the cover of Hocus Pocus, but I preserved the anomaly.

Anyhow, if any of you have suggestions on what I should read first, chime in. I'm leaning towards Marquez, because I've generally enjoyed the books that I've read by the Authors of whom Moxy Fruvous' Baby Loves a Bunch. Right now I'm 3 for, I think, 11, if you count both versions of the song, and Marquez will be number 4. (For some reason Wikipedia listed 10, excluding Daniel Richler; I just adder Richler to the end of the list, so it should be happy now.)

Failure never tasted so good
Some friends of mine baked an almond cake today for Jack, their occasional restaurant. They decided that the sides were a bit too crispy, and declared the cake a failure, and subsequently baked a replacement. I inherited this cake, and my boss and I agree that it is totally delicious. Which leaves me wondering - what does the success taste like?

I never knew that I'd even like almond cake. Food is good. But food doesn't rhyme with good. Always remember that.

Guam
So, Obama won Guam by "just seven votes." What this article fails to mention is that the voting population of Democrats Guam is only 117, and there was less than a 20% voter turnout, which means that there were 15 votes for Obama and only 8 for Clinton. So in reality, he won by a margin of almost two to one.

Games
Board games - Monday, 6:00pm - Midnight, Brooklyn Lyceum.

All are welcome.

Directions:

Brooklyn Lyceum
227 4th Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn
R, M to Union Street - the Lyceum is on the same block as the train station

The "Right" to Life
Here's another phrase that I think has been horribly misused. What does it mean for something to be a right? Well, if I say that I have the right to free speech, it means that the government cannot stop me from saying things. It doesn't mean that a private entity cannot stop me from saying things. For instance, if I worked for a prestigious educational institution and I got up at a podium and said that women can't do math or science because their brains are made out of peanut butter fudge, that institution could (and should) fire me. This is not a violation of my freedom of speech - I have the right to say whatever I want, but universities have the right not to employ me if I do. In fact, any corporation or association or club could have rules for employees or members banning those people from saying certain things, and that would still not be a violation of the right to free speech, as long as we are talking about voluntary associations. It also doesn't mean that others are obliged to provide for my speech in some way. For instance, if I want to get on the news and tell everyone that I like to eat lemon poppy seed muffins for breakfast and the news people won't let me, they are not violating my freedom of speech. If I post an obnoxious comment on a blog and the blogger deletes it they are also not violating my right to free speech.

As a libertarian I would argue that a right on my part never constitutes an obligation on the part of society. Rights are things to protect us from governmental abuse.

And that's where we come to this "right to life" stuff. The right to life, as written in the Declaration of Independence, and in Locke, and others, should be taken to mean that the government cannot take away someone's life. It doesn't mean that there can't be a club that only admits dead people (an absurd argument included only for the sake of parallelism.) More substantially, it doesn't mean that private entities cannot take away one's life. The right to life is not the same as a law against murder. Murder prohibitions are provided by criminal statutes at the state level, not by the Constitution and certainly not by the D of I. These statutes provide specific instances of when taking a life is or is not murder, and if so then to what degree. For instance, I could kill someone who breaks into my house, or who assaults me physically, without violating their rights. Some would argue that euthanasia or assisted suicide is not murder. Some would argue that dueling is not murder. The point is, if I kill someone who has asked me to kill them, or agreed to fight me to the death, am I violating their rights? Finally, it doesn't mean that others are obliged to provide for my life in some way. Bakers are not obliged to bake me lemon poppy seed muffins for breakfast. Generally speaking I would have to pay someone to do that. It sucks if people starve to death but do we say that their right to life has been violated? How, and by whom?

It's important I think to note that it is a different argument if we're going to say that there's a moral obligation to keep people alive. Healing the sick and feeding the hungry are important social causes, and are addressed by a variety of social organizations (churches, charities, etc). Whether or not governments ought to be involved is an argument that we could have, but we all sort of know where each other stands on it. Since no one is taking anyone else to court arguing that they are violating the rights of starving people by not feeding them, however, I think we can agree that as rights are generally understood, the right to life does not include the right to be provided for.

So what does it mean for a fetus to have a right to life? Simply that the government may not arbitrarily deprive the fetus of life. So, for instance, let's say the government decided that in order to effect population control, all women were restricted to having one child, and all subsequent pregnancies must be terminated. This law (which is not too far-fetched, given what is going on in China) would be a violation of the right to life of any aborted fetus. An individual woman choosing to get an abortion is not a violation of the right to life of the fetus. Women have no obligation to provide support for this individual. Is it murder? Again, I can kill someone who invades my property or threatens my physical well-being. A woman's body must be considered her property and therefore the fetus is either a part of that property, which could be removed, like tonsils or an appendix; or it must be considered another individual, in which case it is invading another's property and endangering her well-being. Either way, an abortion cannot be considered a rights violation - that is, unless you want to consider all those other examples (letting poor people starve, killing home invaders, etc) rights violations as well. And the conservatives who promote gun rights and oppose welfare programs are certainly unwilling to concede that point.

Yes, fighting abortion on moral grounds is important for some people, and I respect their opinion. Abortion can be an ugly, terrible thing, and it would be better if we could all do without it. However, trying to make it about the rights of the fetus is ridiculous. I would go so far as to say that it is disingenuous, but I suspect that most conservatives don't even notice the contradictions inherent in their positions. By prohibiting abortion, we would be placing a burden on the woman to carry the child to term, and then on
someone - the woman, her family, a foster family, or a state-funded orphanage, but in other words, on society - to take care of the child. To provide for it. But providing for other people's lives is something conservatives don't want to have to do. Apparently, neither is thinking things through to their logical conclusions.

For those honestly concerned about the right to life, though - the death penalty is a great example of the government violating that fundamental right. War - probably another good example.

And any libertarian - including Ron Paul - who thinks that abortion is a violation of the right to life, is an idiot. I hereby banish them from the libertarian movement.

Two unrelated word-related things
1. My girlfriend is FreeRicing. I = so bored.

2. Does the word "Prosopistics" mean anything to any of you? It came to me in a dream, but don't bother googling it - it's not on the internet. Could I be thinking of prosopography? I just wonder why that particular word came to me in a dream.

3. There is no third thing. I just typed the number three and had a strange urge not to delete it.

EDIT: Google spiders have now found this entry, which means that the word "prosopistics" now is officially on the internet, and has exactly one hit.

Hiking Trips - Open Invitation!
This is an open invitation to anyone interested in hiking the famous Breakneck Ridge. I first hiked these trails when I was 14 - a small, shy, nerdy, asthmatic version of my current self. Breakneck is described as strenuous - and it is - but it's also reasonably short, and the views are amazing.

Maps of the trails can be found here and here. Back in High School, we'd start on the white trail, the third P up from Cold Spring. At the Blue trail we cut right, and descended to a little abandoned farm near a reservoir, where we ate lunch. We then climbed Mt. Taurus (called "Bull Hill") on the map using, I believe, the Yellow trail, and finally descended on the White. Then we walked south to Cold Spring, got pizza, and caught the train back to the city.

Recently, though, we've been skipping Taurus and just cutting through the valley using the Red trail, or going off trail and following streams down to the river road. Taurus is tall and the trail is winding, and it takes a long time and a lot of energy - which is why I like it, but also why we skip it in our old age. Whether we climb Taurus or not usually gets decided at the abandoned farm, based on our energy levels and the time of day.

Here is a reasonably good list of what to bring. I'd also add the recommendation of an ace bandage (just in case - I think we've had a sprained ankle on one trip) and also that if you buy new hiking shoes for this trip, try to break them in in advance - even if it's just walking around in them for a few days - just to get a feel for them and make sure you can sustain 5-8 hours of walking. I usually wear sneakers, but then, I don't do the rock scrambles.

That brings me to the difficulty level. The initial ascent divides into two trails at various points, with one trail (marked with white blazes) being the difficult trail and the other (marked with Xs, set to the left) being the bypass trail for those who do not wish to attempt the difficult trail. There are also some rock faces that are off the trail that can be climbed by those daring and skilled enough to do so. So, basically, there are three levels of difficulty - beginner, intermediate, advanced - and if you want you don't have to exceed the beginner level (I hover between beginner and intermediate).

The initial dates I have set for trips are May 4th (Sunday) and May 7th (Wednesday). Feel free to join us for either or both. On the 4th,

corneredangel will be my companion tour guide - I actually met him for the first time on my very first Breakneck hike. On the 7th, Jonathan Keller, another experienced Breakneck hiker, may be joining us. Based on level of interest I'll schedule more dates in the future.

Transportation: Metro-North to Cold Spring. On weekends, trains leaving Grand Central at 7:50 or 8:50 stop at Breakneck Ridge station, which consists of a sign and two little wooden stairs.

If you're interested, comment or email (my lj username at gmail).

When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail
When I first encountered this phrase, I thought it was exceedingly clever, and it invoked images of some rugged spaceship captain improvising something really awesome out of little pieces of his ship. Now, however, my feelings have changed. In practice, if all you have is a hammer, everyone around you has to suffer through six hours of hammering every day for two weeks.

They're renovating the apartment next door, and every morning I wake up to the wall behind my head vibrating because someone is hammering on the other side of it. Now, I know what goes into renovating apartments, and I can think of a few things that might need occasional hammering, but really, this is ridiculous. I feel like going over there and explaining the concept of a screwgun.

You see, screws are far superior to nails. This is because a screw is basically a nail with a little winding road going all the way from the pointy end to the flat end. This road is called "threading," and when you turn the screw, the screw follows the road into the object getting screwed. It's a lot like magic.

I remember reading one of them there Little House on the Prairie books as a youngun, and Pa Ingalls built a house what got held together by some nails. We've come a long way since the Midwest was settled. Get a fucking screwgun.

Feminism
This subject has been taking up a lot of my time lately.

odilesseduction and I had a discussion prompted by her civil liberties class in which she learned of some radical feminist anti-porn arguments. She took the libertarian side, and I ran some radfem arguments up against her to see how she did. I wasn't able to convince her that porn is bad, but I don't really believe it is myself so I may not have been arguing with my typical ardor.

The argument goes that porn is bad because it harms the women who make porn as well as the women who have to deal with the men who watch porn. Let's break it down. First we have the question of the women in porn. Are these women forced to be in porn, coerced to be in porn, are they in porn because of societal imbalances of power, are they in porn because they have chosen from a limited set of options, or are they in porn because that is what they really want to do? I think we can agree that as it now stands, the answer could be any one of these for any given woman, but I would expect that the numbers would be more weighted toward the earlier options. Even so, this leaves us with the question of whether it is porn itself that is bad or whether the underlying systems (force, coercion, power, etc) are bad. In other words, in a post-patriarchal society, could porn still be made?

The second question is, how are individual women treated by the porn industry? This again would seem to depend on circumstance, and if some women are treated badly, any attempt to protect their rights should be directed against any abuse they receive rather than against porn itself. In other words, a woman being beaten is bad, whether she is beaten by a pornographer or a husband or a random dude on the street.

Unless, of course, merely being involved in porn itself constitutes harm. What does being in porn do to a woman? How does she feel afterwards? How is her life affected? These, I think, are important questions.

Next we have the argument that porn harms all women. Men are by far the primary consumers of porn, and women are the commodity of porn - the men aren't watching porn for the other men. So inherent in the nature of porn is the idea of women pleasing men because men have the power (eg money). This relationship strengthens the idea of women existing to please or serve men. In addition, the content of porn is almost always oriented towards the male orgasm or men's ideas of pleasure. Does being constantly exposed to the idea that women are commodities to be bought and sold, existing only to please men, and with no genuine desires of their own, cause men to treat women like commodities? Or is it that porn is simply a reflection of men's impulse to commodify women, with no consequence of its own?

If porn indeed causes men to view and treat women as objects, and being treated as an object is harmful, then porn is indeed harmful to all women. So the question becomes, how much to these images actually affect people?

I've never believed that playing violent video games would make people violent. I always thought that getting one's violent urges out in a safe outlet would lessen the chances of a person becoming actually violent. Aristotle called this process katharsis. He claimed that if a person had unhealthy impulses or desires, seeing these impulses or desires played out on a stage would purify the person of those impulses or desires. The need for badness would be satisfied and the person could then be virtuous in life.

I really don't have an answer about porn, or violent video games, or even plays in which a young man kills his father and marries his mother. It's possible that both are true - that watching porn helps satisfy men's nastier urges without harming anyone, but also causes men to demean women in normal day-to-day interactions.

***

By manner of segue, I'll point out that the idea that women are coerced into porn by societal or economic factors didn't always sit well with me. As a libertarian I liked to believe that people made choices freely unless the government got in their way. And here would be my example: let's say a woman wants to earn money for college or to feed her child or whatever. She decides to pose nude for some softcore porn, but the government says no, we've decided that porn is illegal. Now the woman can't go to college or feed her child or whatever. So the libertarian says, sure, porn might not be the greatest job - but clearly the woman who chooses to be in porn would rather be in porn that not, and so whatever her other alternatives are, they must logically be worse than porn. We just want to give women choices.

Now, a real effective way to give this woman a choice would be to somehow fix it so that she could easily get a non-porn job. Now most libertarians want everyone to fend for themselves - if this woman can't get a job it's not our responsibility to give her one. However, I no longer find this position satisfying.

I'm not advocating a government solution. I still think that whatever has to be done, the State system will fuck it up beyond all reason. But we live in a society where women are consistently paid less than men for equal work, where women are undervalued as business partners or professionals or students and overvalued as sex objects, and as long as that condition continues, women will be drawn towards choices that may be harmful to themselves and to women as a group.

No law can fix this. Only a change in the perspective of society will put men and women on equal footing, and without such a change women won't really have the same freedom as men. Any true libertarian, then - that is, anyone who values liberty - must also be a feminist. (Which is not to say that they must agree with every position put forth by feminists - as

a4yroldfaerie says, there is no overmind.) I claim that I am a true libertarian, therefore, by my logic, I must also be a feminist. So there.

As an exercise for the reader, try substituting "the State" for "the patriarchy" in feminist arguments, and vice versa. You will begin to see the uncanny synergy of this unholy union.

PS - Here are some other people blogging about feminism today.

This is why I defriend people
Several years ago, I defriended

cos because I found myself losing my temper fairly often when reading his LJ or when having discussions with him. Given the level of flame-war I've pursued with some of you who I still have friended, this might seem shocking. I'm not sure what it was about cos in particular that offended me, but today I have been graced with an example.

"It might have been interesting to engage soulchanger on some of the really bizarre assumptions he makes, particularly about what I said (I think I can see what he thinks I said, though it isn't what I meant at all), but I have learned for absolutely sure that discussing anything with him is 100% pointless, so I won't go there. I'm also going to re-edit and take this paragraph out of the comment. I just want you to know why I seem to be ignoring him."

The above paragraph comes from a comment that cos left in response to a discussion on

savyakoshka's lj in which he and

odilesseduction were debating politics. I had tried to participate but noticed that cos was not responding to my comments. Now we have an explanation. Apparently, for him, discussing anything with me is pointless. And not just, like, 32% pointless, or even 85%. It's one hundred per cent pointless.

He may be right. Perhaps the thing that offended me so much about cos was that no matter what I said he would never stop acting like he knew better and I just had to get down on my knees and bask in his fucking wisdom. Since I'm not going to be his disciple, there's no point in him wasting any time on me.

Now before you all jump in and point out that this is all projection I'd like to make a few distinctions. First of all, I don't expect people to listen to what I say and agree with me because everyone has to learn from me. If I don't make a convincing point I want to have my contentions disputed with evidence, and I am perfectly willing to be proven wrong. I was proven wrong when I supported the invasion of Iraq and I subsequently admitted it and now I am a staunchly anti-war libertarian. I have also changed my mind completely about my positions regarding feminism (of course, the discovery of post-modern feminism facilitated that - socialist and radical feminisms don't quite suit me, for reasons that are perhaps obvious). I have also changed my mind about global warming, thanks in large part to

novalis. So it's not like I never listen to anyone, never absorb their arguments, always think the same way about the same thing.

When I take a position, I defend that position. I argue that position. Just because I don't respond well to vacant criticisms or baseless assertions doesn't mean I don't listen to people. It means that if I'm going to change my mind I want to see arguments followed by evidence or examples that logically support those arguments. I don't care if the evidence is an anecdote or a statistic, a thought experiment or a counterexample, an analogy or a historical reference. Just give me something to argue with and argue I will, and if it turns out that your argument is supported, I really will acknowledge it.

In any case, I find that there are some people with whom I disagree strongly over principles and values, but with whom I can always come to some peaceful conclusion with about a particular issue -

a4yroldfaerie is a good example. Then there are the

coses of the world - people who can't even understand why their arguments are incoherent rubbish.

Also, talking about people behind their back is kind of a dick move. True to his word, cos took that paragraph out so that I wouldn't be able to see it. Because I don't want to talk about cos behind his back, I'm making this entry public (since he, not being on my friends list, wouldn't be able to see it otherwise).

And finally, if you've never met cos IRL, I just want to tell you that he's kind of creepy. Except by kind of, I mean 100%.

Coolest f-word ever deserves a fucking shout!
Proudly Proclaiming

Thus saith Ani:

people, we are standing at ground zero
of the feminist revolution
yeah, it was an inside job
stoic and sly
one we're supposed to forget
and downplay and deny
but i think the time is nothing
if not nigh
to let the truth out
coolest f-word ever deserves a fucking shout!
i mean
why can't all decent men and women
call themselves feminists?
out of respect
for those who fought for this
i mean, look around
we have this

yes
i love my country
by which i mean
i am indebted joyfully
to all the people throughout its history
who have fought the government to make right
where so many cunning sons and daughters
our foremothers and forefathers
came singing through slaughter
came through hell and high water
so that we could stand here
and behold breathlessly the sight
how a raging river of tears
is cutting a grand canyon of light

Ani DiFranco
"Grand Canyon"
Educated Guess