What would the world be like without borders?

Let’s see– you would have territories instead, where your kinship group did its primary food-gathering. And periodically you’d have wars with other kinship groups who gathered their own food nearby over those territories. Those wars would be brutal and no-prisoners.

There are a lot of people who forget that not all borders were drawn by white guys sitting at a table parcelling up countries they were never going to live in. The people actually living in those countries already had their own established borders– white guys simply ignored those peoples’ own border-making decisions, not invented the conception of borders where previously there was none. The white man’s invented a lot of damaging stuff, but don’t give him any credit for ‘borders’.

War is about resources– borders are a decision by multiple kin groups, tribes or countries to not fight a war over particular resources. Resources are always going to be scarce.

Everyone has borders or territory they fight for or assign others to defend. You can have two tribes of ten people each– they’ve got territories they get into periodic war over.

A world without borders is called ‘Life Before Agriculture’.

The Falsity of Certitude

Something that took me quite some while to overcome was the falsity of others’ certitude. Online, on the internet, people love to speak out of both sides of their mouths. On the one side, one cannot ever really be sure of anything, but yet on the other side, one can be utterly certain of all manner of things– often without any proof beyond the most anecdotal.

One can find this false certitude offline, but it is so much more omnipresent online. I read regularly some examples of it, and their fixed belief that their handful of anecdotes are more accurate than any other data (anecdotal or otherwise) is immensely distracting. It can get one to believing that maybe you’re wrong, since they seem so darned certain. This is a variant of the Greater Sucker Fallacy, and an especially cruel one.

By arguing not only from authority, but from a falsely invested authority at that, the people who are ’so sure’ pillage their own chosen philosophies of any lasting value. All they leave is the notion that if you yell loudly enough that you are right and your experience is the only valid/real/legitimate experience, then you can write your own truthiness.

And this is cruel because it’s so seriously taken. There’s no sarcasm or jesting air– this is considered the real way to bring your views to the table. And yes, the loudness, the absolute, egomaniacal self-righteousness involved can be very persuasive– but it is ultimately false, empty and inaccurate. It creates the unfortunate situation where if your belief structure has any merit, that merit is crushed when people realise your certitude is just a false, inflated sense of entitlement rather than something that emanates from your beliefs.

It’s kinda sad, it’s endemic to the internets, and it infects all that I find interesting to read or ponder. Another time I will expound with explicit examples.

nudity is neither a shield nor an invitation.

This is the sort of viewpoint that leaves people on both sides of the rape arguments fistfighting.  But it is a simple enough reality, though with complex consequences of acceptance. 

The tears of a white woman– what can’t they get Hillary Clinton?

So Hillary Clinton pulled out the classic white woman option– she cried her way to a win in New Hampshire.

As plenty of others have pointed out, her ‘experience’ is primarily being married to a devilishly capable politician. But one doesn’t gain experience via osmosis. And Hillary’s scrambling shows that even osmotically, she didn’t pick up much from her husband.

What Hillary is coasting on is what numerous other women have historically used to gain political office– people really really really liking her husband. Hillary would be doing even better if Bill Clinton were deceased, frankly. That Obama is a threat in any fashion demonstrates her incapability to exploit the Clinton-goodwill she has from people liking her husband so much. Her stooping to the dirtiest of racial tactics specifically just keeps illustrating her lack of political craft. Simultaneously, it also reveals how racism is still omnipresent, because if people weren’t acting on her racist digs at Obama, he would be doing a lot better as a charismatic and genuinely interesting candidate. She’s working with the Republicans against Obama– and yet liberal white women are failing to speak out against her and deny her their support. Politics makes for curious bedfellows, indeed.

But she’s a white woman, after all, and the tears of this white woman might just get her a Presidency.

“If a hot guy paid me to have sex with him, I totally would!”

This is a moderately common idea about prostitution, even if it isn’t always stated so baldly. Even among sexworkers who don’t perform sex acts (strippers mostly, but also some others), there is a little too much ‘yeah, i’d totally have sex for moneys if i thought the guy was hot and, you know, it was the right price’. The right price generally being minimum five figures for a night, shockingly.

Dirty little secret: if a guy is giving you money for sex with him, he mysteriously rachets up in appeal. is this unilaterally true? nah. every women who fucks for money refuses at least a handful of clients, even the ones doing it for drugs. but overall, most prostitutes don’t think their clients are omg hawt. that’s not how it works. you have money and that makes you omg hawt for the time it takes to acquire that money from you, within some surprisingly minimal constraints (this would be the criteria for refusal, which vary from sexworker to sexworker).

even when sex acts aren’t involved, the principle still holds. it is a fundamental of sexually-oriented work. when i danced, the range of guys i found attractive mysteriously increased to match the range of guys who would give me money with minimal or no hassles.

the myth that money doesn’t create its own sliding scale of tolerance in the interactions between men and women is one that irritates me regarding sexwork. a lot of women say ‘oh i totally would if i could only dance for/fuck/pose naked for guys i consider hot without money involved’. it’s a curious subversion that once you bring money into it, ‘guys i consider hot’ gets to be a pretty broad category.

another time i will mention casually another dirty little secret about the nature of the buyers, something that sexworkers instinctually or consciously use in their work but hate to have mentioned explicitly.

The government does not exist to rubberstamp your ideology.

One might class this as a core belief of mine. I think there should be (federal and state/provincial) governments, but I don’t think they exist solely to sign off on a given agenda.

I don’t believe abortion is a federal issue.

I don’t believe teaching creationism vs. evolution is a federal issue.

I will use those two above examples to illustrate my discontent with accepted party lines on these matters. Regarding abortion, I think that instead of lobbying the government to cut checks for women who want abortions or attempting to enforce a federal law that states can and will weaken at their own whims, women should collectively organise to raise funds for abortion and/or contraceptive support. If abortion were a state issue, I would expect and frankly contribute towards women pooling money and time and other resources towards helping other girls and women get those abortions or contraceptives they needed if they lived in a state where these things were outlawed.

Yet, when I suggest this kind of thing, people get very irate with me and insist that the government should serve their goals. They start talking about ‘privilege to have a car to drive across a border with’ and other such things. The entire issue is reduced to a perverse binary in which either there is a check cut from on high (federally) or individual women exercise privilege and go travel as needed to get abortions and/or contraceptives.

There are middle grounds, but they require individuals working privately towards collective goals, without expecting the government to approve their ideology.

Regarding school teachings, I feel much the same way. You want all the theories of evolution taught (dirty little secret: there’s more than one)– pool resources and build you a school. Likewise for creationism in all its forms.

Supporting people in need can be done by individuals being willing to pool their resources. The false narrative that the government has to pay for it or else it cannot happen stifles grassroots efforts.

For me it is obvious that you ask many individuals privately to work towards a common goal by sharing resources– it is fundamentally (fundamentalistically?) Christian. Christ ever asked that people share what they could for a common goal.

I think the privilege remarks in these instances are just derailing tactics, to avoid the issues of having to work with and share resources with those of other colors and backgrounds– to put money where your ideology is. It’s easy to talk about a right to abortion when your goal is to have ‘the government’ pay for it– other people still, but faceless enough that they don’t count.

Kinda different when you have to canvass neighborhoods full of people not like you to get the money together for women in need. It’s harder, and it takes more time to set up useful and flexible infrastructures. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be done. Again, likewise with school-teachings. It is harder to advocate for creationism or evolution if you aren’t expecting the government to rubberstamp your views on the matter and fund it anonymously.

Some would say, but is not a government a collection of individuals? Is not this suggestion to organise in groups a simulacrum of government? And I would say– it is altogether a different thing when you have to learn all the names of the people you’re asking for money from. And government-reliance means never having to go that far. It is always ever about distancing yourself from the source of support, be it in cash or time or other things. Always making sure that it’s impersonal, that you never have to look anyone in the face and state your case and beliefs.

I say embrace the difficulty, and the challenge. Find out what you love and are willing to sacrifice for, and do that. Don’t wait on a wilfully impersonalised third party. And if you will not truly offer yourself for others, then maybe you should lay off the vehement advocacy that relies on quasi-anonymous government cash to succeed.

The Greater Sucker Fallacy

Among the perils of modern existence is something akin to ‘paralysis of perception’, but as likely to fall upon the clever as upon the dim. Paralysis of perception is a shorthand phrase for the way in which clever people think themselves into inaction due to perceiving too many options in life. When everything is technically, theoretically accomplishable, very little actually gets done.

The Greater Sucker Fallacy can be taken as either a subclass of the perception-paralysis or it can be taken on its own. As it afflicts all intelligences, I prefer to take it on its own.

The Greater Sucker Fallacy is simply the idea that the other person must have better information than you, or that the other person’s notion on the matter is superior. It is the idea that you are the greater sucker, that what you think about a given topic is CLEARLY incorrect or faulty in some crucial regard.

It is fundamentally the idea that you are clueless about it all and other people never are, precisely because they seem way more certain about their conceptions of reality than you do. You, with your willingness to admit doubt and occasional confusion. You, with your willingness to accept that new data can lead to a revised opinion. You, with your belief that life is an endless series of greys, with fewer binary choices than any of us would prefer. You, with your utterly incompetent conception of the world as a complex series of interactions with consequences not entirely or easily predictable by human minds.

You are the Greater Sucker. Because you’re not convinced that you have found all the answers, or even one particular one for a particular topic.

The Greater Sucker Fallacy is that quailing in the face of certitude by people with absolutely no reason other than arrogance to believe that their viewpoints carry higher authority or heftier weight in the grand schemes of things. They seem so sure they’re right– you worry that all you know must therefore be wrong because it’s not so clearcut for you.

This fallacy is an insecurity, but it’s also the natural result of a modern world where the loudest people who seem most certain claim all the authority and work terribly hard to crush all opposition. Only they are not nearly so excellent at it as good old Ghenghis Khan. Who was less certain…

I guess really, the Greater Sucker Fallacy is just the belief that the Greatest Suckers are Great at anything else.