Forbidden Lore, Inflation and the Housing Bubble

This guy writes a lot about what he terms Forbidden Lore, or powerful knowledge not readily accessible. The thing about forbidden lore is that once you discover it, it can so radically alter your worldview that you can’t un-see it.

Discovering the truth about inflation was some forbidden lore for me. Understanding precisely how awful inflation is leaves me even more appalled at the housing bubble’s popping.

The thing about inflation is that people generally process half of how it works, but not all of it. When it comes to housing prices, they notice that historically the prices go up. So then it seems like a great idea to buy a house that’s a bit over their income, since ‘housing prices always go up’.

But the other half of inflation is that spending power goes down as prices rise. Historically, you need more and more money to buy the same things you might have bought 20 years earlier. This is where people just…they can’t seem to process it. They basically believe housing prices can go up AND they can somehow retain the CURRENT year’s spending power. That is, they think they can buy a house in 2005 for 500k, have it be worth 1.5 million in 30 years (2035), and that this means they’ll have 2005 spending power with that 1.5 million as home equity. Everyone thinks that housing prices can rise forever, but they can still keep current spending power.

Once you understand what it really means that one dollar now buys far less than it did in 1940, you can’t look at inflation the same way. You can’t look at housing as an investment at all. It’s a depreciating asset. The treating of debt as wealth as a result of this half-knowledge of inflation fills one with a sense of complete horror.

I just can’t un-see the devastation and the problems that come from a situation where rampant inflation is considered ok. Nobody in America seems to be taking seriously the lessons of all the countries where people burnt the money instead of buying wood because it was cheaper. Or have to use calculators for the most simple purchases because the smallest notes are thousands or millions.

I really think inflation is forbidden lore, because if people really followed through the implications, they wouldn’t have made such astronomically crazy decisions in purchasing housing. At least, I have to hope so.

Chastity does not equal celibacy.

The idea of chastity in modern life has become inextricably entangled with celibacy. This is a shame, because chaste sexuality is not so simple (or simply dismissed) as abstaning from sex. By binding the idea of chastity to a sort of arid, sex-averse conception of celibacy, the full range of sacred sexuality is denied expression and acknowledgement.

Chastity is a difficult concept to incorporate into sacred sexuality if one isn’t Christian. Sacred sexuality is all too often associated with a certain kind of neo-pagan sexuality, generally including something like sacred whores. There is also the idea that sacred sexuality is about sexual indulgence equalling innocence. That you can’t be sexually innocent without group sex, for example. Because somehow a sexual innocent would just naturally go for that (or other sexual acts/expressions the person in question prefers personally). And more to the point, this type of sacred sexuality presumes that sexuality must be expressed through specific sexual acts. There isn’t room for sacred virginity in such a worldview (which is quite fascinating in its divergence from the pagan traditions that effectively do make room for sacred celibacy/virginity AND sacred whoredom).

Christianity, however, presumes that sexuality is part of all that you are in a different manner. Sexuality is intrinsic, and as an intrinsic quality, does not need to be expressed to be present. It can be latent or dormant, in a sense, without that dormancy being a flaw or fault.

Chastity, from a Christian-sexuality perspective, is the state of living in holy sexuality. Because this includes latent or dormant sexuality, a virgin or celibate is as ’sexual’ as, say, a married person and all three can thus have holy or sinful sexuality– that is, be chaste or unchaste. This is a much more nuanced approach to the idea of sexuality, to me. Likewise, a person who shifts from unchaste sexuality to chaste sexuality (such as someone who is a non-virgin due to fornication, but lays off the fornicating after being saved) is as sexually sacred as someone who was a Christian virgin or is a Christian celibate. There’s not a scale of chastity in that sense.

For Christians, sacred sexuality is more about honoring God than expressing themselves sexually. The second thing is one method of doing the first (ideally). Because the focus is on God, having sex can itself be perfectly chaste. But so can NOT having sex. And sometimes NOT having sex is unchaste (as when a husband denies his wife sex out of spiteful intent, or vice versa). So the specifics revolve around chastity being defined by how your heart approaches sexual matters. Come in with a heart for God, it is a chaste sexuality. Come in seeking to sin, it is unchaste. Whether sexual acts happen or not is often quite orthogonal to whether one’s sexuality is chaste or unchaste.

ETA: Essentially, for Christians chastity is about whether one’s sex life in thought and deed focuses on God. If it does not (even if no deed is committed), then it is not chaste.

The Puritans really liked sex.

I’m just going to randomly post this from time to time, because it’s true and I am sick of ‘Puritanical’ being used to mean ‘anti-sex’.

They were in many ways quite feminist and radical and sex-positive. They did eventually degenerate into legalism and hyper-Calvinism, but that was by no means the starting point. People need to read more history.

Feministe joins the misinformation about sexwork fray

This whole Spitzer deal is spawning some just seriously DUMB posts about sexwork from feminist blogs. This deal from Feministe is a case in point, though much of the dum is in the comments.

I don’t even know where to start, as the whole mess is so covered in semi-truth and straight out misinformation that I feel too exasperated to take it all apart.

I suppose part of the problem is that I cannot identify as a feminist because the more radical strains of it that I was influenced by (and still have residual effects from) really are pretty much religious beliefs. A lot of it must be taken on faith, since it requires that humans behave in ways they often refuse to when given the chance.

A prime example is with (unpaid) sex. The current culture is aggressively pro-casual sex and anti-marriage. It is of course more complex than that, but that simplification serves well enough for this point. By undermining the value of any long term romantic relationship (by increasing the ease of divorce and redefining ‘long-term relationship’ in terms of months rather than decades, to name two means), a nastily combative situation has developed between men and women.

Men and women are increasingly not culturally bound to treat each other well. Since both male and female virtues were denigrated, what is now culturally rewarded is male and female vice.

Which brings us back to the whole ‘is sexwork anti-feminist?’ query of that Feministe post. Sexwork is (mainly for the privileged women referenced in the post) quite literally a way to buy respect in a cultural market that tells women their value is how many people affirm their hotness.

You can get groped for looking cute in that miniskirt at a bar or you can wear an even shorter one at a strip bar and get paid twenty bucks a song. And possibly avoid the groping entirely. You can have one nighters with guys who expect you to be a 2am booty call the next week or you can book appointments with some of those same guys for 150-300 bucks an hour.

By third-wave, sex-positive definitions of feminism, sexwork is clearly feminist because women are leveraging money to generate power where they would otherwise have none if they did the same stuff for free. Using a slightly different means of analysis, it can also work with some radical first and second wave definitions of feminism. When you make a guy respect you by paying you, then it’s feminist if feminism is about how much respect you can coerce from an interaction.

Ok, now that I have declared sexwork intrinsically feminist in modern society, back to the comments which contained privilege and partial truths about sexwork itself.

There was a fair amount of ‘it’s better money than other jobs’ floating around. I will save the econ breakdown for a later series (yes, sexwork economics could be its own series of textbooks), but simply put, the money never changes and there’s a lower ceiling than most people (including many sexworkers) will concede.

While you can make guys pay you twenty a song, you can’t make them all pay you 100 a song. Likewise with escorting, phone sex, webcam work, porn, softcore/hardcore modelling, or paid BDSM. This is where the privilege comes in. While women who look like the right kinds of conventional attractive can command a premium above the norm, there is a fairly hard limit on how much respect even they can earn (so to speak). And because sexwork requires a whore/madonna dichotomy of its own to even exist, women who are not so conventionally attractive suffer a penalty against the norm.

Also, there are two money-levellers: how sexual you will get potentially, and how physical you CAN get potentially. You are not getting hundreds per hour to be a webcam girl or talk dirty on the phone. Likewise, strippers top out at hundreds per hour versus escorts/prostitutes.

Then there’s the flat wages. In stripping, dances have been 10-20 overwhelmingly for decades. Standard stage tips are still a dollar. Three hundred bucks is still a tolerable to decent night, with five hundred being pretty sweet for the great midrange of strippers.

The difference is the combative stuff carries over into sexwork. Now that women have to hustle respect in cash, men are responding by demanding more and more for that cash. It quickly becomes a very tangled give and take. Add to that the ever-increasing numbers of women attempting some form of sexwork, and we see that while the work is feminist, it’s being done in a heavily buyer-friendly market.

Women now have to get their boobs grabbed and grind on dudes to get 500 in a night, versus even ten years ago, when it might have been stage-only money or maybe a mix of stage and airdance money. Five hundred bucks buys a lot less now. And a girl may only get it once in a month of shifts. Not really ‘more money than other jobs’ as a default anymore.

Anyway, I could spin out another couple thousand words detailing the privilege intersections, but they kind of deserve their own discrete spaces. I’ll just finish out with a grumble about the gender dynamics.

The comments to that Feministe post had a fair helping of ‘omg it’s not just women who do sexwork’. That is true. However, I would hazard but can only prove anecdotally that buying sex is essentially masculine, and selling it is essentially feminine. That is, I tend to use man/woman as abstractions when talking about sexwork. I do this because I don’t really know of any markets where a feminine purchasing style exists, as such. I don’t know what it would look like. Even women who buy take a masculine purchasing style as their starting point and go from there.

Maybe that’s the final partial truth. There’s many kinds of masculine, and that’s what a buyer works from culturally. Some of them aren’t macho-masculine.

As for sellers, even among men and transgender, again anecdotally, they felt feminised in the process of selling. They didn’t necessarily think the customer thought them feminine, they just felt very chick-like (of those presenting as male).

Anyway, I have written over a thousand bipping and bopping words about this post and its comments without even touching on all the assumptions implicit to the discussion.

But then, that’s why I gots a blog. I have an unending supply of material for many (more orderly) posts along such lines…

Pandagon panders to panderers.

At any rate, I rather like the sound of that. In this post, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon takes Melissa Farley and Some Dude seriously regarding What To Do about legalising prostitution.

The assumptions that all men purchase sex to punish women are appalling in their bizarre self-righteousness. It is one reason, but not the only one. It’s required that some women be degraded for the edifice to exist, yes, but it is not a requirement or truth that all men buy sex to treat women like trash. Some pay to treat women well, or be kind to them as they understand kindness. Selling sex gets very complicated even though it is meant to offer uncomplicated alternatives to romantic and marital relationships.

As far as the legalisation argument goes, the problem with legalisation is– how do we define what’s legal? Whatever answer is determined almost certainly will penalise ’small operators’ such as the escort who works off craigslist, or the street girl without a pimp, or the four girls who pool money for their time-shared incall location.

It’s private labor, like childcare and housecleaning. And like those, too intimate to regulate at the level most people prefer to keep them at (small). You have to instead create a situation where only brothels are legal, and only large childcare facilities are legal, and only large companies funded and run by men are legal.

And everything else is on the edge.

It’s beyond legalisation, and I’m not sure I think that part’s a problem. This is why simply failing to prosecute (decriminalisation) can be a start, if it’s done with an eye to protecting the ability of small operators to operate safely. That doesn’t usually happen. Canada is a rare exception, with brothels being illegal and small-scale operating being legal (going to the guy’s hotel, or having him come to your location). And even there law enforcement has trouble accepting the law. But that’s a more valid way to go if you want the girls to be harmed less, if you care a damn bit about them being able to GET customers who aren’t there to treat them like trash.

Invoking Melissa Farley=lose. It’s not that she hasn’t done the work (she hasn’t), it’s that she has no care for the women. In this world, in the larger societies of this world, some women will offer. And they must be protected if people won’t find them other ways to earn livings. I think of the Ghanaian women, devout Christians, pleading with relatives in bordering countries for money to buy food with and being told ‘no’. But those same relatives shame and berate them for working in the new strip clubs in Accra. That’s unChristian, but it’s also the world we live in. The sin of not starving is an understandable one to commit, there. More so than the sin of self-righteous refusal to take care of relatives in need.

The work is tempting, compelling, alluring precisely because it isn’t always degradation and harm to the woman doing it. And Marcotte simply doesn’t acknowledge why women are drawn to make the offers in the first place. There is power in selling sex, though one can certainly dispute what kind it is and its limits.

Marcotte doesn’t understand that even Ms. 10$ blowjobs in the rain has the right of refusal. Yes, even her. It is a serious and difficult and nuanced topic, prostitution, because it involves women, who are also nuanced in their reactions and attitudes towards the work. I can’t even agree with her that HappyHookerdom is the problem in this case. She’s committing the FarleyError of thinking that even if there are women outside the HappyHooker and CrackWhoreInTheRain categories of prostitute, they don’t count because by using that binary distinction, they technically don’t even exist!

You aren’t real to Farley if you aren’t a traitorous HappyHooker (for claiming it can ever be enjoyable work) or bitter OppressedHooker wanting out. You break the binary, distort the clean little narrative. And that Marcotte swallows her poison bait so completely is just, again, appalling in its very bizarre self-righteousness.

A Tale of Two Tamars.

In the Bible, there are two ladies named Tamar that come up in regular discussion. The first of these is an ancestress of King David, while the second is one of David’s many children. What is interesting about both women is that they are both sexually victimised.

Ancestress-Tamar is used by her brother in law Onan for sex (Onan denies her the right to bear children by him, as was their mutual duty under Jewish law, by pulling out every time) and then screwed over figuratively and literally by her father in law Judah. When God strikes Onan down for being a greedy jerk (he didn’t want to lose his inheritance), Judah refuses to marry Tamar to his remaining son when that son hits marrying age. That’s the figurative. The literal is where it gets interesting. Tamar takes continuation of the line matters into her own hands. She dresses up as a prostitute and gets solicited. By Judah. He was pretty eager to break further commandments with her, so he does, but cannot pay immediately.

So Ancestress-Tamar gets some IOU tokens from him and sends him off. She gets pregnant, and is accused of immorality and threatened with death– by Judah. At that point she busts out with the tokens and Judah is like “I totally suck.”

She ended up with twin boys.

Daughter-Tamar is a different kind of sexual victimisation. She was ill-used without her consent. She was raped by her half-brother Amnon, after being bullied into going to see him by her father David. Her situation is interesting because she even offered to be wife to her half-brother, and that was rejected, because there was no love underlying his ‘affection’ for her.

Unlike Ancestress-Tamar, she does not take matters into her own hands. Her brother Absalom revenges her rape.

David’s wives are similarly passive (exemplified by Bathsheba) or even passive-aggressive (exemplified by Michal), while his other ancestresses such as Ruth and Rahab are pretty take-charge and assertive. That said, I don’t think Daughter-Tamar’s response was bad, but it is very different than Ancestress-Tamar’s response to sexual mistreatment (albeit more consensual in her case).

When dealing with actual prostitutes, the Bible mentions them in ways that belie the stereotype of the Bible as anti-woman or denigrative of female power. And that’s very interesting. Rahab the prostitute, after all, was an ancestress of Christ Himself, along with Tamar, who played one to get done what none of the men around her were willing to (continue the bloodline).

Sexwork is like naked grifting.

In a way this is an extension of my thoughts about the possible class ceiling within sexwork. But thinking of sexwork from this angle explains a lot of the seemingly contradictory (to those outside the work) aspects of sexwork that crop up.

I’ll just list some similarities:

• Cunning is rewarded over abstract intelligence.
• Being plastically adaptable to many situations and circumstances.
• The constant focus on money (always defined as CASH) rather than assets.
• Related to that and also to cunning, both sexwork and grifting think of one’s body as the only real asset, with larger-scale assets rarely acquired and even more rarely kept over the long term. Also, that one asset is thought to be inexhaustibly profitable.
• Attracts binge personality types.
• Rewards and encourages sociopathic and narcissistic personality traits. This also relates back to adaptability.

I really think you hit a class ceiling where only up to x class level will you find people in either or both lines of work (there is some crossover, though not very much). At least for me, noting the similarities explains certain things better than any other explanation.

Notes on Class and Sexwork

I suspect but cannot prove that there’s a class ceiling within the realm of sexwork, that it’s not a means of class migration and that really only middle class and below women enter into it at all.

But that does involve using a definition of middle class that isn’t quite tied to earning x amount of dollars per year.

However, I’m just not sure. I’ve never known anyone above middle class to be in sexwork, or even heard of such a thing. But there could be alternative anecdotal evidence to the contrary, possibly.

It would make for interesting research, anyhow.

Obama lifted my heart, Hillary skeet-shot it.

I can’t hang with poliblogging.

Politics is dirty and grubby and it’s a secular religion that was leading me astray.

South Park was right. It is always a contest between some douche and some turd. After Junior Tuesday descended into a morass of swampy disaster, I watched that episode and it was painfully true, even down to the focus on voting in itself.

I was led astray by the idea that Obama’s campaigning was sparking a massive movement to restore the proper relationship between politicians and voters. As if there is such a thing. Politics just makes everyone greedy in different ways, even if they sometimes do good. That good done is incidental for the most part.

Politics is different from The Law, but that would be a whole different series of posts I’m not qualified enough to write coherently.

I mean, in all honesty, whoever’s elected will bankrupt the country for a generation to come. Obama will do so trying to give everyone free stuff. Hillary will do so trying to seize any scraps of power she can grab for herself. McCain will do so sending half of us off to war in fifteen different countries. Of the three options, Obama’s is at least incidentally decent in intent. But the US government has no money to grant any favors with and may take a few other governments down with it as we head into this most glorious of depressions (NOT recession).

The dollar’s losing value against the peso. In the face of that sort of seismic shift in economic realities, I should never have gotten caught up in a message of people voting their way to something better with a new set of politicians. This whole economic implosion is all handiwork of both Democrats and Republicans, rich and poor alike. Americans overwhelmingly wanted to live on easy, always extended credit. But even many of the rich are going to suffer in this depression. It’s not going to leave anyone out.

Elections aren’t going to save anyone. Jesus will, but not from economic turmoil.

Anyway, this isn’t quite what I had in mind, but it’s close enough. Now I can get back to writing about Jesus, sexwork and every other not-political thing that I care intimately about.

Hillary Clinton’s turning Republican I really think so.

First she did the whole ‘I cannot say whether Mr. Obama is a Muslim or not, I must take his word on the matter’ thing that pretty much is the next step up from the false email forwards saying he’s a Muslim.

Then she said McCain was teh awesum. I mean ‘more experienced’…

And about half the people voting in the Dem primaries are voting for this not-so-stealth Republican in disguise. Nice to know half of all Dems support racism, and religious bigotry when the Nice White Lady decides to campaign that way.

She musta learnt it from Bill, who went about as Republican as one can get after 1994.

The Dems supporting someone who isn’t playing dirty (Obama and even Edwards) are keen enough. Increasingly, I am not sure what to think of anyone supporting implicitly or otherwise Hillary’s very GOP campaign tactics and support of McCain. I could do as they do regarding Obama and think the worst, or I could hope they call Hillary out on her rude and prejudice-exploiting tactics.

Obama, Clinton, WWS and the black man’s burden

Unlike Kipling’s rendition of the white man’s burden (which is basically the whole civilising savages deal), the black man’s burden is basically to wildly outperform and still be told it’s not good enough. Always twice the work for half the benefit.

One can see this in Hillary’s campaign releasing a memo complaining that Obama wins ‘because he spends money and campaigns hard on top of that’ and that therefore his winning is bad. Like, how DARE the upstart Negro work hard to win a Presidential campaign. How DARE he run it smoothly and efficiently, making optimal use of the numerous small donations he’s gotten. How DARE he work twice as hard, three times as hard.

He was supposed to sit back and let her have the nomination. It was her’n, because she’s Hillary freaking Clinton. A white woman, clearly superiorly equipped to run the country. What with being married to a President and all.

The problem with Hillary Clinton’s campaign is White Woman’s Syndrome (WWS). It’s all about a sense of entitlement to power without a sense of responsibility for handling that power.

That’s why her campaign is flailing and yet even the MSM fails to pin that on her own decision-making, instead saying ‘She’s got bad advisors’, ‘It wasn’t her fault she failed to plan past Super Tuesday’. All the mistakes and missteps are never her fault, always Bill’s, or Mark Penn’s, or Obama’s– always it is some dude’s fault she isn’t already the nominee.

I don’t think she’d be a good President, precisely because she stomps her foot, demands that she get the job as some kind of prize for being married to a President and is mad when actual voters and superdelegates choose someone else. It’s ridiculous, frankly, to repeatedly fail to take responsibility while simultaneously arguing that you are better equipped to manage the country than someone who has been taking responsibility (Obama).

Hillary underperforms endlessly, and endless excuses are made for her. Obama overperforms, and there’s still endless articles about how all those votes aren’t good enough because he didn’t get 90 percent wins in every state he won.

But here’s the facts: You can give Hillary her precious Florida and Michigan delegates, and give Obama his proportion of the Florida ones. Then you can give him a FRACTION of the uncommitted Michigan ones (which is what would happen minimally, no way he would get zero out of that), and guess what? He’s still ahead!

The superdelegates, the oh-so-important superdelegates that would decide this whole mess for Miz Hillary? All heading for Obama in a steady stream.

Obama started with 64, Hillary with 161, giving her a 97 delegate headstart. She’s gained a net of 80 supers, while Obama has gained a net of 132– 65% more in the same timeframe. He’s halved that starting lead in barely eight weeks of campaigning.

I am just going to randomly predict that Obama wins Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont. I predict a four state sweep, routing Hillary completely.

And I predict that if that happens, there will be further spectacular statistics from Obama and further foot-stomping that it’s not good enough by Hillary Clinton, with the MSM backing her the whole way.

The voters and volunteers are warming my cynical heart. But the MSM and Hillary Clinton’s massive entitlement complex are not.

I’m feeling kinda ranty after all the slagging on Obama that keeps turning up the further ahead he gets, the better he does. But as burdens go, perhaps it’s the one to have, since it means our first black President.