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AC_Wright 58F
83 posts
8/1/2014 6:20 pm
Rant to Respond to Svetya's latest post: a History of the Female World.


Rant to Respond to Svetya's: a History of the World.

Oh such beautiful focus, Svetya. Such wonderful points. So delightfully thorough.

It's a pity that we Americans don't love our brains more; fewer of us would live our lives in chimneys of logically unsupported opinion.

I think Christianity and Capitalism are fascinating factors in what you say in that they provide and waste, create and destroy opportunities, and modify aspects of culture.

Hunting and gathering provides life in the state of nature that Hobbes famously described as nasty, brutish and short and everyone does the same thing. The difference between a troupe of Neanderthals or early Homo Sapiens and a troupe of say, gorillas or chimpanzees is that we use tools better. Instead of the termite stick, we've got the termite stick and the hand-axe (the same one for a long, long, long time) and we've the sense to seek or create shelter—there's a division of labor, the females gather plant matter, the males hunt and provide protein. Exclude either and you see hunger and social collapse—is there war? Who knows? No one can record it.

Then, along comes agriculture, Egypt is the gift of the Nile and the scratch plow (James Burke, Connections: an alternative view of change). Welcome to surplus.

Specialization is possible and necesary: some people are freed from the task of producing food, others are chained to it. Societies stratify and create strict hierarchies: kings, priests, artisans, architects, physicians, metalsmiths, brick-makers, mesons, peasants, peasant women in that order.

For the first time, information is recorded other than by word of mouth. It is no longer a game of telephone. It outlives the people who thought of it. It doesn't have to be true. Religions explain the world in creation myths and freeze it in place, forever and ever, Amen.

This exchange does not take place: "how on earth do you know an animal-headed Egyptian god masturbated the stars into existence, you weren't around! Oh, they talk to you? Fine. That makes all the difference."

Nothing changes. They still don't ask the question.

Proper war is possible, not half-reluctant skirmishes between tribes, but proper war and lots of it: there is only so much arable flood-plain available but surplus makes you lucky, you can keep men idle, regiment them and provide them with armor and funny-looking bronze swords to hold onto it.

As you point out, the Ancient Greeks who gave us the basis of our notion of law and philosophy, had no problem with homosexuality. Sex with men was for fun and connection between equals: sex with women was for reproduction—at least in the parts of society that gets written about. Hard to imagine that poor bastard behind the oxen going home to his hut and choosing between his hairy wife and a perfumed boy.

The pagan Romans didn't really care that much about it at the height of their power. They didn't particularly *like* it but it seems to have been a matter of taste. Catullus's Carmen sixteen: "Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo..." Suetonius, of Julius Caesar: "He was every woman's man and every man's woman." Political statements? Accurate(?) reports of sexual license?

You decide—either way, women were chattel even at the top of society, given objects without names of their own, Roman sisters: Father's name, father's name the younger, father's name the third—given, exchanged, even and especially at the top.

The Roman Republic can be said to have ended when Caesar's , Julia, died in childbirth, severing the personal connection between himself and Pompey Magnus.

The Roman Empire contained Egypt and Judea where mystics react to unsettled times. One of them was to prove especially controversial.

Freeze-frame.

Item:

The Ancient Romans' posession of Judea allows the new cult/religion to spread (or possibly metastasize) through Rome and from there, throughout the civilized world and to make inroads beyond it.

Item:

The new religion borrows the holy books of the ancient Hebrews with their tales and harsh proscriptions against homosexuality (Judges 19-21) and limes them to tales of the savior which have nothing whatsoever to do with the far older material, except for the prophecy among the Hebrews, a tribal people whose religion belongs *to* their tribe that one day, a savior, a messiah, will come—some of the accounts are demonstrably written by people who were nowhere near him during his lifetime, some of whom weren't even born. Of course, all of these accounts are absolutely true.

Some of the words of Jesus of Nazareth can be construed as a fantastic philosophical system of pacifism and tolerance that is stunning in a world of power-hungry, religion-ridden cultures that stone women to death for selling themselves instead of starving or that drive spikes through the joints of criminals and slaves (Roman Citizens were not crucified) and leave them to die of thirst and positional suffocaton. The *other* words of Jesus involve things like cursing olive-trees to death for not bearing fruit out of the season when olive trees actually bear fruit.

We draw a curtain on those stories here.

The creation account/myth of the hebrew bible shares elements with the accounts from other cultures. The Greeks had Pandora's curiosity. The Hebrews had Eve's failure to resist the temptation of eating from the fruit of the one tree in the Garden of Eden that was forbidden them when prompted by God's enemy—the angel who had been closest to him.

Following one mistake, the story goes, God, went nuts and cursed *all* humanity for *all* of time with the need for bitter labor and for women to go through childbirth and to suffer the curse of menstruation—a curse the almighty blithely extended to chimpanzees, many other primates, and many, many other wicked species including oppossums, shrews, bats...

Women are still chattel. Now they are not chattel because men are dicks who are physically stronger than women, but because they are wicked the way they were in a borrowed mythology.

Ecclesiasties: "Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us.

Reality: "What's new? A religion bigger than any tribal religion, that, unlike all the various pagan religions, cannot be refuted by climbing the nearest sacred mountain."

Christianity gives the world a god who is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Except for of the nobility, under Christianity, women remain chattel—their sex lives are much less interesting...

Fast-forward.

Spread of Christianity.

War, war, war. How do you like it? How do you like it? Fire and sword, "I believe in your god, can I live now?"

Rise of Islam.

War, war, war. How do you like it? How do you like it? Fire and sword, "I believe in your god, can I live now?"

Don't forget to burn those libraries: the holy book (pick one) is absolutely true and it contains everything you will ever need to know. Forget all that good stuff the Greeks and Romans got up to including the stuff on engineering.

The Mongols drop by. They wipe out the Polish armies that oppose them and are poised to change the face of Europe but the Great Khan dies and they are required to attend the rites. They leave.

Europe changes its collective underwear. Capitalism is waiting in the wings.

The black plague kills so many people that there is a lot of loose property just laying around: an accidental surplus.

The Church is corrupted!

People get to accuse their political rivals of being the Anti-Christ. They do it often.

War, war, war. How do you like it? How do you like it? Gustavus Adolphus is a military genius who will reform European warfare. Unfortunately, he is also *brave* in battle. Had he lived, even more of Europe would have been protestant.

Cuius regio, eius religio.

Blah, blah, capitalism.

Blah, Blah, technology.

Blah, Blah, colonialism.

Women remain chattel.

Up to 1718, no woman anywhere on the planet, in all of human history, has voted in any democratic procedure, election or assembly, EVER.

In 1718 female taxpaying city guild members are allowed to vote in local and national elections in Sweden. Both of these rights are rescinded (1758, and 1771).

The MC steps up to the microphone:

"And now, the moment you've all been waiting for...American Capitalism!!"

The crowd goes wild!!!

America is founded on a set of incredibly smart ideas assembled by incredibly well-read people who have seen world-history up to that point from the Ancient Greeks and Romans all the way up through European history. They are out to create the perfect, rationalist, constitutionally-based society for which they will have two great economic boosts.

1. Farmland that hasn't been worked out for the last two thousand years.
2. Slaves who, unlike Roman slaves, do not have to be obtained following the effort of conquest.

Women are still chattel.

War, war, war. How do you like it? How do you like it?

No. We don't pay taxes to you anymore. We want nothing to do with you. Oh yeah, wait until we're done with the French. Ouch! We still don't want anything to do with you. Fine! Lets' be friends. How about that? Done.

War, war, war. How do you like it? How do you like it?

African Americans are property. No! They're people! We need them for agricultural production and we own them! Agriculture is necessary but old hat. industry for cash is the way to go and slaves, people who work for *food*, have no buying power. Get with the program! No! Fine. You don't believe in industry? Feast your eyes on this repeating rifle, breachloading cannon, modern battleship and primative machine-gun. Okay. You win. They're free...we just won't let them vote, learn to read, or own anything whatsoever while we treat them like the scum of the earth—what could go wrong?

Industry marches on. America becomes rich the new-fangled way: by letting him who has the most money do whatever he pleases to an industrial proletariat—people who have nothing of worth but their labor.

put in hours in factories that would make modern adult workers burn the place down and pee all over the ashes.

Late 1800s, Anthony Comstock, a United States Postal Inspector, supresses the transportation of illicit materials like pornography (which men like) through the U.S. mails along with information on birth-control. Priets don't like this, women are evil and sex is supposed to be an adventure involving the certainty of pain and the possibility of dying. Emma Goldman called Comstock, "The leader of America's moral eunuchs." He is known to have caused a number of suicides.

On May 31, 1889, the South Fork dam burst following heavy rains, unleashing a flood that killed 2,209 people, mostly German and Welsh immigrants. The dams owners were gilded-age industrialists including Frick and Carnegie.

Frick, who was a prick, donated thousands of dollars from his millions in flood relief. Carnegie, who was less of a prick, build the town a library.

The survivors alleged that the dam's owners, Frick, Carnegie and others, who ran a nearby club, had modified the dam weakening it and leading to its collapse. The suit, of course, failed.

At 4:40 PM on March 25th, 1911, 146 women between the ages of 14 and 43, burned to death or leapt from a building to escape the smoke and flames that filled the factory where they were locked in while working fifty-two hour weeks at seven to twelve dollars a week—a maximum of $285 in today's dollars. Burnt to death for less than the current minimum wage—for less than you make after taxes working full-time at McDonalds.

Come to New York's Lower East Side in March. History buffs chalk the names of some of the women on the sidewalks in front of the rathole tenement buildings where some of them lived that are now expensive condominiums.

None of the women in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire ever voted for the simple reason that it was illegal for them to do so.

War, war, war. How do you like it? How do you like it?

Ten million men die in the first World War. American tips the balance and becomes a leader in an ever more integrated world economy.

Women get the right to vote in 1924. Just in time to suffer horribly along with everyone else, from the consequences of unbridled economic speculation where the rich *use* money to *make* money, leading to the stock crash the aftershock of which will cause massive suffering in a defeated Germany and lay the groundwork for an oddly-mustachiod malcontent to goose-step his way into history.

Rimshot!

War, war, war. How do you like it? How do you like it?

Forty-four millions die in World War II. America showed the world what you can do with industrial power, converting factories that made typewriters into factories that made rifles. Shocking the world with its ability to invent and synthesize. The Rolls-Royce Merlin engine that powered the P-51 Mustang allowed fighter for the long range bombers that help to destory Germany's warmaking capacity. Due to a shortage of manpower, women enter the military and the industrial labor force and collect wages that allow them to live on their own terms. New P-51 Mustangs are given their maiden flights by women trained as pilots. Rosie the riveter remains a feminist icon to this day.

World War II showed women that it was possible to be something other than a man's kitchen slave and sperm incubator. Their grandchildren would reap the rewards and the disadvantages.

The end of the Second World War leaves America the only big economic player on the field for decades. England's industrial capacity is damaged and has to return itself to a peacetime, market economy—its government creates a national health service. Germany and Japan have to reinvent themselves industrially, but, unlike the United States, they are rebuilding from scratch, they can incorporate modernized, more efficient strategies without additional investment in plant because they have no plant: the American steel industry that made Carnegie more than a strange Scottish name is eventually going to learn all about this. The Soviet Union is far behind us economically. Practically everyone who wants a job can find one. Progressive taxation and inheritance taxes lessen the pace at which wealth congeals in the hands of those who already have it; the pace at which the wealthy become wealthier, preventing the creation of dynasties and spurring the ambitious to create and invent and buy and sell. If you are an American your prosperity or your potential for it, is the envy of the world provided you are neither black nor a woman.

Everyone wants America to put its lawmaking where its mouth is. If All men are created equal then what about black men? If "all men," means "all humans" then what about women?

The Sixties saw a time when everyone wanted to have all the power and prestige of someone who was male and white, even if he or she was neither and it seemed like America was a land of miracles—the country that would pull it off.

Technology changes morality. The pill allows women to be as raunchy as men are without consequences. Women can now study if they have the resources and enter the workplace.

Capitalism loves this because women increase competition among workers for jobs which depresses all wages by increasing supply—a piece of economics you can learn by hanging out on streetcorners.

Better still, with men who understand and value exploitation in charge, a wage-gap between men and women means that a woman can be made to do what had been a man's job, which keeps men in their place, and she can be made to do it for less, bettering the company's bottom-line.

Win-Win. Score one for the ruling classes. "Goooooal!!"

Remember, according to Americna mythology, we women are secretly in charge. We emasculate from the shadows...

The animal of American history assassinates or murders agents of potential change in the Sixties. John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, three southern civil rights workers. Those are just the big ones.

If Betty Friedan had started ten years earlier. If men took women seriously and thought we were a threat...

And the eye of television calmly watched everything and held your hand and told you what was socially alright, and what you needed to buy to feel human and what you had to talk about if you ever want to get laid in a world that wantsed you to. It said everything and anything. It said that the world was six-thousand years old when Lord Kelvin's life's work and every telescope say its not.

It told you nothing was wrong when the actor who played a President said, "we're going to let the rich keep more of their money and that is going to be good for everybody."

That's been a thirty-year experiment with not an iota of success. No sign that isn't negative—one that has failed over, and that is never ended.

"We must make the Bush tax-cuts permanent."

We're bad at arithmetic, even with a calculator: Your extra cheeseburger a day versus my extra Congressman who will vote to keep the cost of your 's health-care as high as possible.

Television said that things were just fine while American business interests moved whole factories worth of machinery to China where workers were every month, a worker made what a Manhattan resident paid for two meals from a bad diner. Industrial buildings stripped to the walls of their machinery—taking their productive capacity and their jobs elsewhere. It's what the Russians did to the Germans at the end of World War II. De-industrialization, free-trade agreements, It's what America's owning classes have been doing to America since Reagan was "President."

It was there to make you believe anything, to feed you some version of acceptable reality.

On "E.R." a black, American male surgeon dates a white English G.P. They go off an a Shaft-themed date together. She laughs. She is happy, but oh, what is waiting in the watcher's wings? The audience can see them alone together as his dark hands wander her white body. They can hear her gasp in the moment when he enters her.

The next thing you know, she's married to a very nice, very bald, and very white Doctor and having his socially acceptable baby.

Television will tell you that feminists have the power to shake their breasts at Rush Limbaugh and make him cry.

It will say that you should keep listening to the holy man who can't keep his fingers off the cheap streetwalkers—twice.

It will tell you everything but that you should run out and think.

Televisions are wonderful: One day, they will park you in front of one while you're waiting for a diaper-change in an underfunded nursing home.

Schrille Schlampen aller Länder, vereinigt euch! Ihr habt nichts zu verlieren als euren Kontakt mit Versagern!



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