feminist blogs

Here’s a great post from a bit more than a year ago at Anomalous Presumptions (2007-02-26), which I just got around to reading:

I was responding to this key point:

[P]eer production isn’t an assault on the principles of a free society, but an extension of those principles to aspects of human life that don’t directly involve money. ….

[A] lot of the intellectual tools that libertarians use to analyze markets apply equally well to other, non-monetary forms of decentralized coordination. It’s a shame that some libertarians see open source software, Wikipedia, and other peer-produced wealth as a threat to the free market rather than a natural complement.

Since peer production is an entirely voluntary activity it seems strange to view it as a threat to the free market. (My interlocutors in the comments demonstrated that this view of peer production is alive and well, at least in some minds.) So how could this opinion arise? And does it indicate some deeper issue?

I think viewing peer production as a threat is a symptom of an underlying issue with huge long-term consequences: In peer production, the interests of capitalists and entrepreneurs are no longer aligned.

[…]

For example, Linus Torvalds is a great entrepreneur, and his management of the Linux community has been a key factor in the success of Linux. Success to an entrepreneur is coordinating social activity to create a new, self-sustaining social process. Entrepreneurship is essential to peer production, and successful entrepreneurs become rock stars in the peer production world.

A capitalist, by contrast, wants to get a return on something they own, such as money, a domain name, a patent, or a catalog of copyrighted works. A pure capitalist wants to maximize their return while minimizing the complexity of their actual business; in a pure capitalist scenario, coordination, production and thus entrepreneurship is overhead. Ideally, as a pure capitalist you just get income on an asset without having to manage a business.

The problem for capitalists in peer production is that typically there is no way to get a return on ownership. Linus Torvalds doesn’t own the Linux source code, Jimmy Wales doesn’t own the text of Wikipedia, etc. These are not just an incidental facts, they are at the core of the social phenomenon of peer production. A capitalist may benefit indirectly, for a while, from peer production, but the whole trend of the process is against returns on ownership per se.

Profit

Historically, entrepreneurship is associated with creating a profitable enterprise. In peer production, the idea of profit also splits into two concepts that are fairly independent, and are sometimes opposed to each other.

The classical idea of profit is monetary and is closely associated with the rate of (monetary) return on assets. This is obviously very much aligned with capitalist incentives. Entrepreneurs operating within this scenario create something valuable (typically a new business), own at least a large share of it, and profit from their return on the business as an asset.

The peer production equivalent of profit is creating a self-sustaining social entity that delivers value to participants. Typically the means are the same as those used by any classical entrepreneur: creating a product, publicizing the product, recruiting contributors, acquiring resources, generating support from larger organizations (legal, political, and sometimes financial), etc.

Before widespread peer production, the entrepreneur’s and capitalist’s definitions of success were typically congruent, because growing a business required capital, and gaining access to capital required providing a competitive return. So classical profit was usually required to build a self-sustaining business entity.

The change that enables widespread peer production is that today, an entity can become self-sustaining, and even grow explosively, with very small amounts of capital. As a result it doesn’t need to trade ownership for capital, and so it doesn’t need to provide any return on investment.

As others have noted, peer production is not new. The people who created educational institutions, social movements, scientific societies, etc. in the past were often entrepreneurs in the sense that I’m using here, and in their case as well, the definition of success was to create a self-sustaining entity, even though it often had no owners, and usually produced no profit in the classical sense.

—Jed Harris, Anomalous Presumptions (2007-02-26): Capitalists vs. Entrepreneurs

The only thing that I would want to add here is that it’s not just a matter of projects being able to expand or sustain themselves with little capital (although that is a factor). It’s also a matter of the way in which both emerging distributed technologies in general, and peer production projects in particular, facilitate the aggregation of dispersed capital — without it having to pass through a single capitalist chokepoint, like a commercial bank or a venture capital fund. Because of the way that peer production projects distribute and amortize their costs of operation, entrepreneurs can afford to bypass existing financial operators and go directly to people with $20 or $50 to give away and take the money in in small donations, because they no longer need to get multimillion dollar cash infusions all at once just to keep themselves running: the peer production model allows greater flexibility by dispersing fixed costs among many peers (and allowing new entrepreneurs to easily step in and take over the project, if one has to bow out due to the pressures imposed by fixed costs), rather than by concentrating them into the bottom line of a single, precarious legal entity. Meanwhile, because of the way that peer production projects distribute their labor, peer-production entrepreneurs can also take advantage of spare cycles on existing, widely-distributed capital goods — tools like computers, facilities like offices and houses, software, etc. which contributors own, which they still would have owned personally or professionally whether or not they were contributing to the peer production project, and which can be put to use as a direct contribution of a small amount of fractional shares of capital goods directly to the peer production project. So it’s not just a matter of cutting total aggregate costs for capital goods (although that’s an important element); it’s also, importantly, a matter of new models of aggregating the capital goods to meet whatever costs you may have, so that small bits of available capital can be rounded up without the intervention of money-men and other intermediaries.

The article also has an excellent coda on the way that Intellectual Protectionism threatens to give a government-backed prop to lingering capitalistic modes of production, by hobbling the emergence of entrepreneurial peer production based competition:

The conflicting incentives of entrepreneurs and capitalists come into sharp focus around questions of intellectual property. One commenter complained about open source advocates’ attacks on software patents, … the DMCA and … IP firms. These are all great examples of the divergence between ownership and entrepreneurship.

The DMCA was drafted and lobbied into existence by companies who wanted the government to help them extract money from consumers, with essentially no innovation on their part, and probably negative net social value. In almost every case, the DMCA advocates are not the people who created the copyrighted works that generate the revenue; instead they own the distribution systems that got those works to consumers, and they want to control any future distribution networks.

The DMCA hurts people who want to create new, more efficient modes of distribution, new artistic genres, new delivery devices, etc. In general it hurts entrepreneurs. However it helps some copyright owners get a return on their assets.

The consequences of patents and other IP protection are more mixed, but in many cases they inhibit innovation and entrepreneurship. Certainly patent trolls are an extremely clear example of the conflict — they buy patents not to produce anything, but to sue others who do produce something. Submarine patents (like the claimed patents on MP3 that just surfaced) are another example—a patent owner waits until a technology has been widely adopted (due to the work of others) and then asserts the right to skim revenue from ongoing use.

[…]

All of these issues, and other similar ones, make it harder for small companies, individuals and peer production projects to contribute innovation and entrepreneurship. Large companies with lawyers, lobbyists, and defensive patent portfolios can fight their way through the thickets of intellectual property. Small entrepreneurs are limited to clearings where they can hope to avoid IP problems.

Conclusion

Historically many benefits of entrepreneurship have been used to justify capitalism. However, we are beginning to see that in some cases we can have the benefits of a free market and entrepreneurship, while avoiding the social costs imposed by ensuring returns to property owners. The current battles over intellectual property rights are just the beginning of a much larger conflict about how to handle a broad shift from centralized, high capital production to decentralized, low capital production.

—Jed Harris, Anomalous Presumptions (2007-02-26): Capitalists vs. Entrepreneurs

Here’s an interesting passage I noticed in an article in the New York Times Magazine, which was mostly about companies trying to sell fancy new mattresses.

The story of our ruined sleep, in virtually every telling I’ve heard, begins with Thomas Edison: electric light destroyed the sanctity of night. Given more to do and more opportunity to do it, we gave sleep shorter and shorter shrift. But the sleep that we’re now trying to reclaim may never have been ours to begin with. It’s a myth, A. Roger Ekirch, a professor of history at Virginia Tech, told me. And it’s a myth that even some sleep experts today have bought into.

… More surprising still, Ekirch reports that for many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night — divided into a first sleep and second sleep — also included a curious intermission. There was an extraordinary level of activity, Ekirch told me. People got up and tended to their animals or did housekeeping. Others had sex or just lay in bed thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with bedfellows. Benjamin Franklin took cold-air baths, reading naked in a chair.

Our conception of sleep as an unbroken block is so innate that it can seem inconceivable that people only two centuries ago should have experienced it so differently. Yet in an experiment at the National Institutes of Health a decade ago, men kept on a schedule of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness — mimicking the duration of day and night during winter — fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one to three hours of somnolence — just calmly lying there — in between. Some sleep disorders, namely waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep again, may simply be this traditional pattern, this normal pattern, reasserting itself, Ekirch told me. It’s the seamless sleep that we aspire to that’s the anomaly, the creation of the modern world.

… Our peculiar preference for one well-organized hunk of sleep likely evolved as a corollary to our expectation of uninterrupted wakefulness during the day — as our lives came to be governed by a single, stringent clock. Eluned Summers-Bremner, author of the forthcoming Insomnia: A Cultural History, explains that in the 18th century, we start overvaluing our waking time, and come to see our sleeping time only as a way to support our waking time. Consequently, we begin trying to streamline sleep, to get it done more economically: We should lie down and go out right away so we can get up and get to the day right away. She describes insomniacs as having a ruthless ambition to do just this, wanting to administer sleep as an efficiency expert normalizes the action in a factory. Certainly all of us, after a protracted failure to fall asleep for whatever reason, have turned solemnly to our alarm clocks and performed that desperate arithmetic: If I fall asleep right now, I can still get four hours.

Nevertheless, while it may be at odds with our history and even our biology, lie-down-and-die is the only practical model for our lifestyle. Unless we overhaul society to tolerate all schedules and degrees of sleepiness and attentiveness, we are stuck with that ideal.

—Jon Mooallem, New York Times Magazine (2007-11-18): The Sleep-Industrial Complex

Besides grousing about one of my linguistic pet peeves — the sloppy misuse of the idiom ____________-industrial complex, the only other thing that I’d like to add is that filing the institutions that currently structure most Americans’ sleep patterns under the vague label of our lifestyle tends to obscure the issue. Depending on your age, the two main institutions that regiment your sleeping schedule are either (1) school, or (2) your job. The first has little to do with lifestyle choices; it’s something that’s forced on children by both their parents and by the government for a good 10-12 years of their lives. After a decade or more of forced training, the job you take is nevertheless a matter of adult choices. But the economic and political environment that structures and constrains those choices — and tends to favor centralized, regimented, official forms of employment not only through cultural prejudice but also through government-enforced subsidy and monopoly — deserves much more critical scrutiny than the term lifestyle conveys. In both cases, the daily schedules that we keep are no better described as an adopted style than is a straightjacket.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it? - E. Roosevelt

SiCKO Part 1 of 2
SiCKO Part 2 of 2

(thanks boo!)

I just made the mistake of walking down O'Farrell on my way home from work and was confronted by nine million morons lined up around the block to be the nine millionth moron with a $500 iPhone.

You know, if even HALF of Americans gave even HALF a shit as much about ending the war or violence against women or poverty or governmental corruption or what have you as they do about Paris fucking Hilton and Lindsay fucking Lohan and owning the latest fucking gadget I might have a glimmer of hope for humanity. As it stands, I do not.

Enjoy being good little consumer robots, assholes, but feel free to get the fuck out of my way and stop blocking the goddamn sidewalk!

Happy Friday, y'all! Bzzt.

my ass.

SFPD veteran charged in molest case

Sgt. Donald Forte, 58, was charged by Alameda County prosecutors with committing a lewd and lascivious act with a child of 14 or 15 years of age by someone at least 10 years older. He was released from Santa Rita Jail in Dublin on Friday after posting bail.

The girl was a 14-year-old prostitute whom Forte picked up on the 1700 block of International Boulevard in East Oakland on Thursday night, police said. The sergeant alleged agreed to pay her $50 and took her to Calcot Place, a dead-end street near the 23rd Avenue on-ramp to Interstate 880, police said.

I wonder how "empowered" and "independent" and "free" she was to "choose" the glorious life of prostitution, to be raped and molested by those who are paid to protect her.

Totally vomit inducing, especially after reading all the pro-john bullshit over on that feministe thread.

Everyone goes on and on and on about how important it is to listen to sexworkers when it comes to their health and safety, but apparently that only extends to the sexworkers who say what the pro-pornstitution crowd want to hear. When radfems want to discuss the health and safety of the vast majority of sexworkers and what they actually say, the ones who want out immediately, we're accused of disrespecting and derailing.

Well excuse the fuck out of me, but I totally don't respect a bunch of johns defending their right to a ceaseless supply of pussy and I'd like to see every last one of them behind bars.

Remember when Denice Denton, the UCSC chancellor, committed suicide? Well SF magazine did an in depth story recently that gave a lot of information the Chronicle chose to ignore. What led to the chancellor's suicide might not in fact have been entirely due to "a guilty conscience" as some have speculated, but a psychotic break triggered by relentless attacks, lesbophobia, sexism, and isolation.

The scandal, the scapegoats, and the suicide

The paper’s coverage of what was now being widely referred to as the UC compensation scandal was in many ways an impressive display of watchdog journalism. The drama of the revelations triggered an almost Pavlovian cycle in state government and within UC, with each new finding generating a response—hearings, audits, policy reforms—followed by new stories. And the university never disputed the Chronicle’s assertion that it was not being above board in its compensation practices and was even circumventing its own policies. In February, at the first of two legislative hearings, Dynes personally apologized for UC’s failures. Later, he acknowledged its “culture of secrecy” and its history of “trying to get away with as much as possible and disclose as little as possible.”

In mid-January, however, without fanfare, the Chronicle published a story that appeared to backpedal on the financial aspect of the scandal. In a brief, cryptic piece, buried in the middle of the Bay Area section, Schevitz and Wallack reported that UC had by this time provided a full breakdown of the $871 million, and by its accounting, over half of the amount was clinical revenue paid to hospital administrators and health sciences faculty. Another $221 million was faculty pay for additional teaching and research and union pay for unusual shifts. Millions more was attributed to “compensation under special contracts” and speaking honorariums. All of these expenses, UC argued, while admittedly not included in the official wage and overtime budget—and therefore not transparent to the public—were legitimate and standard forms of salary.

UC also complained that the series left readers with an exaggerated impression of how much top-tier executives were getting. Its official report states: “While senior managers at the University have been the focus of the Chronicle’s stories, these senior managers received only $7 million, or less than 1 percent of the $871 million figure.” The $7 million figure did not appear in the Chronicle story, nor did the paper ever respond to UC’s charge that the focus on senior management had misled readers.

[...]

Reflecting on the whole experience, Greenwood finds one reality impossible to ignore: “It’s that three white men are left standing.” (She’s referring to Dynes, Darling, and Rory Hume, who replaced her as provost.) Janie Fouke, provost of the University of Florida and former dean of the college of engineering at Michigan State, goes one step further. She recently got a call from a headhunter representing one of the UC campuses for a job she declined to pursue. “Are you kidding me?” she asks. “Until that system learns civil behavior, I wouldn’t recommend any woman go to UC.”

You should read the whole thing.

It's always about "free" with them. A brief look at what some of my latest visitors were searching for when they found me. These are all unique searches from different ISPs, mind you.

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It's disturbing on many levels, not the least of which is how specific they are in what they're looking for, but also in the deep hatred of women and girls they so clearly possess. (And how stupid they are. "Pitchers"? Evil fucking morons.)

Granted, there are numberous searches for "free xxx porn", but the overwhelming majority of searches I get come from these specifically disgusting, hate filled requests. It really makes me look at everyone differently now. I wonder if the UPS man or or the MUNI driver or the guy who owns the deli where I get my salad every day could be one of these perverts. It's so fucking depressing.

Why come up with original content when Sam is such a genius and I can just copy and paste hers?(Her comments in bold.)

Decriminalizing Prostitution Can Stop Illegal Brothels, Trafficking of Women and Increase Public Health and Safety.

1.) If prostitution were decriminalized there would be no illegal black market for sex slaves. If we remove the profit incentive, we remove the motivation of the traffickers.

Decriminalization doesn't remove the profit motive from forcing women into prostitution because a poke at a woman's pussy, anus and/or mouth is still worth several hundreds dollars a trick and that's very incentive-full profit. Legal maids and fruit-pickers haven't reduced trafficking for domestic and farm labor.

2.) If prostitution were decriminalized the existing zoning laws would prevent brothels from opening in residential neighborhoods. Laws that apply to legitimate businesses would also apply to brothels.

Pimps who don't give a fuck about rape, murder, kidnapping and zoning laws now won't suddenly give a fuck about zoning laws after decriminalization.

3.) If prostitution were decriminalized licensed brothel owners would not jeopardize their business by hiring illegal, underage trafficked women.

You mean like this New Zealand brothel owner who sold raping privileges to 24 men who wanted to rape a 14-year old girl in the care of Child, Youth and Family Services?

4.) If prostitution were decriminalized it would allow law enforcement the ability to concentrate on determining and distinguishing between child prostitution and consensual adult prostitution.

The simple fact of age already distinguishes children from adults.

5.) If prostitution were decriminalized it will help eliminate pimps by providing prostitutes with occupational choices.

The occupational choice to be a prostitute is almost always made by the pimp, not the prostitute. She makes it sound as if prostitutes choose pimps instead of pimps choosing prostitutes.

6.) If prostitution were decriminalized it would help prevent violent offenders from remaining on the streets. With equal protections under the law prostitutes could report assaults perpetrated against them or others without fear of prosecution.

Cause that worked so well for the legal stripper in the Duke case and strippers everywhere.

7.) If prostitution were decriminalized it would promote the mental health of prostitutes. Many women involved in sex work feel ashamed because they are criminals.

And here I thought it was a neverending line of men dumping their semen into prostituted women like toilets before beating/burning/choking/slashing/kicking the living shit out of them that caused their PTSD, but no, it's just the same stigma of criminalization that makes marijuana dealers commit suicide regularly and not the gobs of violence tricks and pimps heap on prostituted women making them suicidal in skewed numbers.

8.) If prostitution were decriminalized it would improve health education, STD and AIDS prevention outreach. Education will allow people to make safer choices about sexual health. Police using condoms as evidence of a crime does not promote safe sex.

These things not only can be greatly improved without allowing men unlimited sexual access to women, but since the global health community has pegged "male sexual predation" as the core problem of AIDS then honest sex ed combined with reducing male sexual predation in all its forms, including prostitution, would go much further in reducing not only AIDS but the rape, incest, and marital infidelity that men's belief in their entitlement to sex breeds.

9.) Laws against prostitution have no effect on demand, but have a profound effect on the safety of sex workers and society as a whole.

If British men can learn to double their demand for prostitutes in ten years (1995-2005) then it follows that British men can also learn to reduce their use of prostitutes in ten years. If men's demand can go up then men's demand can go down, and there's plenty of research refuting the myth of men's immovable tricking behaviors. http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0000060

10.) A criminal record impedes mobility from the sex industry to other occupations. If prostitution were decriminalized sex workers would be able to move from one occupation to another without discrimination.

Ah, the beauty of the Swedish model shines its Promethean light again.

of Sam's brilliant writing: (via Witchy)

As the woman who put the berg in Genderberg, it’s time I said a few words publicly about the recent fracas.

Everyone gets harassed online, which doesn’t make it right, just common. It’s in vogue this week to kvetch about the gobs of sexist harassment encountered online and pretty much anything I could say on that subject has already been said.

However, vitriol towards anti-pornography and anti-prostitution feminists has been screeching at a fever pitch since the 70s when the first serious challenges to male sexual entitlement were made. There are death-threateningly good reasons MacKinnon and other anti-pornography feminists are protective about their personal information.

Genderberg is one teensy e-space where anti-pornstitution activists of all stripes, shapes and colors don’t have to face opposition to their viewpoints. It’s a place for prostituted women to find others steaming mad about the way they were abused and exploited, for activists to refuel during and after a tough debate, and for the very small but robust community of radical feminists to meet for tip swapping and talent sharing as we do the soul-rending work that is seeking to stop the rapes of the world’s most raped women.

To all who thought it was okay to repost a private opinion from a place you know strives for privacy because it deals with the deeply personal subject of sexual violence, I have only one question: How could you repost what you knew to be a violation of sexually-abused women’s safe space without even asking to know the name of the person who wrote it? Of course the snitch knew Pony wrote that RenEv was a paid tool of the porniarchy. Not a one of you harpies hovering over radfem blogs and licking your chops for something meaty to pounce on insisted your supposedly anonymous source (I don’t believe none of you knows who did it) reveal the author of the post.

With glee you told people I wrote those words and even since Pony claimed them I have seen others refer to it as “What Genderberg is about” though Pony was but one member; she left the forum. For that I will not forgive a one of you unethical bloggers who reposted what was written in confidence at a private place that I’m responsible for making as safe for prostitution survivors as possible. Organizing sexually traumatized people is like herding cats that have been put in sacks and beaten with sticks and I don’t care what any of you think of Pony, I value the way she wears her heart on her sleeve and will miss her contributions.

What’s that you say? You didn’t mean to violate the feeling of trust I and the other 100+ members of Genderberg worked hard to build at our forum, didn’t mean pull the rug out from under women who have had a lifetime of rugs being pulled out from under them? Like hell you didn’t. Everyday I can hear you smacking your lips in anticipation of a radfem slip up you can make an exaggerated stink about. The gotcha joy you felt before running off half-cocked to say/insinuate I wrote those words was what the snitch was counting on. You know as well as I do that if Pony’s name was on it from the beginning it would’ve been easily dismissed. Smearing the whole of Genderberg and all its antiporn members was the point of the no-name leak as that goofy new blog affirmed and your re-snitching of an anonymous post achieved.

Libel is publicly lying about someone, which Pony never did because her opinion was written privately. The person who stole from Genderberg did something illegal. I have little faith in the legal system to stand up for my rights since the she-pimps at $pread Magazine broke the law by stealing my writing, changing key points, and removing my name after I explicitly denied them permission to publish a letter not written to them. For all the hot air about defending women’s choices, pornstitution’s defenders seem to have a hard time respecting the choices women make when they feel they have a “right” to steal what isn’t theirs. The law and ethics are on our side.

The majority of Genderberg’s forums are readable by anyone. Contrary to some paranoiac ramblings, women in pornstitution are not the focus of the private forums nearly as much as members sharing actions, articles, and anti-demand strategies. We vary in opinions but one constant is we don’t like prostituting men and seek to hold them accountable for what they do. It’s easy to get caught up in political battles and personal fighting, and when diversions are intended to draw people away from prostituting men and towards the exceptionally small number of women who support them we can lose sight of who really provides the reasons feminists have to fight against sexual capitalism. I would rather debate tricking men than any woman who puts herself between me and sexual exploiters, but in case you haven’t noticed there are no spokesjohns among the almost unanimous liberal men who roundly show support in all lefty media for “a woman’s right” to suck their dicks for cash.

When you constantly attack radfems as individuals and maliciously penetrate our badly-needed privacy instead of addressing the astonishingly solid arguments against pornstitution and men’s right to sex on demand you show your pro-john, pro-capitalism position to be as weak as we say it is. If you want to poke holes in our arguments then take your best shots, but stop poking holes in our fragile community because you lack the evidence and ability to argue that sustaining men’s right to demand sex from women is a feminist act.

amen, sister.