mick silver
8th December 2014, 03:18 PM
I’m Reconsidering My Use of Force Arguments by Chris (http://christophercantwell.com/author/Chris/) • June 1, 2014 • 63 Comments (http://christophercantwell.com/2014/06/01/im-reconsidering-use-force-arguments/#disqus_thread)What follows is either a pause on a long journey, or a massive course correction. I am either momentarily confused by an emotional response to something, or I am experiencing an epiphany of sorts. I am not entirely sure which it is at this point but I thought this was sort of important to put out there, because the pause I have leaves me with great concern that I have done a terrible thing.
Where I fear I am in error, is in a number of articles and videos I’ve made pertaining to the use of force. For new readers unfamiliar, I’ll recap.
From a moral/philosophical perspective, I’m an adherent to a concept known as the non-aggression principle. Which is to say that the initiation of force is impermissible, and may be responded to with force. All else is permissible, and may not have force levied against it. I have discussed this in some detail here (http://www.christophercantwell.com/2014/04/18/libertarianism-brief-introduction/), and here (http://www.christophercantwell.com/2013/09/07/the-proportionality-of-force-doctrine-is-madness/). My views pertaining to this have not changed. When someone initiates force against a person acting peaceably, they prove themselves a threat to the society and incompetent. They cede control over the situation to the person they have aggressed against, and to say anything less would be to empower aggressors at the expense of victims.
http://www.christophercantwell.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/stormwhitehouse-300x156.png (http://www.christophercantwell.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/stormwhitehouse.png)Violently Overthrow the Government
How to put that into practice is another question, which leads us to the tactical end of it. Ultimately, other than as it pertains to the State, this is an individual decision for individuals to make in situations based on their own perceptions and values. Since I see the State as a fraudulent authority however, I’ve become very concerned with its abolition. The only way I’ve seen that to be possible is for men to kill each other. For men who are aggressed against by police officers and other government agents (who are usually also male), to use violence to defend themselves, until those government agents simply stopped showing up for work out of fear for their lives. I estimated that as little as 5% of the population or less in a given geographic area would have to get this through their heads for a free society to be achieved. I have written about this in more detail here (http://www.christophercantwell.com/2014/03/15/violently-overthrow-the-government/).
Now, this obviously results in a bunch of dead men. I didn’t like that when I wrote it the first time, I didn’t like it when I woke up yesterday morning. It just seemed necessary, and frankly it still does, but I woke up this morning realizing that I had based this all on a very despicable perception that I have held my entire life which only recently got called into question.
What changed?
I imagined reversing the gender roles.
To imagine women engaging in this kind of violence made me absolutely sick. I was really relatively comfortable with the idea of the best young men laying down their lives for the hope of a brighter future. The idea of pretty young women doing that drove me absolutely out of my mind, leading me to say to myself “You have to find a better way”.
I’ve recently been combating feminists, and in the course of that became a contributor to A Voice for Men (http://www.avoiceformen.com/author/christophercantwell/). In an effort to sharpen my arguments I began doing some research into arguments from other men’s rights advocates. I realized at some point that Stefan Molyneux (who I have long admired in for his articulation of anti-State arguments) was also involved in that movement, and stumbled upon a playlist of his on YouTube. I posted this playlist here yesterday titled “Necessary Training for Male Libertarians (http://www.christophercantwell.com/2014/05/31/necessary-training-male-libertarians/)“. Watching that playlist occupied almost all of my time for the last three days and led me to question a number of things.
I really can’t stress strongly enough how important it is for men, everyone really, but men especially, to watch that entire playlist from beginning to end. I read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises. I read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read The Creature from Jekyll Island by G Edward Griffin. This playlist is more important, more entertaining, and it will cost you less time.
In it, Stefan and others talk about male disposability (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6r8HzhaAaM). We’ve had this view in society, and I personally haven’t completely departed from it yet, that men are disposable. We work the most dangerous jobs, we fight the wars, we stand between women and threats to their safety even if it puts our own lives in danger. “Women and Children first!” you hear in films as the life boats are filled, and men go down with the ship.
From a biological evolutionary perspective, we can see how this made sense. Men cannot give birth, and we cannot breast feed. Human children take longer to mature, and require more resources, than any creature I can readily think of on this planet. If men want to pass on our DNA, we have to guard our women from danger, we have to provide her with resources. This is why men have become the physically stronger of the species, why we have taken on the roles of protector and provider, and that disparity is marked in ours more than any other. A buck has antlers, and a doe does not, but a doe can kick the crap out of you as easily as a buck can for the most part, and neither has any trouble finding its own food. Outside of some very radical and intentional behavior and hormone changes, this is hardly true of disparity human strength or capacity for violence.
The reproductive differences obviously remain the same, but modern technology provides us with weapons that almost level the playing field as it pertains to violence. Obviously more brutal large scale conflicts men are still better suited to, but as it pertains to any average type of victimization in common criminality, a woman is as capable of pointing a handgun and pulling a trigger as anyone else who is properly trained. Additionally, it is not as if the choice of becoming quite strong and capable of doing all the things men do, does not exist for women. It might require more work, but it is a choice they can make.
So what we’re clinging to in the disposability of males, is this some instinct that has in many ways become outdated, some notions in our society that women are the fairer sex, and are not as responsible for the violence within it. Well, instincts can’t really be proven or disproven, but women are most certainly not the fairer sex, and are absolutely every bit as culpable for the violence in our society, if not more. What I also discovered by watching that playlist, is that women, when analyzed objectively, have all the capacity for evil that men do (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw_UlUGoUV4), if not more.
One thing that absolutely blew my mind was paternity fraud (http://www.wnd.com/2006/02/34861/#5Yz44scRShbDB1yh.99). Where a woman becomes pregnant by one man, and knowingly assigns responsibility to another for the purpose of obtaining child support. Most US States still require a man to pay child support once responsibility is assigned, even if it is proven that he is not the biological father, and in the UK a man cannot obtain a paternity test without the consent of the mother and the child. According to statistics (http://xceleratedscreening.com/2011/07/paternity-fraud/), about 1.6 million alleged fathers are paying for child support for their non-biological children. There is no way of knowing how many husbands are presently and unknowingly raising children their wife conceived in extra marital affairs. Out of as sample of 300,000 paternity tests, 30% came back false (http://xceleratedscreening.com/2011/07/paternity-fraud/). Half of all women would lie to their husbands or partners to keep their relationship going if they became pregnant by another man, according to a survey of 5,000 women in England (http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/women-lie-cheat-and-steal-1131837). A fifth of women with a long-term partner (19%) (http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/women-lie-cheat-and-steal-1131837) say they have cheated on him by having an affair, while 30% of all women have had an affair with a married man. Eight out of ten women (83%) (http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/women-lie-cheat-and-steal-1131837) admit to telling “big, life-changing lies”, with 13% saying they do so frequently.
Not long ago I quoted a study (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1992.tb01102.x/abstract) that said for every 100 men who murder their wives, 75 women murder their husbands. A pretty staggering number in and of itself. We tend to think men are doing all this violence against women, and there’s almost none in return. What scared the hell out of me was when I realized this didn’t take into account all the times that women get other men to kill their husbands, either by enticing them with sex, making false claims of abuse, or by paying them, often with the husband’s money. When you take that into account, the stats are impossible to confirm because governments record that either as a multi-offender crime, or as an incident of male on male violence. We can easily imagine though, that this would even out the numbers, or even lead us to believe that women kill their husbands more of then than men kill their wives.
I also recently quoted another study (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/sep/05/men-victims-domestic-violence) that suggested women commit upwards of 40% of domestic violence incidents. This also fails to take into account how unlikely men are to report an incident of domestic violence, or how unlikely police are to take men seriously when they do. It also fails to take into account how much violence is done to men by the government on behalf of women who often lie about situations inside the home, as well as the aforementioned enticing of other men to do violence against their husbands. When those things are taken into account, men are easily the greater victims of domestic violence than women. Additionally, most domestic violence is reciprocal (http://pb.rcpsych.org/content/35/1/33.1.long), but we all know who goes to jail when the cops show up.
Women vote in greater numbers than men (http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/fast_facts/voters/documents/genderdiff.pdf), so they are every bit as responsible for government violence as men are, if not more. They also tend to vote Democrat (http://www.gallup.com/poll/120839/women-likely-democrats-regardless-age.aspx), and despite all the lovey dovey rhetoric, Democrats have proven even more bloodthirsty than their Republican counterparts.
The most staggering part of this is violence against children. Mothers are roughly three times more likely to maltreat their children than fathers, according to a study by the US Department of Health and Human Services (http://archive.today/DOFB), and boys are more likely to be spanked than girls (http://www.livescience.com/1257-study-reveals-spanked.html). It’s hard to ignore evidence that people who are abused as children go on to abuse others in adulthood. Be they serial killers (http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/tick/abuse_3.html), mass murderers (http://nospank.net/pt2011.htm), or other violent crime (http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2013/07/spanking-and-crime-rates), correlations are found consistently in children who had a violent upbringing. Women also make up the vast majority (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28) of early education. So unless you think how you were raised has absolutely nothing to do with the cycle of violence in society, women have a massively disproportionate role in it.
With that, and a whole lot more (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw_UlUGoUV4&feature=kp) in mind, I think it’s really quite sick that I’ve bought into this idea that men are more disposable than women. Feminists are constantly accusing me of misogyny, when in fact I’ve been directly responsible for spreading one of the most vicious lies misandry has to offer. So in my own mind, I’ve got a few options here to reconsider. I’ve either got to accept that men are more disposable than women, despite women being disproportionately responsible for some of the most depraved violence and evil in human society, or I’ve got to accept the idea of women participating in the violence I advocate.
On the other hand, the violence of the State will continue while I reconsider this. Wars will continue, 2.3 million people continue to rot in American prisons, 12+ million people a year will be kidnapped by police, most without having harmed anyone, police will gun down over 400 people a year in “justifiable homicides” alone. Hundreds of people will mindlessly mill about under constant threat of violence while hardly ever even being aware of it. So this doesn’t mean violence isn’t or won’t ultimately be necessary, violence is obviously inevitable. Who takes part in that violence, who are the victors, who are the victims, and what its aggregate effect will be, are the only questions.
All of this does however need to be freshly reexamined, without the rose colored glasses of male disposability. Men need to stop thinking of themselves as “meat shields” for women. So if you’re a man who has considered adding yourself to the pile of bodies based on anything I’ve said, please hold off on that, look into the information provided here, and await further consideration.
Where I fear I am in error, is in a number of articles and videos I’ve made pertaining to the use of force. For new readers unfamiliar, I’ll recap.
From a moral/philosophical perspective, I’m an adherent to a concept known as the non-aggression principle. Which is to say that the initiation of force is impermissible, and may be responded to with force. All else is permissible, and may not have force levied against it. I have discussed this in some detail here (http://www.christophercantwell.com/2014/04/18/libertarianism-brief-introduction/), and here (http://www.christophercantwell.com/2013/09/07/the-proportionality-of-force-doctrine-is-madness/). My views pertaining to this have not changed. When someone initiates force against a person acting peaceably, they prove themselves a threat to the society and incompetent. They cede control over the situation to the person they have aggressed against, and to say anything less would be to empower aggressors at the expense of victims.
http://www.christophercantwell.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/stormwhitehouse-300x156.png (http://www.christophercantwell.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/stormwhitehouse.png)Violently Overthrow the Government
How to put that into practice is another question, which leads us to the tactical end of it. Ultimately, other than as it pertains to the State, this is an individual decision for individuals to make in situations based on their own perceptions and values. Since I see the State as a fraudulent authority however, I’ve become very concerned with its abolition. The only way I’ve seen that to be possible is for men to kill each other. For men who are aggressed against by police officers and other government agents (who are usually also male), to use violence to defend themselves, until those government agents simply stopped showing up for work out of fear for their lives. I estimated that as little as 5% of the population or less in a given geographic area would have to get this through their heads for a free society to be achieved. I have written about this in more detail here (http://www.christophercantwell.com/2014/03/15/violently-overthrow-the-government/).
Now, this obviously results in a bunch of dead men. I didn’t like that when I wrote it the first time, I didn’t like it when I woke up yesterday morning. It just seemed necessary, and frankly it still does, but I woke up this morning realizing that I had based this all on a very despicable perception that I have held my entire life which only recently got called into question.
What changed?
I imagined reversing the gender roles.
To imagine women engaging in this kind of violence made me absolutely sick. I was really relatively comfortable with the idea of the best young men laying down their lives for the hope of a brighter future. The idea of pretty young women doing that drove me absolutely out of my mind, leading me to say to myself “You have to find a better way”.
I’ve recently been combating feminists, and in the course of that became a contributor to A Voice for Men (http://www.avoiceformen.com/author/christophercantwell/). In an effort to sharpen my arguments I began doing some research into arguments from other men’s rights advocates. I realized at some point that Stefan Molyneux (who I have long admired in for his articulation of anti-State arguments) was also involved in that movement, and stumbled upon a playlist of his on YouTube. I posted this playlist here yesterday titled “Necessary Training for Male Libertarians (http://www.christophercantwell.com/2014/05/31/necessary-training-male-libertarians/)“. Watching that playlist occupied almost all of my time for the last three days and led me to question a number of things.
I really can’t stress strongly enough how important it is for men, everyone really, but men especially, to watch that entire playlist from beginning to end. I read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises. I read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read The Creature from Jekyll Island by G Edward Griffin. This playlist is more important, more entertaining, and it will cost you less time.
In it, Stefan and others talk about male disposability (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6r8HzhaAaM). We’ve had this view in society, and I personally haven’t completely departed from it yet, that men are disposable. We work the most dangerous jobs, we fight the wars, we stand between women and threats to their safety even if it puts our own lives in danger. “Women and Children first!” you hear in films as the life boats are filled, and men go down with the ship.
From a biological evolutionary perspective, we can see how this made sense. Men cannot give birth, and we cannot breast feed. Human children take longer to mature, and require more resources, than any creature I can readily think of on this planet. If men want to pass on our DNA, we have to guard our women from danger, we have to provide her with resources. This is why men have become the physically stronger of the species, why we have taken on the roles of protector and provider, and that disparity is marked in ours more than any other. A buck has antlers, and a doe does not, but a doe can kick the crap out of you as easily as a buck can for the most part, and neither has any trouble finding its own food. Outside of some very radical and intentional behavior and hormone changes, this is hardly true of disparity human strength or capacity for violence.
The reproductive differences obviously remain the same, but modern technology provides us with weapons that almost level the playing field as it pertains to violence. Obviously more brutal large scale conflicts men are still better suited to, but as it pertains to any average type of victimization in common criminality, a woman is as capable of pointing a handgun and pulling a trigger as anyone else who is properly trained. Additionally, it is not as if the choice of becoming quite strong and capable of doing all the things men do, does not exist for women. It might require more work, but it is a choice they can make.
So what we’re clinging to in the disposability of males, is this some instinct that has in many ways become outdated, some notions in our society that women are the fairer sex, and are not as responsible for the violence within it. Well, instincts can’t really be proven or disproven, but women are most certainly not the fairer sex, and are absolutely every bit as culpable for the violence in our society, if not more. What I also discovered by watching that playlist, is that women, when analyzed objectively, have all the capacity for evil that men do (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw_UlUGoUV4), if not more.
One thing that absolutely blew my mind was paternity fraud (http://www.wnd.com/2006/02/34861/#5Yz44scRShbDB1yh.99). Where a woman becomes pregnant by one man, and knowingly assigns responsibility to another for the purpose of obtaining child support. Most US States still require a man to pay child support once responsibility is assigned, even if it is proven that he is not the biological father, and in the UK a man cannot obtain a paternity test without the consent of the mother and the child. According to statistics (http://xceleratedscreening.com/2011/07/paternity-fraud/), about 1.6 million alleged fathers are paying for child support for their non-biological children. There is no way of knowing how many husbands are presently and unknowingly raising children their wife conceived in extra marital affairs. Out of as sample of 300,000 paternity tests, 30% came back false (http://xceleratedscreening.com/2011/07/paternity-fraud/). Half of all women would lie to their husbands or partners to keep their relationship going if they became pregnant by another man, according to a survey of 5,000 women in England (http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/women-lie-cheat-and-steal-1131837). A fifth of women with a long-term partner (19%) (http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/women-lie-cheat-and-steal-1131837) say they have cheated on him by having an affair, while 30% of all women have had an affair with a married man. Eight out of ten women (83%) (http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/women-lie-cheat-and-steal-1131837) admit to telling “big, life-changing lies”, with 13% saying they do so frequently.
Not long ago I quoted a study (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1992.tb01102.x/abstract) that said for every 100 men who murder their wives, 75 women murder their husbands. A pretty staggering number in and of itself. We tend to think men are doing all this violence against women, and there’s almost none in return. What scared the hell out of me was when I realized this didn’t take into account all the times that women get other men to kill their husbands, either by enticing them with sex, making false claims of abuse, or by paying them, often with the husband’s money. When you take that into account, the stats are impossible to confirm because governments record that either as a multi-offender crime, or as an incident of male on male violence. We can easily imagine though, that this would even out the numbers, or even lead us to believe that women kill their husbands more of then than men kill their wives.
I also recently quoted another study (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/sep/05/men-victims-domestic-violence) that suggested women commit upwards of 40% of domestic violence incidents. This also fails to take into account how unlikely men are to report an incident of domestic violence, or how unlikely police are to take men seriously when they do. It also fails to take into account how much violence is done to men by the government on behalf of women who often lie about situations inside the home, as well as the aforementioned enticing of other men to do violence against their husbands. When those things are taken into account, men are easily the greater victims of domestic violence than women. Additionally, most domestic violence is reciprocal (http://pb.rcpsych.org/content/35/1/33.1.long), but we all know who goes to jail when the cops show up.
Women vote in greater numbers than men (http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/fast_facts/voters/documents/genderdiff.pdf), so they are every bit as responsible for government violence as men are, if not more. They also tend to vote Democrat (http://www.gallup.com/poll/120839/women-likely-democrats-regardless-age.aspx), and despite all the lovey dovey rhetoric, Democrats have proven even more bloodthirsty than their Republican counterparts.
The most staggering part of this is violence against children. Mothers are roughly three times more likely to maltreat their children than fathers, according to a study by the US Department of Health and Human Services (http://archive.today/DOFB), and boys are more likely to be spanked than girls (http://www.livescience.com/1257-study-reveals-spanked.html). It’s hard to ignore evidence that people who are abused as children go on to abuse others in adulthood. Be they serial killers (http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/tick/abuse_3.html), mass murderers (http://nospank.net/pt2011.htm), or other violent crime (http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2013/07/spanking-and-crime-rates), correlations are found consistently in children who had a violent upbringing. Women also make up the vast majority (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28) of early education. So unless you think how you were raised has absolutely nothing to do with the cycle of violence in society, women have a massively disproportionate role in it.
With that, and a whole lot more (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw_UlUGoUV4&feature=kp) in mind, I think it’s really quite sick that I’ve bought into this idea that men are more disposable than women. Feminists are constantly accusing me of misogyny, when in fact I’ve been directly responsible for spreading one of the most vicious lies misandry has to offer. So in my own mind, I’ve got a few options here to reconsider. I’ve either got to accept that men are more disposable than women, despite women being disproportionately responsible for some of the most depraved violence and evil in human society, or I’ve got to accept the idea of women participating in the violence I advocate.
On the other hand, the violence of the State will continue while I reconsider this. Wars will continue, 2.3 million people continue to rot in American prisons, 12+ million people a year will be kidnapped by police, most without having harmed anyone, police will gun down over 400 people a year in “justifiable homicides” alone. Hundreds of people will mindlessly mill about under constant threat of violence while hardly ever even being aware of it. So this doesn’t mean violence isn’t or won’t ultimately be necessary, violence is obviously inevitable. Who takes part in that violence, who are the victors, who are the victims, and what its aggregate effect will be, are the only questions.
All of this does however need to be freshly reexamined, without the rose colored glasses of male disposability. Men need to stop thinking of themselves as “meat shields” for women. So if you’re a man who has considered adding yourself to the pile of bodies based on anything I’ve said, please hold off on that, look into the information provided here, and await further consideration.