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Notes -
Have we talked about the squirrel? Sigh. Let's talk about the squirrel:
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This story has been making the rounds on my social media feeds, with commentary, countercommentary, memes, and political implications galore. A few people have wondered why the story resonates, given that it's just a squirrel. For me, it's because of how neatly it ties into other election conversations.
A couple days ago, we were talking about an article on SlateStarCodex and I disputed Scott's framing where he felt the need to say that Democrats can be authoritarian too, even if it's not the normal definition. No, I say, Democrats want arbitrary and petty control over the smallest aspects of your life, things you can't even imagine that someone would care about. In this case, a man had a squirrel living inside his house rather than outside his house. Squirrels, you may be aware, are common animals. Rodents, in general, frequently cohabitate with humans both as pets and pests. For some, it seems only natural that the government has a compelling interest in making sure you have a Squirrel License with proper proof of squirrel maintenance. Failing to license your squirrel is proof positive of outright irresponsibility - what kind of miscreant doesn't even file their squirrel paperwork? For others, this is a great example of how under no circumstances will the government ever leave you alone, even if it's on something as small and irrelevant as whether you're sheltering squirrels under your floorboards. These petty, useless authoritarians are willing to show up without warning, sit you outside your house, and kill your pets because you didn't file for a squirrel license.
When I was young and naturally rebellious, I was a libertarian on strong pro-freedom grounds. As a young professional, I made my peace with the bureaucracy and thought this was an important part of being an adult. As I've aged, my libertarian streak has returned as I've realized just how much I despise our governments.
I'm going to add a second comment that's different and much more spicy.
For a while now, I've had this growing knot in my guts whenever these types of things happen and the bad guys end up being women. I hate the knot because my brain says it's stupid to think women are somehow to blame for the increased pressure to root out anyone who's doing something wrong somewhere. But the knot keeps growing. I can't resolve the conundrum.
With Peanut, a lady in Texas presumably sent the complaint to a lady in New York who sent the city services to take the squirrel out back and shoot it. Clearly that's just a coincidence...right? Or is there something darker in here. Like....is the Karen meme deserved and legitimate? Why did that lady at the Harris rally scream about Palestine at a baby? What's with all the, "I'm speaking," moments? Do the ladies have more power and authority than they can handle?
I don't consider myself a woman-hater. Hell, once upon a time I considered myself a feminist. Is it just my imagination or has something in our national psyche gone and unleashed the worst aspects of womanhood upon the land? The puritanical hunt for all that is good and fun in life can't just be a female thing. Can it? Or is it that safety-ism causes men to operate in a different, more narrow theater (ex. geopolitics) leaving women to police the margins (ex. protesting pussy-grabbin' presidents and yelling at babies)? I really don't want to become a Trad Chad who wants to put the ladies back into some parochial 17th century box. But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?
I'm assuming you're a man.
Female hypoagency is baked hard into your evolutionary biology. This is your instinct of "do whatever gets you laid" doing the talking, and in an era where men and women are, in fact, equal on most fields (that were for the past 100,000+ years dominated by men) it's simply maladaptive. And a woman who can't or won't perform the productive parts of that role is no woman, and it's a mistake of men to consider them as worthy of any special social status whatsoever. The biological principle of "women [and children] first" falls apart when those women in aggregate can refuse to bear children (or fail to put the interests of the nation's children above their own self-interests and aesthetic preferences).
In an age of automation (and slavery) driven equality, women and men ought to be equal parts human doing and human being- the fact that women are both and men are neither is a clear indication that our current methods and measures of "equality" need some re-evaluation.
If you assume that the average man and the average women are just as inherently anti-social/destructive as the other (a fundamental assumption for my worldview), you need to tailor-make the way you deal with those things to suit their biological specializations. If a woman's speech is just as destructive as a man's violence, the speech needs to be regulated in the same measure as the violence, or you're just giving too much power to women and their particular version of anti-sociality eventually starts to dominate.
The current folly of liberalism was believing that legal equality would lead to objective equality, where what actually happened is that by removing the societal safeguards from the gender that has had 100,000+ years to specialize in manipulating men to do things on their behalf, they [predictably] unleashed that machinery upon society. People get confused about "well, then why didn't gynosupremacy have massive negative effects earlier?" but fail to recognize that this is a 1920s problem that we got to punt on for 50 years because the post-WW2 economic boom gave so many advantages to male social power that women would actually end up on the losing end for a while, but naturally they wouldn't last.
We already recognize strict legal equality in the face of women as a stepping-stone to strict objective equality, and women in aggregate recognize the concept of intersectionality and equity. They're correct in that these are things that should happen; where they're incorrect is that if it was applied fairly it would be almost exclusively at the cost of their current social license to be destructive. And, as these same women are quick to point out, loss of that privilege will feel like oppression (but, of course, isn't).
The problem I have is that, if this is done improperly, you catch the "transgender" women and men in the blast radius (i.e. the women and men who don't need rules restraining a latent gynosupremacist/androsupremacist attitude they didn't have in the first place). They tend to be the most productive/least disruptive people society has and the cost of this change might not be worth what it costs them.
I have some ideas for the way this might work, but the trick is implementing them in a way contradictory to instinct, are not feasible while men are still in socioeconomic oversupply, and are just as easy to conveniently leave pointed at men (just like how we use paper-bag tests to determine which criminals to prosecute now). (Of course, these measures wouldn't be needed if women were all of a sudden in socioeconomic oversupply -> in less of a position to demand men conform to them; this is why, ironically, that gynosupremacists being able to exclusively choose to bear saintly girls and not toxic boys would eventually end up diluting their current power over time.)
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