Against everything bad, and for everything good
The
recent farce of the fledgling Feminist Initiative party in Sweden was
educational in many ways. For the anti-feminists, this comedy of errors
actually taught that the best way to combat feminism is to give it
actual power so that feminists would have to organize and have to make
their demands explicit, because this forces the various Sunday
feminists and their la-de-la ideas such as "feminist is someone who
believes that women should be allowed to work outside home" encounter
the ideological hard core of feminism and its realities. This
ideological hard core, not unlike the stalinist members of moderately
leftist unions, is a numerical minority and normally relatively
invisible, but it will not stay away from places or silent where there
is hope of the feminist movement acquiring power.
In the initial forming of the FI party, the participants could keep its goals vague enough so that every leftist could think that this is now the party that works for his or her particular goals. Of course, when the party eventually had to make a concrete platform and policies, it became obvious that the ideological hard core of the feminism, despite being only a minority of feminists, in practice ruled the party completely. It's not like their ideologically softer sisters could ever oppose them in any way or say no to even any of their wackiest demands, since doing so would reveal them to be agents of patriarchy.
Women who were insufficiently enthusiastic for the postgender ideology and wanted to improve the lives of normal men and women were one by one purged from the party, until only the people you would think were nasty caricatures invented by anti-feminists were left. (And "left" they indeed were: for some reason, there is a tight memetic connection between feminism and socialism, despite everything that we have seen learned during the last few decades. I guess that feminist socialism would be different, since its central planners would be wise women instead of patriarchal men, and this somehow negates the economic reasons why socialism necessarily becomes a disaster.)
One such member, Gudrun Ensslin (yeah, I know, but I think this is a more appropriate name for this radical chick) had the idea of charging a special "man tax" of all men for their collective responsibility of the bad things that men do. (Thinking in terms of the collectives instead of individuals, socialists are naturally big on the concepts of collective guilt and responsibility.) This man tax would be earmarked to fund domestic violence centers and other feminist efforts to cure the ills that the men do. This way, men would have to consciously confront the bad things that men do, and force themselves and their brothers to change their behaviour.
As ideas go, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater but rather think about this a minute. As Bob the Builder would say, "Can we fix it? Yes, we can!" Gudrun's idea is actually not 100% bad and it has something going for it, but it needs to be generalized a lot so that it considers more divisions than just men/women. Thinking about it further, I came up with the following taxation scheme intended to increase general fairness and giving people of various groups an incentive to change their behaviour and the behaviour of the fellow members of the various groups that they belong to. After all, many groups tend behave badly, and it would be good to somehow make them behave better. Financial incentives to the rescue!
In my scheme, instead of just using the men/women division, there could be something like 30 or 40 criteria, independent of each other. Therefore his tax return, each person would mark on each one of them which side he is currently on. First, of course, there would be man/woman. Then perhaps child/adult/senior, then employed/unemployed, leftist/centrist/conservative, and so on.
Now, for each possible class in these criteria, some government agency would have estimated the costs and benefits that the members of that class cause to society, on average. This would determine the tax rate for that criteria. The tax rate of each individual would be determined as some kind of population-weighted average of the tax rates that this calculation produces for him or her in each of these criteria. So even if you belong to "bad" groups in some criteria, you could compensate for this by belonging to "good" groups in some other criteria. Nobody would be punished for belonging to one single group, unlike in Gudrun's simplistic men/women classification. And if you belong to mostly "good" groups, then you would be rewarded for this, as you damn well should be. People who belong to "bad" groups would pay more taxes to compensate for the harm that these groups cause.
In this scheme, everyone would concretely feel in their wallets the effect of belonging to certain groups. Citizens would have a strong financial incentive to curb the bad behaviour of the other members of the bad groups that they belong to, and this way the invisible hand of the free market would create social harmony and well-being. As each group starts to have a serious internal discussion and self-police its behaviour, there wouldn't be as much need for outside policing which we know ultimately causes only resentment. Since there would be many different criteria and almost all people would be on the "good" side in some of them and on the "bad" side in some others (and as we all know, people are individuals so that you can't predict whether someone belongs to group A instead of group B, knowing that he belongs to group X instead of group Y), no single group of people would be pointed out as a general scapegoat.
I think this would be a good and fair idea. Some people might find this idea offensive, for various reasons. But of those people I ask: how exactly is this any more offensive that what Gudrun Ensslin proposed? (Rhetorical.)
In the initial forming of the FI party, the participants could keep its goals vague enough so that every leftist could think that this is now the party that works for his or her particular goals. Of course, when the party eventually had to make a concrete platform and policies, it became obvious that the ideological hard core of the feminism, despite being only a minority of feminists, in practice ruled the party completely. It's not like their ideologically softer sisters could ever oppose them in any way or say no to even any of their wackiest demands, since doing so would reveal them to be agents of patriarchy.
Women who were insufficiently enthusiastic for the postgender ideology and wanted to improve the lives of normal men and women were one by one purged from the party, until only the people you would think were nasty caricatures invented by anti-feminists were left. (And "left" they indeed were: for some reason, there is a tight memetic connection between feminism and socialism, despite everything that we have seen learned during the last few decades. I guess that feminist socialism would be different, since its central planners would be wise women instead of patriarchal men, and this somehow negates the economic reasons why socialism necessarily becomes a disaster.)
One such member, Gudrun Ensslin (yeah, I know, but I think this is a more appropriate name for this radical chick) had the idea of charging a special "man tax" of all men for their collective responsibility of the bad things that men do. (Thinking in terms of the collectives instead of individuals, socialists are naturally big on the concepts of collective guilt and responsibility.) This man tax would be earmarked to fund domestic violence centers and other feminist efforts to cure the ills that the men do. This way, men would have to consciously confront the bad things that men do, and force themselves and their brothers to change their behaviour.
As ideas go, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater but rather think about this a minute. As Bob the Builder would say, "Can we fix it? Yes, we can!" Gudrun's idea is actually not 100% bad and it has something going for it, but it needs to be generalized a lot so that it considers more divisions than just men/women. Thinking about it further, I came up with the following taxation scheme intended to increase general fairness and giving people of various groups an incentive to change their behaviour and the behaviour of the fellow members of the various groups that they belong to. After all, many groups tend behave badly, and it would be good to somehow make them behave better. Financial incentives to the rescue!
In my scheme, instead of just using the men/women division, there could be something like 30 or 40 criteria, independent of each other. Therefore his tax return, each person would mark on each one of them which side he is currently on. First, of course, there would be man/woman. Then perhaps child/adult/senior, then employed/unemployed, leftist/centrist/conservative, and so on.
Now, for each possible class in these criteria, some government agency would have estimated the costs and benefits that the members of that class cause to society, on average. This would determine the tax rate for that criteria. The tax rate of each individual would be determined as some kind of population-weighted average of the tax rates that this calculation produces for him or her in each of these criteria. So even if you belong to "bad" groups in some criteria, you could compensate for this by belonging to "good" groups in some other criteria. Nobody would be punished for belonging to one single group, unlike in Gudrun's simplistic men/women classification. And if you belong to mostly "good" groups, then you would be rewarded for this, as you damn well should be. People who belong to "bad" groups would pay more taxes to compensate for the harm that these groups cause.
In this scheme, everyone would concretely feel in their wallets the effect of belonging to certain groups. Citizens would have a strong financial incentive to curb the bad behaviour of the other members of the bad groups that they belong to, and this way the invisible hand of the free market would create social harmony and well-being. As each group starts to have a serious internal discussion and self-police its behaviour, there wouldn't be as much need for outside policing which we know ultimately causes only resentment. Since there would be many different criteria and almost all people would be on the "good" side in some of them and on the "bad" side in some others (and as we all know, people are individuals so that you can't predict whether someone belongs to group A instead of group B, knowing that he belongs to group X instead of group Y), no single group of people would be pointed out as a general scapegoat.
I think this would be a good and fair idea. Some people might find this idea offensive, for various reasons. But of those people I ask: how exactly is this any more offensive that what Gudrun Ensslin proposed? (Rhetorical.)
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