Resolution: Declaring War against Christmas

The cup that launched a thousand tweets. (Starbucks)

Ladies, gentlemen, genderfluids and otherkin:

Yesterday, November 7, 2015 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by Twitter and other social media forces of the Empire of Christmas.

The United States was at peace with that holiday and, at the solicitation of various merchants, was still in conversation with its Elvin representatives and Santa Claus looking toward the maintenance of peace and plentiful gifts from the Arctic. Indeed, for two weeks after Starbucks baristas had commenced distributing plain red cups, the propaganda instruments for the Empire of Christmas lay silent. And while this silence did not implicitly state that it seemed trivial for Starbucks to cut printing costs by removing a few snowflakes and the like from some beverage containers, it contained no threat or hint of Culture War or of social media attack.

It will be recorded that the distance from the nearest Starbucks to immediate internet mob-fueled outrage makes it obvious that Planck length is not, in fact, the shortest measurable distance. Even so, the culture warrior allies of the Empire of Christmas deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued cultural peace.

The attack yesterday on social media has caused severe damage to American humor and journalistic integrity. I regret to inform you that very many American likes and shares have been lost. In addition, American sighs have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between Facebook and Instagram.

For decades the Empire of Christmas has claimed, time and again, that the American people have been at war with it. For decades both the people and the political leadership of America have routinely and without objection denied this claim.

Today that ends.

On our careful, wary watch, Christmas has annexed November, October, the Sudentenland, and part of September. Now Christmas demands Labor Day and the Free City of Danzig. For too long we have appeased this irredentist regime. For too long we told ourselves there would be peace in our time. America shall have no more of it. The line must be drawn here. We shall hold this ground.

I move that this blog welcomes the formation of a movement representing the united and inflexible resolve of the nation to prosecute the war with Christmas to a victorious conclusion.

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long weeks of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by social, commercial and satirical, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalog of human attention deficit disorder driven clickbait. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of slight annoyance, victory, however short and ephemeral the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realized; no survival for the pre-Christmas season, no survival for all that the refusal to wear red and green at the same time has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages to not gorge incessantly in the commercial spirit of Christmas, that humankind will move forward towards its goal. But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men, women, deis, magis, sagits, kyuus, toks, feys, firs, virs, xirs, thons, zirs, and other assorted otherkin. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, "come then, let us go forward together with our united strength, at least until something else distracts us five minutes from now."

So come then, let us go forward together! Together our boots shall march on the North Pole by December 25th - if not this one then the next, assuming we don't forget about this before then! Together, with solidarity, we shall rise up and defeat the Jolly Green & Red Menace!

For liberty! For fraternity! For equality!

Viva la revolution!

In defense of small-l libertarianism

Two porcupines by Denali National Park and Reserve is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

My name is David Colborne, and I'm a small-l libertarian.

Having been active in libertarian circles for a number of years, I've had several people ask me why I'm not a full-throated anarchist. Don't I think the initiation of force is evil? Don't I think government is inherently coercive? Why settle for smaller government, for minimal government, when I should clearly be advocating for no government as a matter of philosophical principle? My short answer has usually been, "Perhaps, but I'm not really sure that would work". My longer answer has been to throw such people at Scott Siskind's Non-Libertarian FAQ and then try to go through it point-by-point, but even that felt like it was dancing around the core issue that really prevents me from embracing Full Metal Anarcho-Capitalism.

Then, while reading Meaningness' Systems of meaning all in flames, I came across this passage:

Any serious system has a network of justifications that answer all “why” questions—not perfectly, but well enough for most people most of the time. So it ought to work.

That's when it hit me - "Big L" Libertarianism, the kind of Libertarianism you see presented from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the kind you sometimes see from the Center for a Stateless Society, the kind you hear argued about at Libertarian conventions where people throw Murray Rothbard quotes at one another, is a system. Oh, sure, it's a heavily decentralized one (in theory), but it's still definitely a system.

Don't believe me? Ask it questions.

Okay, will there be law in an Anarcho-Capitalist society? Sure - there will be competing forms of law that individuals can choose from. Will there still be a police system? Absolutely - there will be several, in fact. But what about the roads? And so on. How are these questions answered? The same way any system answers questions - it makes certain base assumptions:

1. The initiation of physical force against persons or property, the threat of such, or fraud upon persons or property, is evil.
2. Since government requires physical force to enforce its edicts, it is therefore, by nature, evil.
3. Even if government didn't require physical force to enforce its edicts, it suffers from the knowledge problem - its information is incomplete - so it must, by its very nature, also be incompetent. 
4. Therefore, all optimal solutions to all political problems must therefore be small, decentralized, self-governing voluntary organizations, i.e. a stateless society, with all services provided via a free market of exchange.

Then, using these assumptions, it solves for X. Worried about militaries? If they exist, they should purely be defensive in nature (see point 1), they should be voluntarily staffed (1, 4), and they should be voluntarily paid for (1, 4). How will this pay for nuclear weapons? It won't - nuclear weapons are inherently immoral due to the collateral damage incurred by detonating one (1). Okay, what about a social safety net? Easy - use private charity (4). Anything else, such as income redistribution, would violate all four tenets above, and probably be more harmful to boot since it's impossible for the anyone implementing a forced income redistribution scheme to know how much income needs to be transferred to poor people to meet their particular needs.

See? It's a system. It has rules. You can ask those rules questions and they'll answer them. It ought to work.

And that's my problem.

Simply put, I don't believe in systems, even ones based on ideological assumptions I happen to share. Even a system like Anarcho-Capitalism, one that is ostensibly decentralized, still requires everyone to play by the rules. Everyone has to believe that, even if 99 out of 100 people in a neighborhood think it's a really good idea to put up sandbags next to their river right before it floods, they are not allowed to use physical force to secure "consent" from the lone straggler. Those 99 people further must believe that "trespassing" under those circumstances is "physical force". Philosophically, if it's really a problem, they can just install sandbags around the property line of the lone straggler and let what may come - it may not be quite as expedient, but it's morally right, and that's what matters, isn't it?

Perhaps, but good luck convincing enough people for the system to work.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a wonderful idea. I'm sure there are plenty of arguments about why this system will work, why this system is morally right and good, why this system will lead to more happiness, health, and so forth. I'm sure they're all fascinating, and logical, too. None of that matters. There will be failures - perhaps warlords, perhaps violent feuds between competing companies, perhaps something totally unanticipated. Either way, it won't matter - eventually, people will tire of the problems of this system and replace it with something else, one that fixes these problems (and inevitably introduces new ones). This is, in my opinion, the lifecycle of all systems.

So what's the alternative?

There isn't one. Well, more accurately, there are several of them - you could probably paint me comfortably in a corner somewhere between political existentialism and nihilism and probably get "close enough for government work". My personal belief is that the philosophies behind Anarcho-Capitalism are arguably the most morally sound, that they make an excellent framework to consider differing political choices against, but that, as the old saw goes, "no plan survives contact with the enemy". When in doubt, we should try policies and prescriptions that move us in a Libertarian, potentially Anarcho-Capitalist direction, but we should also be willing to stop if we're not getting the desired results and try policies and prescriptions from other frameworks if they get us closer to the desired results than we were getting using the Libertarian framework.

Take defense, for example.

Any defense plan that calls on me to accept that, while defending my apartment, I may lose the lives of at least one member of my family is not what I would call an ideal defense plan. Similarly, any defense plan that requires me and my neighbors to suffer through about a decade or so of brutal occupation before we finally wear down our oppressors is also not what I, or any of my fellow voting neighbors, would call an ideal defense plan. Instead, we're probably going to collectively decide, with near total unanimity, that we should do everything possible to ensure that no fighting happens in our backyards, even if that potentially means periodically invading or destroying the backyards of those sketchy people across the street. Because of this, neither I nor my neighbors will ever voluntarily choose a strictly Non-Aggression Principle compliant defense structure if an alternative is available - we're not going to wait for others to invade our neighborhoods, in other words, before defending them. Not if we have the option to make those others defend their neighborhoods first.

Perhaps if we're feeling really principled, we might justify this on the grounds that, well, the Non-Aggression Principle also prohibits threats of violence, and, well, those people over there look awfully threatening...

Ah, but wait! - you're thinking to yourself - what if the other neighborhood makes the same decision? Well, congratulations - you just demonstrated that, even in a presumably stateless society, war will still happen. In fact, since individual neighborhoods will have far less effective methods of deterrence than your average nuclear arsenal or aggressively funded military-industrial complex, there's a pretty good chance that wars will be more common in a stateless society than they are now, even if they might in aggregate be considerably less destructive and shorter than the "total wars" of the 20th century - what's stopping either neighborhood from misjudging their opposing neighborhood's strengths or intentions? Consequently, if we really want a more peaceful, liberty-friendly environment, one in which people are free to do what they will without worrying incessantly about whether their paranoid neighbors from across the street might feel threatened and react accordingly, we shouldn't necessarily rule out a society in which one particular organization has a monopoly on violence - preferably an organization that all of us, including the paranoid neighbors, have some limited control individually but near-total control in the aggregate. Granted, history has shown issues with this approach as well, but it still seems to beat seasonal raids whenever someone's low on salt or bacon. Besides, whenever there are organizations competing for the right to commit violence for citizens in an area, the first thing everyone in the area wants is for the competition to stop, preferably before the competing organizations kill and maim everyone. Then again, small, local civil wars usually don't last for long periods of time or involve genocide like larger state-run conflicts, except when they do, so there's that.

Perhaps I'm wrong about defense, though. Maybe Scott's wrong about fish, despite further evidence to the contrary. Maybe the 19th century was wrong about private police forces and private scrip. Maybe if we re-privatize everything and get government out of the way once more this time will be different. It's possible - it's not the 19th century anymore, after all, and a lot of our beliefs, customs and technology have evolved dramatically since then. That counts for quite a bit, actually - it's a little harder to keep a "company store" going when Amazon's always around the corner, and it's a little harder to try to drum up business for your private security agency when everyone can record everybody. Maybe this time will be different. But, if it's not, if our attempts at increasing liberty result in, paradoxically enough, less liberty for most people, we need to retain the philosophical flexibility required to change tack and not confuse the path with the destination.

That's why I'm a small-l libertarian. Maybe you are too?

Libertarians and Veterans Day

Sunflower Field in Kansas by Ted Duboise is licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

Libertarians have historically had a conflicted view, if not an openly contrarian one, regarding militaries in general and the US military in particular. There are a variety of reasons for this, some philosophical and some historical. From a historical standpoint, the Libertarian movement was birthed in the United States and is consequently focused on its own backyard - since Libertarians advocate non-interference in other countries' affairs, it makes sense for them to focus near-exclusively on the actions of their own country. Also, since the modern Libertarian movement was established in the late 1960's, its views on the foreign policy and the government of the United States are very consistent with many of the concerns people shared back then. Between the poor behavior of American troops in Vietnam, the discovery of Operation Northwoods and Project MKUltra, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and J. Edgar Hoover's notorious conflicts with the Civil Rights movement, it's not surprising in the least that leaders of the Libertarian movement of the time began to openly sympathize with the Soviet Union, a decision that many of us might understand under the circumstances but find regrettable today. Meanwhile, from a philosophical standpoint, Libertarians are naturally allergic to "aggression", which, in Libertarian circles, roughly translates into, "making someone do something they wouldn't otherwise do through threats or use of violence". Since a military's sole existence revolves around perfecting the use of violence to serve its ends, it's no surprise that Libertarians are more than a little nervous about the existence of a military, to say nothing of its use. Following the Civil War, for example, Lysander Spooner, widely considered the grandfather of the modern Libertarian movement, had this to say about Abraham Lincoln and the war effort:

Abraham Lincoln did not cause the death of so many people from a mere love of slaughter, but only to bring about a state of consent that could not otherwise be secured for the government he had undertaken to administer. When a government has once reduced its people to a state of consent – that is, of submission to its will – it can put them to a much better use than to kill them; for it can then plunder them, enslave them, and use them as tools for plundering and enslaving others. And these are the uses to which most governments, our own among the rest, do put their people, whenever they have once reduced them to a state of consent to its will. 

[...] 

The idea that, although government should rest on the consent of the governed, yet so much force may nevertheless be employed as may be necessary to produce that consent, embodies everything that was ever exhibited in the shape of usurpation and tyranny in any country on earth. It has cost this country a million of lives, and the loss of everything that resembles political liberty. It can have no place except as a part of a system of absolute military despotism. And it means nothing else either in this country, or in any other. There is no half-way house between a government depending wholly on voluntary support, and one depending wholly on military compulsion.

This tradition of suspicion, if not outright hatred and hostility, of the government and the power it wields through the military continues today. Joseph T. Salerno from the Ludwig von Mises Institute demonstrates the tone:

All governments past and present, regardless of their formal organization, involve the rule of the many by the few. In other words, all governments are fundamentally oligarchic. The reasons are twofold. First, governments are nonproductive organizations and can only subsist by extracting goods and services from the productive class in their territorial domain. Thus the ruling class must remain a minority of the population if they are to continually extract resources from their subjects or citizens. Genuine "majority rule" on a permanent basis is impossible because it would result in an economic collapse as the tribute or taxes expropriated by the more numerous rulers deprived the minority engaged in peaceful productive activities of the resources needed to sustain and reproduce itself. Majority rule would therefore eventually bring about a violent conflict between factions of the previous ruling class, which would terminate with one group establishing oligarchic rule and economically exploiting its former confederates. 

The second factor that renders oligarchic rule practically inevitable is related to the law of comparative advantage. The tendency toward division of labor and specialization based on the unequal endowment of skills pervades all sectors of human endeavor. Just as a small segment of the population is adept at playing professional football or dispensing financial advice, so a tiny fraction of the population tends to excel at wielding coercive power. As one writer summed up this Iron Law of Oligarchy: "[In] all human groups at all times there are the few who rule and the many who are ruled." 

 [...]

 Thus, a permanent state of war or preparedness for war is optimal from the point of view of the ruling elite, especially one that controls a large and powerful state. Take the current US government as an example. It rules over a relatively populous, wealthy, and progressive economy from which it can extract ever larger boodles of loot without destroying the productive class. Nevertheless, it is subject to the real and abiding fear that sooner or later productive Americans will come to recognize the continually increasing burden of taxation, inflation, and regulation for what it really is — naked exploitation. So the US government, the most powerful mega-state in history, is driven by the very logic of the political relationship to pursue a policy of permanent war.

The article continues in that general vein - read the whole thing if you're so inclined. Personally, I think it is a grand example of how some in the modern Libertarian movement learned a little too much from Communism, including the use of emotionally charged, polarizing hyperbole, and the embrace of a reductionist Marxist-style dialectic in which all of human and social history can be viewed through an idealized Libertarian political-philosophical lens and critiqued accordingly. However, that sort of thing is coin of the realm at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, among other venues - that's not what compelled me to write today.

No, what got my attention was "What Makes Someone a Hero", by Bleeding Heart Libertarian's Jason Brennan (quoting excerpts to get to the point - please read the whole thing):

[...] 

Today is Veteran’s Day, yet another day when Americans are supposed to thank soldiers for their service. But are (some, most, all?) soldiers heroes? This depends on the facts. A hero–as we use the term in typical English discourse–is someone who voluntarily engages in rightful service to others, even though that service puts him at risk of harm, and who does so out of benevolence rather than a desire for personal gain. So, to assess whether soldiers are heroes, we’d need to know 1) what their motives are, 2) the degree to which they were at risk of harm, 3) whether they were rightfully serving others. The qualifier “rightfully” is important. After all, Nazi soldiers and Gulag guards served others, but they don’t serve the right ends, and they didn’t conduct their service in a morally permissible way. Superman is a hero not simply because he puts himself at risk on behalf of others, but also because he serves the right ends the right way. 

[...] 

Whether you think the typical American soldier is a hero or not will depend a great deal on your view of American foreign policy. Some American wars are beyond the pale; no reasonable person could believe them to be justified: e.g., the various wars fought to exterminate and uproot Native Americans, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American war. What about other wars and military incursions? I’ll lay my cards on the table and say that I think hardly any US military actions have been justified according to the correct theory of just war.

From a very narrow Libertarian-Anarchic philosophical sense, a sense that Brennan is adopting, there's no such thing as a "just war", at least in any view of "war" as we would recognize it, as the book Brennan links to at the end of the excerpt above discusses. Since, according to a particular vein of Libertarian philosophy, there's no such thing as groups - only individuals choosing to act individually or collectively as they deem fit - the only "just war" is one in which you defend yourself from someone who is quite literally walking up to you, gun in hand, and getting ready to point the trigger (I exaggerate slightly, but you get the idea). Anything short of immediate individual self-defense requires such a high moral and philosophical aversion to murder to overcome that it's virtually impossible to do so, especially at the level of an organized nation-state. Since it's also assumed that governments and states are openly antagonistic against individuals (see the LvMI post linked above), even an invasion by a foreign power wouldn't meet the necessary qualifications of a "just war" unless each individual was personally confronted violently by an armed soldier from the invading army - until that happened, each individual would be morally required to assume that the invading army was an enemy of the state, not of the individual, and should thus be morally compelled to assist the invasion to help overthrow the state, at least unless or until the invading army attempts to set up another state or government to replace it.

Though this certainly seems a principled approach to war, it's actually just the philosophical and deontological codification of the Worst Argument in the World:

"X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."

To apply this to our current topic of discussion, X is the military, or the state, or government in general, and the archetypal member it belongs to is "murder". Let's sketch this out:

1. Murder is wrong.
2. Murder is defined as the killing of a human being by another human being, usually intentionally though not exclusively.
3. In war, humans kill other human beings.
4. Therefore, wars are conducted through murder, which is wrong.
5. By the transitive property, war is therefore as wrong as murder, times the number of casualties.

Let's continue on this train a little farther...

1. Wars are conducted by opposing militaries, which are trained to kill on command.
2. Since the primary goal of a military is to successfully kill others in war, the primary goal of a military is therefore murder, which is wrong. 
3. By the transitive property, militaries are therefore wrong.
4. Due to #3, anyone who chooses to participate in a military, either by volunteering or by refusing to conscientiously object to participating if conscripted, is therefore a murderer. 
5. Therefore, Veterans Day is a holiday explicitly designed to celebrate murderers.

If you ask most people about this line of reasoning, they'll instinctively flinch away from it, though they won't be able to tell you why. If you ask deontologically driven Libertarians why that's the case, they'll tell you it's because of cognitive dissonance, or just a general unwillingness to face the truth - the rules for moral human behavior are plain as day, after all, and here are people violating them in the worst way possible. I have a different hypothesis, however - emotions are the mind's way of communicating to us what our words cannot, and, for most people, even if they can't quite articulate it, this line of reasoning just feels wrong.

It should.

What most people are intuitively sensing is the same thing most people intuitively sense when faced with something like PIV is always rape, ok? - the feeling that, yes, there might be some logic to it, but there's so much wrong with it that it's not even wrong anymore, even if they don't possess the intellectual or rhetorical chops to meaningfully identify where the point of ultimate confusion lies. In the case of the deontological Libertarian critique of Veteran's Day, and militaries in general, the ultimate point of confusion lies in the fact that we have separate words for "soldier" and "murderer", separate words for "murder" and "kill", "war" and "mass murder", and so on. That we have separate words or phrases for these concepts suggests that there are distinctions between each of them, much as there are distinctions between "ice" and "water vapor" even though they are both technically "water". Just as the "PIV is always rape" article broadens the definition of rape so broadly that it's impossible to conclude that any sex involving a penis can't be rape, assuming you accept that author's definition of "rape", many Libertarians make the mistake of broadening the definition or "murder" so broadly that self-defense almost becomes murder itself[1].

In the case of soldiers, militaries, and war, versus murderers, gangs, and the like, the distinction ultimately comes down to who's ordering the killing and why. Wars, at least in principle, are supposed to ultimately benefit someone other than the people doing the killing, especially in the long term. Militaries obey the commands of their government - which, in principle, are supposed to derive their consent by the governed. Soldiers obey the commands of their military. This is why we view military service as a form of service worth honoring - for a limited but predefined period of time, in principle, an individual chooses to act in the interests of their society. By contrast, a murder kills merely to satisfy their own desires.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that there's a wide gulf between principle and reality. Soldiers, for example, are not just morally required to refuse to follow an unjust order - in many militaries, they're now legally required to refuse one as well, which is a consequence of some of the worst excesses of the two World Wars. Militaries, meanwhile, don't always obey their governments - oftentimes, they become the government, especially in places with otherwise weak public institutions. As for the benefits of war, they rarely accrue to everyone in the society that wages it, and they certainly never accrue evenly; however, it wasn't just arms suppliers that benefited from the Allies' successful prosecution of World War II, and it was a lot easier and considerably less bloody for America to overcome Jim Crow than it was to overcome slavery. Incidentally, even within the Bleeding Heart Libertarians community, there are some who see the glimmer of a difference.

Of course, that some wars have had some positive benefits for large groups of people shouldn't be used to excuse all wars, or all militaries, or all soldiers, or even all American soldiers. Some American soldiers behave badly. Some American military leaders give and follow morally reprehensible orders. Some American Presidents are power-hungry demagogues. However, it's important for all of us, as Libertarians or as Americans, to remember that, unlike a common murderer, a military, the soldiers that constitute it, and the government it serves are reflections of ourselves. They reflect our ambitions, our fears, our desires, and our needs. If our ambitions are violent, our government and its military will be at least as violent. If we are fearful and defensive, our government and its military will behave at least as defensively. If we prioritize our desires and needs over the desires and needs of our neighbors, so will our government and its military. Even so, despite our imperfect natures, there are those among us who voluntarily choose to grant us the power to control whether they live or die and whether they kill or demonstrate compassion, either by explicitly volunteering into our military, or implicitly by accepting its summons when conscripted, even though they know that the people they are granting control of their lives to aren't infallible or incorruptible. That's a bold choice, one that the rest of us should treat respectfully while we decide whether we should be allowed to have that sort of power over another human being to begin with.

With that respect in mind, while remaining skeptical of the institutions that we grant these powers to, and while remaining skeptical of the nature of power itself, I publicly wish our veterans a Happy Veterans' Day. Here's to each of us doing what we can to ensure that those of you that make the choice to become a soldier are ultimately placed in positions to act heroically, preferably filling sandbags instead of corpses, even though we all know that we will, at times, fail in this.

******

1. As things currently stand, our cultural norms on self-defense have shifted broadly enough toward a consensus that human life is sacrosanct. So sacrosanct that, in many states, you have to be able to assess the threat level of the intruder before you kill them in self-defense, even if they've violently entered your home and even if they're taking your belongings, since no personal possession is worth a human life. Back

The UCSB shooting, PUAs, and hashtag activists

"Henley Gate, UCSB" by Ryosuki Yagi is licensed under CC BY 2.0

As the news has been quick to point out, there was a shooting yesterday at UC Santa Barbara, which started at the suspect's home. Wikipedia, as usual, has a decent compilation of the details. The suspect, who will remain nameless and formless throughout this post - it (not he, not she, not whatever) deserves no further identification or humanization and I will not be the one providing it any. I will be discussing its motives for a bit, though, because there are quite a few things about the incident and people's reactions to it that I find disturbing and, unfortunately, I can't discuss those without discussing the hostile object and why it claims it became murderously hostile.

I'm not happy about that, mind you, but things are what they are.

With that out of the way, let's begin by establishing something - sexual desire is the first instinct a child-adolescent has that, in order for it to be fulfilled in a socially acceptable way, requires consent. Shelter, food, and parental love are all usually given for free before the child has any idea they need these things, much less possess the ability to verbalize that need. Friendship and companionship among peers gets closer, but even then, that's usually a given - children naturally will play with other children. Just watch some at a park sometime.

Sexual desire, on the other hand, is different. It's the first instinct, the first drive, where, in order for it to be fulfilled, a child-adolescent has to ask for it to be fulfilled from another individual. Or, at least, they really should. There are ways to short-circuit that process, though, to fulfill the desire with asking, and we have a word to describe that short-circuiting - rape. Rape messes people up because, once you're raped, the idea that sexual desire and fulfillment comes from consent and mutual agreement is thrown out the window. Sexual desire becomes a source of danger. The sexual fulfillment of other human beings becomes something that is done to you, either through force (violent rape), mental manipulation (drug/alcohol rape), or emotional manipulation (child molestation and certain kinds of "date rape").

On the flip side, though - and before I begin, let me point out that I'm not equating any of this with the severity of rape or sexual assault - a lot of people have serious issues learning how to communicate their sexual desires with other human beings in a way that's mutually fulfilling. These individuals often had problems communicating with their peers before their sexual drive began to assert itself within them, but now there is a sense of urgency behind that failure to communicate that can, in extreme cases, become all-consuming and obsessive. Normally, this obsession manifests itself in the form of what we now call "nice guy" behaviors - they'll "be friends" with their object of affection for as long as it takes for them to become comfortable enough with their object of affection to take the risk of communicating their real desires with that object. In extreme cases, it can lead to stalking or, in this particular case, murder. Note that I refer to the desired individual as an "object" - this is intentional. In the mind of the afflicted, the person they desire isn't a person, an individual with desires of their own. Instead, the object of affection is something that must be earned or gained somehow. Indeed, those with this particular sort of communication difficulty often have trouble viewing people as individuals in a mature sense because their ability to communicate their desires to other people, and their ability to understand the desires of others when communicated to them, is sorely lacking. Worse yet, their ability to understand their own desires, in a mature sense, is hampered by this inability to communicate - their ability to communicate with themselves, to understand themselves, is every bit as poor as their ability to communicate and understand others. If you're feeling analytical, you can thank the Sapir-Worph Hypothesis for this - if you don't possess the means to communicate with others about how you feel or what your desires are, you probably lack the ability to communicate those feelings or desires with yourself.

I'm pretty familiar with this problem - painfully, intimately so, in fact. I haven't recovered entirely from it, but I can at least say that I'm on a path of improvement, partially by getting to know people and partially by exposing myself to material from people who are far more comfortable with expressing their emotions than I am and learning how to express emotions from them. One particular piece of material I'm rather fond of in this regard is Taste It Twice, a well-written if intermittently updated blog by Avens O'Brien. Go bookmark it.

To overcome this problem, many afflicted individuals will initially gravitate toward the Pick-Up Artist (PUA) community. Though there are many warranted criticisms of the movement - their response to the shootings, for example, leaves a lot to be desired - it can provide some legitimately useful advice and in a way that those afflicted with particular sorts of communication problems can understand and act upon. For example:

• Work out.
• Dress distinctively.
• Rejection happens - get over it.
• Make some friends of both genders.
• Act confident.
• Learn how to depend on yourself instead of others.
• Travel.
• Have a project or hobby you're passionate about.
• Don't watch people do something, do something yourself.
• Don't put anyone on a pedestal.
• Don't act obsessive.
• Possessiveness is also bad.
• Physical communication is just as important as verbal communication.
• Don't be afraid of your own needs or desires.
• Don't let a desired one get away with anything you wouldn't put up with from a friend.
• Don't give up.
• Keep improving yourself.

On top of that, the PUA community does an excellent job providing step-by-step instructions on how to act on this advice. Saying that you need to work out more is one thing. If you've never been inside a gym and couldn't tell the difference between a dumbbell and an elliptical, you're going to need some details and fast. This also holds true for communicating with women - or people - in general, especially when you're trying to learn how to communicate sexual desire to another human being. The oft-derided "cheat code"-style walkthroughs for "seducing" women are an aid - one that's meant to get a person comfortable enough to communicate sexual desire to another person in some fashion so that they can eventually develop their own communication style and pick up on others' communication styles. In that capacity, they can actually be useful with a little practice and common sense.

Where things go wrong, however, is when PUAs start treating their advice as a logically consistent philosophical framework for living one's life. It's best treated as a phase - a toolbox that can be used to learn how to approach "objects of desire" as human beings. The goal should be to become comfortable enough around women where you can actually have some conversations with them and learn that, yes, women are people, too. When the PUA community uses their limited mental model of the world to draw crude characterizations of evolutionary psychology, sociology, domesticity, politics, religion, and yes, even rape, that's where you know they've failed to recognize the limits of their particular mental model. When you hold a model hammer, it's tempting to see the world as a collection of model nails, and PUAs are not alone in this tendency. It's the same tendency that drives fundamentalism of all stripes; fundamentalism, after all, is merely the idea that One Particular Model can find the Solution To Anything Ever. Unfortunately, the universe is an infinitely complex place, one that does not lend itself to a Theory of Everything - models, by their very nature, must be limited in scope and must make simplifications to be useful. The PUA model of human behavior is no different in that regard.

Things brings me to my biggest issue with the responses I've seen to this shooting. Because of the purported motives and history of the assailant, it's attracted, like a lodestone, two particularly limited models of human behavior with limited, fundamentalist followers. One such model was the PUA community and its associated adherents, which I already touched on above - here's a good example of model fundamentalism in action. The other, meanwhile, is what I'll call the Women's Victimization movement. The Women's Victimization movement, in my view, is every bit as well-meaning as the PUA community, and I mean that both positively and negatively. Both communities are trying to establish how to communicate about sexual desire with other human beings, a complicated and emotionally fraught issue, and we need more of that. However, just as the PUA community relies on a set of potentially dangerous simplifications that, if taken too far, can lead to severe harm for everyone involved, the Women's Victimization movement relies upon the dangerous simplification that expressed male sexual desire should be feared. 

Case in point: #YesAllWomen

To be clear, many of the instances on #YesAllWomen are truly horrible. There are stories of rape, of sexual harassment, and plenty more. Women should not have to worry about whether their drink has been doctored. Women should not experience sexual advances from people in a position of power over them, whether those individuals are family members, religious leaders, employers, or teachers. Women should not have to worry about whether a jilted lover will beat them or kill them. When a woman rejects sexual advances, that rejection should be taken at face value and respected. In short, choices regarding female sexuality should be treated just as respectfully as we treat any other choice. 

However, we need to be clear about something here. The shooting is only considered a part of the pattern of behavior #YesAllWomen are highlighting because we're taking the assailant's purported motives at face value. We're actually assuming that a crazy, psychotic, dangerous thing unworthy of acknowledging its humanity is capable of enough self-awareness to successfully identify who its victims should have been and why it was choosing to eliminate them. In truth, more men have been killed than women so far - the current count is four men to two women, though the identities of the thirteen injured victims has not been revealed. We also need to understand that being shot at is very, very different from... well, how about this?

Because our swimsuits, even for little girls, are bra & underwear... But in a stretchy fabric so it's totally ok #YesAllWomen
— Jamie Lee (@TheJamieLee) May 25, 2014

Or this:

because every time a guy asks me for pictures i feel guilty for not wanting to #YesAllWomen
— berry (@detricotage) May 25, 2014

Here's the thing - communicating about sexuality is going to be uncomfortable sometimes. Some people are better about it than others, and it's important for both sides of the issue - those communicating and those being communicated to - are able to establish boundaries with one another. However, demonizing either side of the communication is not helpful. It's important that people respect each other when they're communicating with each other about anything, really, but sexual communication is a particularly sensitive subject, one filled with vulnerability and longing, and it has the most potential for damage. Even so, it's important that everyone communicates and it's important for everyone to understand that complete comfort for any side of the conversation at all times is going to be impossible. Rejection is uncomfortable for both sides - nobody likes to be disappointed and nobody likes to disappoint - but it's an important part of communicating. Handling rejection is a learned behavior. Rejecting is a learned behavior. Learning something new, especially something as important as this, is oftentimes uncomfortable. But it's imperative that all people learn both of those behaviors if they're going to become mature adults.

Limited mental models have their uses. Discussing how some women are victimized is important. Discussing how to open communication with someone you find sexually desirable when you're not even capable of viewing yourself or that person as a human being is important. Finding solutions to these problems will help all of us become better human beings and help all of us suck just a little bit less. However, we all need to take a deep breath, step back, and realize that these discussions, and the solutions found from these discussions, have limited utility and meaningfully analyzing the acts of a psychopath falls well beyond the limits of their utility.