SEX, CAPITALISM, PATRIARCHY, MORALITY

In a capitalist patriarchy, when sex is a product then women (in general) are for sale. But its a game they can't win, so at least part of society imagines, because then, so at least part of society says, they have become whores, sluts, slags, bikes, holes, meat to fuck, dirty, tramps and cumrags. There are an amazing amount of women on Only Fans and similar sites who HIDE THEIR FACES. Why? You know why. The morality of our civilisation forces women (and others) to become sex objects AND THEN IT CONDEMNS AND JUDGES THEM FOR IT. They are made into good capitalists but also into dirty, unspeakable capitalists. They are fucked both ways. This particularly affects women who are, for entirely dubious patriarchal reasons only, supposed to be more chaste than men. This boils down to simple misogyny when a man might imagine forcing a woman to her knees for his pleasure but gets to call her a cockslut, and value her accordingly, when she is done. Men always win, women can only lose. Such is the morality of standard patriarchal heterosexuality under capitalism. The man is dominant, the woman inferior. Know your place.

A quotation from Chamfort

Education must be based on two things: ethics and prudence; ethics in order to develop your good qualities, prudence to protect you from other people’s bad ones. If you attach too great an importance to goodness, you produce credulous fools; if you’re too prudent, you produce self-serving, scheming rogues.
 
[L’Éducation doit porter sur deux bases, la morale et la prudence ; la morale, pour appuyer la vertu ; la prudence, pour vous défendre contre les vices d’autrui. En faisant pencher la balance du côté de la morale, vous ne faites que des dupes ou des martyrs; en la faisant pencher de l’autre côté, vous faites des calculateurs égoïstes.]

Nicolas Chamfort (1741-1794) French writer, epigrammist (b. Nicolas-Sébastien Roch)
Products of Perfected Civilization [Produits de la Civilisation Perfectionée], Part 1 “Maxims and Thoughts [Maximes et Pensées],” ch. 5, ¶ 321 (1795) [tr. Parmée (2003), ¶ 205]

Sourcing, notes, alternate translations: wist.info/chamfort-nicolas/897…

Morality and Self-Interest Edited by Paul Bloomfield, 2007

Ever since "Know Thyself" was inscribed at Delphi, Western philosophers have struggled to understand the relations between morality and self-interest. This edited volume of essays pushes forward one of the oldest and most important debates in philosophy. Is morality a check on self-interest or is it in one's self interest to be moral?

@bookstodon
#books
#nonfiction
#philosophy
#essays
#morality
#SefInterest

John Calvin, early Calvinist, writes on Amos 8:5. A few rich held the country in famine. Amos asks the rich if God was too harsh w/ them for killing their compatriots with want?

Calvin and Amos held that a rich person could hold people in famine. Today, would we instead blame the “Amoses” of the day for interfering in the deeds of the rich?

How can you hold worship in its proper place, and act in the marketplace with integrity and justice?

This is not a popular opinion, but I have come to believe that social movements do not ultimately bring systematic change. Not be a contrarian, but I think it takes the right individual that sparks the final measure that brings about real, fundamental change. Let me give some examples.

Martin Luther King, Jr. I know he didn't do it on his own, but he was a singular force, and that is authentic.

From fiction:

Gabriel Bell from the famous Star Trek: DS9 two-parter, "Past Tense" and the Bell Riots. Yes, he also very much did not do it on his own, but he was a force to be reckoned with.

John Sheridan from Babylon 5. He also did not do it on his own, he had both an immediate crew and an extended crew, but he was hands on and even died only to come back and finish the job. He ultimately made the decisions that changed history.

I know how generic I sound. I know I seem like I lack faith in the collective. Well, having lived with severe disability for 27 years, yes, I do lack faith in people at large. I know what you are willing to do to me when no one else is watching. I know it takes a single soul, the right person who possesses the qualities that the collective claims to be in favor of, but they are never actually capable of those moral values, not personally, they are not. It will take one leader to bring change. The group cannot do it.

my moral compass
insists it's pointing steady,
that the world's spinning

It isn’t ethical. It’s corrupt.

The tote bags I'm using for shopping today...

1. Fuck Your Morals
From a stick-up outside #Booksa bookshop / café in Zagreb, Croatia.
I turned my photo of it into a paper negative and printed it in #cyanotype

#anarchy #blueprint #morality

1/3...

Heartwarming aspects of this Sci-Fi dystopia:

* Rebel forest rangers
* Fursuited public-interest cryptographers
* Librarian dark networks
* Everyday people doing distributed archiving
* Doctors of the Resistance

RIGHT NOW THIS IS EXCITING! https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ucsfapathy/

"U.S. Terminates Funding for Polio, H.I.V., Malaria and Nutrition Programs Around the World"

This #AmericaFirst thing has a huge flaw. One that goes further than #morality & that any *educated* #MAGA ought to care about.

Remember #COVID ? That disease that spread around the world because that's what #diseases do in a connected world? Cutting off #healthprograms around the world eventually letd them to come back to the #USA often in a more evolved & deadlier form.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/health/usaid-contract-terminations.html

Convo with a friend this morning. I don't intend this as a pile-on against religion; I have great love and respect for many religious people, both in my former faith and some others. But the individuals living the faith are a different situation from the faith itself. And yes, all Abrahamic religions have a history of god-sanctioned #genocide. How the faithful in these religions deal with that history has been pretty interesting to me, because different sects take very different approaches to it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I am not a fan of the "fuck yeah and we'll do it again!" approach.

A quotation from FDR

Principles of morality and considerations for our own security will never permit us to acquiesce in a peace dictated by aggressors and sponsored by appeasers. We know that enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people’s freedom.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) American lawyer, politician, statesman, US President (1933-1945)
Speech (1941-01-06) to Congress, Annual Message (State of the Union), “Four Freedoms,” Washington, D. C.

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/roosevelt-franklin-d…

Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
-- H. L. Mencken

#Wisdom #Quotes #HLMencken #Morality #Religion

#Photography #Panorama #PitcherPlants #Flowers #Florida

“My parents always said… you are who you hang out with.

There comes a time when you have to decide who you are willing to align with. So long Tesla.

Money donated to @npr” ~ Cheryl Crow

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGEf88eBMVX/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading

From the Quakers and Black Loyalists, Canada has repeatedly given safety and shelter to people being persecuted by American Fascism.

Canada will stand up again and help the innocent people being harmed by AmeriKKKa. Please come here safely, which means not walking across in winter.

Canadians are NOT AMERICAN and never will be.

#Refugee #SafeCountry #Morality #Humanity #Dignity #Hate #Fascism

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/refugees/about-refugee-system/how-system-works/history.html

#WhatWereReading : Joe recommends Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This from Canongate

Not comfortable reading, but it is incredibly *important* reading for today's world, and raises issues we should all be thinking about.

"This is what it means to worship a state, to treat a state as an idol. It justifies itself no matter what it does. This is the moral catastrophe that has been unfolding slowly in Israel and in the American Jewish community simply has now reached a new kind of crescendo in which Israel, with America’s help, destroys an entire society and then says, well, the place is destroyed, so you’d better leave."

~ Peter Beinart

#Israel #Gaza #AmericanJews #morality #Zionism
/1

https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/the-banality-of-evil