rage at the system – Page 17 – Another angry woman

Rats and levers: how to smash capitalism with behavioural psychology

Almost eighty years ago, rats in boxes led to a new paradigm in our understanding of human learning. The famous Skinner trained rats to pull a lever to receive food. Later, with the same methodology, he taught pigeons to play table tennis.

The phenomenon is called “operant conditioning”, and it is pervasive. It is the ability to connect a behaviour with a stimulus: press a lever, receive food; press a lever, avoid pain. It is one of our primal impulses: behaviour leads to an effect. Without that ability, we would get very little indeed done.

For operant conditioning to happen, we need to feel pleasure when we receive a good stimulus and an unpleasant feeling when we receive a bad stimulus. We can see this from when the brain goes wrong: when the ability to feel a sweet little dopamine kick at a pleasurable stimulus is impaired, learning too is impaired. To learn to associate our behaviour with something pleasant, we need to be able to feel good.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the system which we have in place taps into this basic system so well. We spend money, we receive something nice, we feel very good about that. It’s nice to have nice things, and so it’s nice to spend money. We learn to become consumers, because ultimately the stimulus-response effect is positive. Spending money is all too simple. We walk into the shop, bung our money down, and in return we get our nice new handbag or book or delicious burrito. A sweet little dopamine kick tickles our mesolimbic pathways. The response gets carved in deeper.

It goes slightly deeper than this, though. Money is an interesting reinforcer: on its own it has no value whatsoever. It is purely symbolic. You can’t eat a fiver; you can’t play with it much beyond folding it in a way to give the Queen an amusing sadface; a fiver is not entertaining or useful in any tangible way. It is only by exchanging that fiver for the real reward that it has value. This is called a secondary reinforcer. It can be compared to when someone trains a pet using a clicker: the animal will respond to the clicker because it associates the clicker with rewards.

We perform all sorts of actions which are reinforced with this essentially valueless stimulus: we sell our labour, we exchange goods for money, we fill in forms. Some of the money is spent on actual rewards: that shiny new handbag, that book, that telly, all wrapped up with the bow of a sweet little dopamine kick.

The thing with Skinner, though, is that the rats weren’t always working for nice things. Sometimes those rats were starving and they were stuck in a box, pressing that lever so they could eat. This is, usually, how we exchange our tokens: basic food to keep going, shelter, warmth and even water. We are sitting in that box frantically pressing that lever just to stay alive.

This is how the system feeds. We need the money, so we perform the actions. Every so often, we’re rewarded with something to makes us feel good. It’s smart. It’s instant. It taps into a basic learning system: even a rat can do it.

And that’s why it’s so hard to dismantle. Alternatives to the system do not always tap into that instantaneous stimulus-response system. Working against the whole shitty system often does not tap into that instantaneous stimulus-response system. We press the lever and nothing happens. Perhaps ten minutes after the lever press, the pellet of food drops down, but by this point the association is not there. The adage “good things come to those who wait” applies here: those who can build associations and put off an immediate reward in favour of a bigger one in the future tend to do better out of life. For most of us, though, this ability involves a cognitive struggle. And sometimes it’s easier to just play on the immediate stimulus-response reactions.

In activism, a lot of the time we find ourselves bored and standing in the miserable drizzle until we finally fuck off to the pub. Nothing is achieved. In part, this is because our goals are too vast: we will hardly dismantle capitalism by standing in the rain feeling cross and handing out leaflets. What if, though, our goals were smaller? That for each action, we set a simple goal: to change one mind, to block a road for an hour, to disrupt a bank so it will lose a certain amount of business that day? These goals are achievable, and the trip to the pub with comrades suddenly feels like a little treat, combined with a fizz of dopamine. This method is called mastery, an offshoot of operant learning: measurable behaviours, measurable and achievable goals, slowly building.

Satisfaction can come from other sources than buying, as many in the left wing community will know. I take more joy from a scarf I have knitted than one I have bought. I feel happier sharing a meal cooked with friends than something pricier in a restaurant. Gratification is possible, and consumerism is not the only way to get that sweet little dopamine kick. It is simply the most salient way of being.

While this works for activists, it is preaching to the converted. How can this rat and lever response be used to help those who are currently buying wholesale into the system? What we want is for people to know about the problems and act to become part of the solution. The bad news is, those leaflets we hand out in the rain are only useful for awareness-raising. Providing information does not tend to lead to magical change of behaviour. For people to act, we need to be ready.

One way is to negate the reinforcing value of money and the things bought with money. There are few legal ways of achieving this, and it is not necessarily a feasible course of action–and for our own morale, pursuit of the feasible is important. The other option is gradual: starting with helping people to do simple tasks which are rewarding, things that make them feel good. Simplicity, at first is crucial: start off with an e-petition, perhaps. E-petitions are largely pointless, but the signers tend to feel good about themselves afterwards. From the petition, progress to a slightly larger task–such as writing to an MP. Escalate slowly and gently, facilitating people to move to increasingly larger tasks until eventually they, too, are ready for revolution.

This is, essentially, why movements such as UK Uncut have been so successful, with mass appeal. UK Uncut actions involve performing a simple behaviour (sitting down in a shop) with measurable results (the shop loses business). It is hardly surprising that this movement has been a gateway for many into activism: it taps into that simple stimulus-response system.

Awareness of this basic response can help us shape the world. It can help us achieve the ultimate reward: liberation.

How to distract an angry population: WEDDINGS!

So, it finally happened. The government have announced that gay marriage–forget your silly civil partnerships, we’re talking full marriage marriage!–will soon be written into UK law. It’s a victory for gay rights, there’s no doubt about that, and one that I wasn’t expecting in the foreseeable future. So why does this victory feel so hollow to me?

First is the obvious: I’d like to see marriage abolished entirely and for people to love freely, away from church and state meddling. To me, this victory means that one more group of people are subjected to an oppressive seal of approval on their relationships–I explain these thoughts more fully here.

The part of this that leaves the truly bitter taste in my mouth, though, is that it is clearly nothing more than a political manoeuvre. The timing of it couldn’t be more obvious: it is the day of the opening of the Lib Dem party conference. What we see here is the senior coalition partners finally throwing their underlings a bone, something that makes them feel like they’re doing good. A little sweetener for their cooperation in their incremental dismantling of the welfare state. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement; the Lib Dems stop feeling so much like sellouts, the Tories move away from their image as the party which introduced Section 28.

It is a shiny distractor for everyone else, too. While we are all busy celebrating the victory for gay rights, and praising our government for finally doing The Right Thing on something, what will be happening? It is the time of year that the redundancies for public sector workers will start to kick in. It is the time when the students return to university, furious and ripe for radicalisation. It is the time of year that with a focus of concerted effort, there might a long shot to save the NHS. And instead, the government are hoping we’ll be cooing over gay marriage and flapping with so much gratitude that we shall not shout. Given the time the consultation is taking place, I wonder what they’re planning in March?

This is not the first time we have been distracted by a big shiny wedding. Back in April, in the midst of all of the Royal Wedding drama, the news slipped out, unnoticed, that the NHS was being cut much more than we thought. Squats were raided, people removed from their homes. People were arrested for crimes they had not committed, on the charge that at some point in the next few days, they might commit a crime. Much of it was lost in the noise, as everyone was too busy gawping at a bride, a groom and a bridesmaid’s bottom. Even those who were less than happy about paying for some aristocrats to throw a party join in with the mass distraction. We dignified it by talking about it. Our voices, when talking about the bigger issues, were drowned out.

The introduction of gay marriage is more important than a pair of toffs getting hitched. It is something big, and it is beautiful. There is now no longer a linguistic difference between a state-approved same-sex relationship and a state-approved heterosexual relationship. In a world where homophobia is still rife, though, and queer folk live at risk from violence, have we really won equality? We have made a baby step in the right direction. But it is being granted equality, rather than liberation. And fuck it, I want liberation. I want to be free from oppression and persecution, free to fuck who ever I like, set up home with whoever I like, without having to ask nicely for the approval from some rich bastards in Westminster in the hope they might grant me it when it suits them.

Of course, providing something that looks like equality is rather savvy for this government. They are courting the “pink pound“, using the provision of an illusion of equality to court voters and donors, and to further feed the wedding-industrial complex. I am not fooled by this. I hope many other people are equally sceptical, and that we do not simply lay down arms in the fight for queer liberation. We’re not liberated here. We’re just consumers, we’re just pawns.

We must not get distracted by this small victory. We must celebrate it by working harder. We must work for true sexual liberation, we must work for true social liberation, and we must liberate ourselves from a government who believe we are stupid.

—

Update: @helen_bop raises a very good point about the changes to legislation: as there will be no changes to the Gender Recognition Act. In an existing couple one or both partners are trans, they would still have to divorce and remarry; nothing will change for trans people. This is another case wherein the T in LGBT is being woefully ignored. We deserve better than these miserable scraps.

Fuck the lot of them

This post is more of a rant than any of the others I have written. I am absolutely livid.

Yesterday, MPs voted to start the steady, barely perceptible dismantling of the most precious of British institutions: the NHS. In a bill which is worded so bafflingly, with so many amendments, many of the MPs barely knew what they voted for. They voted for the beginning of the end, a means to sneak in privatisation of the biggest employer in the UK, and one of the best healthcare systems in the world. If it’s not broken, why fix it? Because, of course, our ruling class want to give their rich mates a slice of the fucking pie.

And what was done to prevent this travesty? Fuck all, that’s what.

Part of the problem was that it was hard to explain exactly what was going on. Our rulers have been smart enough to obfuscate their evil scheme in language which is thoroughly inaccessible. We say that they are bringing in privatisation, and they can deny it: they opened a back door so the vultures can get in.

At any rate, there were months of notice. Fucking months. I wrote to my useless shit of an MP twice. I marched. I did street theatre. I did all I could to raise awareness of what the Tories were plotting. My useless shit of an MP never replied. The marching and street theatre happened too early. Everything calmed down before the third reading of the bill. I still agitated. I talked whenever I could.

On the day of the vote, the TUC pulled out the big guns. They had been planning something for months. They had a fantastic idea for activism. They were going to save the NHS with a brave move as courageous as this paragraph is sarcastic. They held a fucking candlelit vigil.

On the day the government voted to start to destroy the best thing about Britain, all our fucking trade unions–our means for organisation–could pull out of the bag was a funeral before the vote had even taken place. A funeral attended by less than 200 people, because it was not publicised. The TUC are useless, toothless bastards. They had the power to do so much. They could have organised industrial action. They could have put thousands on the streets. Instead, they mourned.

In the Commons, probably unaware of the pointless vigil outside, Parliament signed the death warrant for our NHS. Nye Bevan span in his grave. The slow destruction of the welfare state shifted gear, speeding up imperceptibly. Few people gave a shit.

This is the thing. They are cutting the means of support for vulnerable people: the sick, the disabled, single parents, the homeless, the poor. They are taking away homes, vital financial support, basic fucking healthcare. They sell lies to the media and the majority swallow these fibs. There should be rioting on the streets over this. There will be rioting on the streets when people find out how much they have been fooled.

I have a theory–somewhat facetious–that perhaps our government does not really hate the abjected. Perhaps they have discovered that the force generated by Nye Bevan spinning in his grave turns out to be a brilliant power source! A clean, green energy that could end world hunger! An energy source that could revolutionise the way the world works, the end of scarcity!

The thing is, even if that turned out to be true, the repulsive swinging dicks in Westminster would sell of NyePower to the highest bidder. Instead of humanitarian uses, that power would be used for profit. They are greedy: profit is king.

And so we feel powerless. Those of us who care feel betrayed by our government, betrayed by those who are supposedly on our side. We did what we could, but it was not enough.

Imagine if we had tried. Imagine if the message had got out and the people had mobilised. Rioting in the streets, and every single person whose life has ever been touched by the NHS standing outside Parliament, daring the fuckers to vote the wrong way. Imagine if the fuckers voted the wrong way, then.

Imagine if we did without the fuckers entirely. Democracy is rule of the people. Democracy is power. Democracy is not trusting some crooked bastard who throws your letters into the shredder to somehow represent your interests. We could have saved the NHS. There’s a remote possibility we still can.

The power is ours. We just need to use it.

Reasons to mistrust a judicial system #1376

I have a somewhat sceptical attitude towards judicial systems. In the last few months alone, I have seen a horrifying case where a woman was sent to prison for reporting a rape, draconian sentencing for rioting, and a close friend of mine sent to prison for a trifling issue–or, to be more precise, a pie-based issue, and much, much more to boot. As it stands, our system for dispensing justice is just another exhibit of societal prejudice, only differentiated from the bog-standard kind by the power it wields. A prejudiced person can only do so much damage. A prejudiced instrument of the state can harm many in much larger ways.

The rot is far from confined to the UK: take this recent, horrible case from the USA. A young gay man was murdered at his school by a fellow student. The jury has not been able to reach a verdict, and as such the trial was a mistrial and must be retried.

The defence does not rest upon the fact that the perpetrator did not shoot the victim: the defence freely admit to this fact. Instead, the defence rests upon “gay panic”–apparently, the victim “sexually harassed” the perpetrator, and he “just snapped” and managed to carry out an act of premeditated murder with a firearm.

Over eight weeks of testimony, the prosecution laid out a case of premeditated murder by McInerney, who prosecutor Maeve Fox described as a bright boy from a broken and violent home who knew what he was doing when he brought a .22-caliber gun to school.

McInerney was upset that King had come up to him at school the day before and said, “What’s up, baby?” Fox said.

He told a defense psychologist that he found King’s attentions “disgusting” and “humiliating” and that King would have to pay for it. He told a school friend that he was going to bring a gun to school the next day, and he did, Fox said.

Then, in a school computer lab, he shot King at point-blank range in the back of the head not once but twice before dropping the weapon and stalking out of the classroom.

Now, it’s never nice for someone to come on to you when you don’t want their attention. I have experienced this same kind of harassment myself, on a pretty much daily basis, every time I leave the fucking house. It can be disgusting and humiliating to experience this kind of harassment. The thing is, when it happens to me, I’m meant to take it as a compliment, because I am a woman and the people who ask me “what’s up, baby?” are men. The other thing is, when this happens to me, I don’t show up the next day at that same bus stop and blow the man’s brains out.

I haven’t even entertained the notion, though I was very interested by the game “Hey Baby“. In this game, you play a woman. Every time a man comes up to you and harasses you, you shoot him with a big fucking gun. It is a rather thought-provoking game–does street harassment really piss women off that much?–and it’s provocative as hell. It got people talking about street harassment, and much of the discourse surrounded how killing someone isn’t a very good comeback to street harassment because killing is wrong. I didn’t play the game very much for this reason: it was thoroughly divorced from my own worldview. Also, I am terrible at FPS games, and it’s not very fun looking up, looking down, rotating slightly, looking down, looking up, left, shoot the floor, look down when some cockbag NPC is telling me it wants to lick me all over.

The main point, though, is that killing is wrong, and people do not tend to snap and kill people after experiencing street harassment. Furthermore, if a young woman had bought a gun to school and murdered a man for saying “what’s up, baby?” I doubt a jury would have any trouble reaching a verdict. She would be found guilty as sin.

What is left, then, is an unpleasant stench of homophobia. What happened in this situation was a murder, a pre-meditated, cold-blooded murder. The jury should be able to easily reach a verdict.

Unfortunately, the whole case, from top to bottom, is steeped in prejudice. Prejudice was the drive for a defence that excused murder by claiming the perpetrator was grossed out by TEH GHEY. Prejudice was firmly in the minds of many jurors as the defence’s prejudice mingled with their own, justifying a violent crime. Prejudice played a part in the crime itself, the perpetrator’s disgust at another person’s sexual orientation a motive.

These prejudices, they leak into judicial systems. They allow victim-blaming to thrive in defences against rape, as these prejudices are so prevalent elsewhere. They are the reason that black people are disproportionately represented in prisons. They allow miscarriages of justice to happen.

Yet we still pretend that our judicial systems can dole out “justice”. Where is the justice in a murder case, when a jury cannot even identify a murder because their judgment is blurred by homophobia? The faith we have in courts is misplaced: they are not the best that we can get, they are a tradition which benefits those who are already blessed with most power. We can do better. We must do better.

Justice is not justice when it is so steeped in systemic hate.

If PETA treat animals the way they treat humans, I pity the animals

I hold a special hate in my heart for PETA. In their quest for publicity and headlines, they fall to cheap tricks that are generally thought by the advertising industry to be a bit tacky.

Take PETA’s attitude towards women. Women, to PETA, should be naked, silent objects, captioned over and over with the same heading. If they keep their clothes on, they had damn well better rub vegetables all over their semi-clad bodies. Of course, this is only relevant to women with societally-acceptable bodies. Anyone else is told to “LOSE THE BLUBBER: GO VEGETARIAN“.

Then there’s the Holocaust appropriation. PETA found it perfectly acceptable to run photographs of people in the Holocaust and caption it “HOLOCAUST ON YOUR PLATE”. This was an unusually strong dick move on their part, considering that a number of Holocaust survivors and families of Holocaust victims are still alive today, and would be unlikely to be particularly happy to see their ordeal compared to a chicken nugget. This doesn’t stop PETA, of course. One local ad campaign of theirs focused on a grisly murder in Manitoba fairly soon after it happened.

For all of their tastelessness and their implicit misogyny, it surprised me to learn that PETA have only very recently decided to launch a porn site. This site will feature amateur performers and celebrities:

“There will be a lot of girl and boy next door content, but we haven’t ruled out celebrities on the site as well,” said Rajt. “People who are extraordinarily dedicated to helping animals and who are willing to do whatever it takes to draw attention to the suffering they endure.”

Just to make it that bit sexier, the porn will be juxtaposed with images of dead animals. Seriously.

I struggle to think who exactly PETA are targeting this porn website at. If they want to target it at people who want to crack one out over a video of a woman fondling a marrow, why the dead animals? And if they want to raise awareness of animal cruelty, why the porn?

It’s all for the attention, of course:

We try to use absolutely every outlet to stick up for animals … We are careful about what we do and wouldn’t use nudity or some of our flashier tactics if we didn’t know they worked.

And here’s the problem: in their quest for attention, PETA have been shamelessly exploiting humans. They have been feeding the notion that women are nothing more than objects and capitalising on horrific things that happened to humans all for the attention. And they believe that this works.

I cannot allow PETA to believe that these tactics work, and are acceptable or in any way desirable. I’m all for the ethical treatment of animals, but this sort of shit makes me want to buy a big dripping veal steak. I don’t eat meat very frequently, and it is nothing to do with PETA.

I want to stop PETA from thinking this works. The only thing I can think of is to eat more meat whenever I see such unpleasant tactics used by the organisation. Any meat. And then buy meat and NOT EAT IT so the animal died in vain. And perhaps kick a puppy, though I am squeamish about that–not because PETA ran a billboard with a naked lady, but because it’s just not a very nice thing to do.

In all seriousness, though, I think we must tell PETA how pissed off we are, and how ineffective their tactics are. I cannot think of a way that does not involve eating a lot of meat and telling them about it. I am open to comment.

A daydream I had

Sometimes I daydream about spending time with historical figures. It is not because my real friends are crap; they are good enough. They simply lack the mystique required for daydreaming.

This particular fantasy begins, as most do, with a historical figure showing up on my doorstep. The set-up is largely irrelevant: it is a contrived scenario which allows everything to happen, much like a porn film but without any fucking.

“Hello,” says my visitor, “I am Mary Wollstonecraft. I hear you like to harbour time travellers in your imagination so you can show them around 21st century life. Do you mind if I stay with you?”

“Of course,” I beam, delighted by my new houseguest. “Come in, I’ll show you everything.”

Mary Wollstonecraft follows me into my kitchen. “This is a kettle for boiling water,” I say, brandishing the cheap white Tefal. “It runs on electricity. I’ll explain electricity properly later, but basically it’s how we fuel most things round here these days. It comes out of here.” I point to the plug, then run my hands along the wire.

We drink tea, and Mary Wollstonecraft looks politely baffled by my slightly confused attempt to explain the physics behind electricity. I worry slightly about taking her outside and having to talk her through how cars work. It doesn’t help that I have no idea how the internal combustion engine functions myself.

Next, I show Wollstonecraft my room. I have braced myself to explain television (“like a play, but everyone in the country can watch it in their houses! It runs on electricity, too. Remind me to explain electricity to you later.”) and the internet (“sort of like telegrams, except MUCH faster and you can said it yourself. Wait, you do have telegrams in your time, don’t you? Oh fuck it. It’s like letters except instant. And it runs on electricity, which I promise I’ll explain to you at some point.”). Wollstonecraft surveys the room, her eyes glancing over all of the features: the TV, the computer, the pile of dirty laundry in the corners.

Finally she pauses. She stares intently at the bookshelf.

“You still have books here?”

“We do,” I say. I shove my Kindle under yesterday’s newspaper. I don’t think I’m ready to tell her about ebooks.

With wonder, she runs her hands along my disorganised collection of books. “They are bound in paper,” she says quietly.

Her fingers alight on one particular book. Slowly she pulls it from the shelf.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

“I wrote this book,” she whispers.

Bollocks, I think to myself. What if she hasn’t already written it? What if I have just created a temporal paradox in my daydream, and I’m going to have to spend the rest of this tube ride imagining some sort of situation where Mary Wollstonecraft develops memory loss before she goes back to her time and writes that book? I knew I should have put it in my handbag before I invited her into my fantasy.

“What year is it?” Wollstonecraft asks.

“2011,” I reply.

“That means I wrote this book more than 220 years ago,” she says. “Are you free now?”

“Let me show you,” I say. I am relieved. She is less concerned with understanding electricity and more interested in the state of modern gender roles. This will be much easier for me to talk about.

I take Mary Wollstonecraft to a high street. Her brow furrows in disgust at billboard after billboard advertising products to make women beautiful. Baubles and trinkets.

I sit her down and we read The Blank Slate together.

“So science has proved that women are naturally inferior after all?” Wollstonecraft sighs. She is tearful in her disappointment.

“Quite the opposite,” I say, handing her a copy of Delusions of Gender. “It’s just that there’s still a lot of people who think that women are weak and inferior and will speculate as to why with a Darwinian fairy tale–remind me to tell you about Darwin later. You were probably right with your assessment that it’s all down to how we treat women.”

“How does that affect women?” she asks.

I do not speak for quite some time. Silently, I roll us both cigarettes. Wollstonecraft does not smoke, and finds my perpetual smoking rather unpalatable, but I know she will need it for what I am about to show her.

“I am going to show you something horrible.” I pass her a copy of More magazine.

She reads it; I hear her periodically scoff and harrumph. As her hands start to shake with rage, I pass her the cigarette, lit. She takes a long drag.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?” exclaims Mary Wollstonecraft. The cigarette drops from between her lips and burns the paper.

“Seriously, what the fuck is this shit? It’s all just beauty regimes to attract a man, and shopping and fucking and it’s all about pleasing a shitting cockfuck arseholing cunthammer man!” Wollstonecraft, as conjured by my imagination, is somewhat less eloquent and rather more profane. She is completely right in her assessment of the magazine.

Wollstonecraft exhales in long puffs until her face is no longer puce. “I had vainly hoped that some things might have changed.”

“In a way, they have,” I say, by way of reassurance.

“They have not. You may claim to have nominal equality of the sexes, yet it is all the same. We still teach women inferiority and weakness. Women are still kept in a state of utter abjection!”

I nod.

“Mary Wollstonecraft, will you help me amend this?” I ask.

“I shall,” Wollstonecraft replies with smouldering determination.

A training montage ensues wherein I guide her through some of the more problematic aspects of her thinking, such as her attitude to the working class and her religiosity. I also teach her about things which were never discussed in her time, like sex toys and queer politics. She is a swift learner. As she is loudly decrying certain radical feminists for their transphobia, there is a crash at my front door.

Where once there stood a front door, there is now a woman clad entirely in red and black, wearing a belt of milk bottles with protruding rags. Framed in smoke, she is brandishing a weapon: a brass ray gun.

“Hello,” she says, “I’m Emma Goldman. I’m here to help you smash the patriarchy.”

Of course, the problems identified by Wollstonecraft two centuries ago cannot feasibly be solved with an imaginary time travelling steampunk anarcha feminist collective, so I will leave the narrative there.

There is still work to do. A lot of it. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is largely as relevant today as it was when written. As Mary Wollstonecraft would say, fuck that shit.

An incitement to anarchy

This story has taught me that “incitement” entails commenting on something that has already happened and suggesting that expansion of such behaviour would not have entirely negative consequences. I hereby incite anarchism.

I think if more than one person is waiting for something, they should form a queue, with those who arrived first at the front of the queue. When this happens, it is fair and a very effective way of doing things.

I think that if you have too much dinner on your plate, and your friend is still hungry, you should give them the rest of your dinner rather than throwing it away. That way, no food gets wasted and both of you get to eat until you’re comfortably full.

I think everyone should treat other people as human beings rather than as a skin colour or what you think their genitals look like or as a slave or master. The world would be nicer that way.

I think that people should place far less trust than they do in the things the media and other authorities tell them. Knowledge should be a personal quest for all people, not just absorption of party lines. We might all be able to make better decisions that way.

I think that patriarchy and kyriarchy and the class system and racism and ableism and homophobia and transphobia and all forms of oppression are harmful to all of us. I think we could do better without those systems.

I think that imposed order in the form of religion, the state and capitalism are harmful to all of us and drive oppression. I think we could do better without these artificial structures.

I think that people should be able to take action with which they are comfortable to take apart artificial structures of oppression. This action can take any form they see to be right, provided their actions do not harm another person. I think that it is absolutely right that people strive to heal the world by any means necessary.

This is an incitement to anarchy. Such incitement is, according to our crooked judicial system, punishable by draconian, disproportionate penalties. This is but one more reason why I believe anarchy to be far less dangerous than the current system.

When not reporting a rape seems like a sensible option

Trigger warning for rape and systemic abuse of rape survivors

Some years ago, I was raped. I never reported it.

I am not alone: the vast majority of rapes are not reported to the police. Some estimates suggest up to 95% of rapes are unreported. The thing is, a lot of the time, not reporting a rape seems like a sensible option.

When a woman reports a rape, forensic evidence is gathered using a rape kit. This procedure is highly invasive, consisting of a full, intimate physical examination and sampling from parts of the body which have only recently been violated. It is highly understandable that many survivors would not want to subject themselves to this intrusive procedure following a traumatic experience. There is also questioning, sometimes with an insensitive or disbelieving tone from the police. Between half to two thirds of rape cases never make it past investigation, and there is a paltry 6.5% conviction rate. A convicted rapist will serve an average of eight years in prison.

Then there are horrifying stories like this. Layla Ibrahim was attacked and raped by two men. She was courageous enough to report this to the police, even though the police had a track record of repeatedly arresting her twelve year old brother and failing her sister after a beating, due to being a mixed-race family in a predominately white area. Despite overwhelming forensic evidence, the police chose not to believe Layla. She was sent to prison for three years.

This did not happen in Iran or Sudan. This did not happen many years ago. This happened last year in the UK.

It is yet another story of rape culture. It differs from others in magnitude, not substance. We live in a world where survivors of rape are not believed.

Rape culture falsely differentiates between “serious rape” and other rapes. This dichotomy alone is enough to ensure that many rapes are not reported. I did not report my rape because rape culture had taught me that what happened to me was not rape. So many women I know have had a similar experience.

When a woman does identify that she has been raped, she faces disbelief from others. This is particularly true if she has been raped by someone powerful: the treatment of the women who accused Julian Assange and Dominique Strauss-Kahn of rape are testament to this. It is also true if she has been wearing “the wrong” sort of clothes, or being “the wrong colour”, or behaving in a way that rape culture dictates is a “definite sexual invitation“.

Layla Ibrahim was accused of “wasting police time” with reporting her rape. Meanwhile, 450 London detectives have been pulled from their usual work to go over CCTV footage of rioters with a view to prosecute them. What, here, is more of a waste of police time? Seeking justice for a person brave enough to be in the minority of people who report rape, or sending a kid to prison for nicking a pair of trainers?

Not reporting a rape seems to be the best possible option in a culture which allows rape, sometimes encouraging it. Not reporting a rape seems to be the best possible option in a broken justice system where barely any survivors see justice served. Not reporting a rape seems like the best possible option where the survivor can be sent to prison while the rapists walk free.

What, then, can be done for rape survivors seeking justice?

In her fantastic book Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, Inga Muscio proposes a solution: Cuntlovin’ Public Retaliation:

The basic premise of C.P.R. is publicly humiliating rapists. Since rapists count on a woman’s shame and silence to keep them on the streets, it seems to me an undue amount of attention focused on rapists would seriously counter this assumption.

C.P.R. can be employed when a woman is sure of her attacker’s identity. Since most attacks are not perpetrated by strangers, this is a highly relevant factor.

There is safety and power in numbers.

A group of two hundred women walking into the place of employment of a known rapist would have an effect. If each of these women were in possession of a dozen rotting eggs which were deposited on the rapist’s person, the rapist might well come to the conclusion that he had committed a very unpopular act, one which was not tolerated by the community. If a rapist had to walk through a crowd of angry, stating, silent or quietly and deadly chanting women to get to his car in the grocery store parking lot, he might feel pretty uncomfortable.

This technique would require a vast degree of solidarity among women and allies. Were it to happen, though, it would feel a damn sight more like justice than the current shambolic system.

The risk to survivors is considerably lower in Muscio’s admirable proposition. Here, they do not risk further invasion with no justice served. They do not risk imprisonment for daring to report a rape to a morally bankrupt police force. They do not become passive pawns in a game of patriarchal power. It is justice for survivors, by survivors.

Muscio stresses non-violence, and I thoroughly agree. Violence is not a solution to violence. Showing a rapist that such behaviour is thoroughly intolerable, reminding him that his behaviour is thoroughly unacceptable, through a supportive network of the community–that is more like what justice looks like.

Were this to happen, rape culture would topple. For this to happen, we need to fight rape culture. Then, perhaps, we will see true justice.

A lack of oppression is not what caused the riots

A lot of the discourse surrounding the recent riots has focused on a very individualist perspective: bad people, wrong people, criminals. This analysis is at the expense of examining systemic problems–the role of poverty and deprivation, provocative policing, rampant consumerism.

Then there is this article: “How our race taboo makes us colour blind to the truth” [clean link; this does not deserve clicks]. Here, the author examines systemic causes and concludes that what we need is more racism and more patriarchy. The whole thing is enough to leave one shaking with rage. It is a torrent of hate, a portrait of pure prejudice. It’s also completely wrong. The author appears to exist on a completely different plane of existence to reality.

Perhaps the most astounding element in the television coverage of the riots over much of England has been the steadfast refusal to mention the race of most of the rioters.

Except everywhere. The television and the news reports perpetually make reference to race, both in dog-whistle terms and overtly, gratuitiously mentioning “a mixed-race girl”, “a black boy”.

They are clearly, and overwhelmingly, Afro-Caribbean, the descendants of immigrants, though such has been the utter British failure to integrate so much of the immigrant population that many have retained something of a Caribbean accent. Admittedly, not all of the rioters are ‘black’: clearly, some white youths have joined in.

According to the writer, young white people are being lead astray by the bad immigrants with their strange way of speaking. The casting of white people as passive rather than active agents is clearly deliberate: the writer is so hell-bent on pushing the race angle that he needs to handwave away the existence and participation of white people in the riot.

After this, there is a brief anti-feminist, sexist interlude:

An astonishing number of young males in London are the sons of single mothers. They have been raised without the presence of a male authority figure to impose familial order and, furthermore, and most vitally, to promote the patriarchy.

Contrary to what the feminist mantra of recent decades has proposed, the patriarchy was not invented to oppress woman, but devised by Abraham to control men.

Let us ignore the batshit notion that rioting is caused by Not Enough Patriarchy for a minute. What I suspect the author is driving at here is the notion of children obeying their fathers, which is what is proposed in the Bible. This is, strangely for the Bible, actually not gendered. Patriarchy was devised to control. Not to control men, but to control everyone. And it does.

The riots, though, I do not think can be blamed on the patriarchy–presence or absence thereof. Gender and gendered oppression does not seem to play as much of a role as poverty here.

Adolescent males, without an imposed order, are as feral as chimpanzees. This is why all societies have adopted rigorous means of imposing authority on teenage boys.

Recall that merely a few paragraphs ago, the author was blaming the rioting on race: now he is comparing rioters to chimpanzees. The use of this word, again, is likely deliberate: a piece of dehumanising language typically applied to people of colour. The second sentence is thoroughly unreferenced, and I doubt that the author is an expert in comparative anthropology. Certainly, this effect is not considered a cultural universal.

Using logical leaps, the author then continues his tirade against single mothers, declaring them to be “incentivised” by benefits and asserting that it is wrong that women can bear children without being married. It is a hate-filled assertion, thoroughly steeped in patriarchy; consciously so. The author believes patriarchy to be the thing that was missing in the world.

Following this, the author bends reality to suggest that the immigrants coming over here and taking our jobs is another problem which caused not just rioting but also the financial crisis. Once again, this seems to be all a thin veneer over personal hatred: it is not backed up by evidence, simply by assertions.

In short, what happened here is an attempt at a systemic explanation of what happened this week which bends everything towards hate. In the author’s world, black people are feral, and the Polish are somehow to blame. In the author’s world, feminism has won and broken everything. It is nothing but bigotry, this article: these claims carefully flutter on the covert side of prejudice, yet are riddled with it.

It must be hard, being the person who wrote this article, with such hatred for all but white men.

Evidence-based public order policing: The Met are Doing It Wrong.

The reaction to the riots has been what can kindest be described as knee-jerk, though “absolutely bloody ridiculous and terrifyingly driven by a desire for revenge” is more apt. The police have now been given the power to use what are essentially lethal, dangerous weapons against crowds. Morally this is completely wrong. It is also likely to be ineffective, if not actively making things worse.

The thing is, the standard police approach to policing crowds is already completely wrong. I have been on a lot of protests and have been unlucky enough to end up kettled twice. On neither of those occasions did the kettles cool everything down and quell anger: quite the opposite happened. It’s not fun to have to endure a debate with oneself about whether to piss on the statue of Churchill or the statue of Lloyd George (in the end, I went for sneaky option C, and fashioned a toilet cubicle from metal fencing and tarpaulin. When I got out, there was a queue for the ersatz facilities). While I built, all around me people took poles and smashed in the windows of the Treasury. Horses charged, batons rained down on skulls and the people fought back.

There is evidence behind the idea that crowd control and public order policing is taking completely the wrong approach. This report provides theory, evidence and recommendations, and I would thoroughly recommend you read the whole thing.

Public order policing subscribes to a theory of crowd psychology that has very little evidence behind it. It assumes that once a sufficient number of people are assembled, they will become irrational and easily open to agitation. Crowds, by this theory, are dangerous, a hive mind which must be controlled: “the crowd is a barbarian”. Police are trained in this model, and taught to disperse or contain crowds where they form. This approach is demonstrably ineffective, and as supported by evidence as classic crowd psychology itself.

A better approach to describing crowd psychology is the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM). This theory has roots in Social Identity Theory and Social Categorisation Theory: our behaviour is influenced by identification as a member of a group and roles we take on. We divide the world into “us” and “them”. In a crowd situation, this becomes “police” and “protesters” or “football fans” or “people who fucking hate the police”. As a member of a crowd, one identifies with this group. The police are “outsiders”. When police use indiscriminate, coercive tactics such as baton charges or kettling, the crowd will start to see itself and everyone else in the crowd as posing very little threat, and the police use of force as illegitimate. This leads to a strengthening: the crowd as “us”, the police as “them”. This can empower people to confront the police in a way they would not have done had they been left to their own devices. This can escalate to rioting, caused, inadvertently, by the very tactics the police are using to avert rioting.

The us-and-them mentality extends to the police themselves. The police tend to view crowds as a homogenous, dangerous mass that requires controlling, partly as an effect of their training, but partly as an effect of their social identity as a police officer. A friend of mine, while kettled, once ended up in conversation with a police officer. She asked to get out. “I’m sorry,” he said, “you’re all the same to us. It could have been you who graffitied Nelson’s Column.”

With the weight of evidence suggesting classic police tactics make things worse rather than better, is is clear that police tactics need to change. Fortunately, there is a much better way of policing. It involves taking a graded approach, and, crucially, treating people as individuals rather than members of a crowd. There are four phases to this approach:

Understanding the crowd and their motivations. Understand the culture and the context. Communicate in advance what is and is not acceptable.
On the day, visibility of the police should initially be low-impact: they should move in pairs, and wear standard uniforms rather than riot gear. No helmets, shields, or visible batons. They should interact with the crowd positively: smiling and adopting a friendly posture, being helpful with directions when they can. Communication is key.
If trouble arises, target only the trouble. It is made clear in the report that this does not mean arresting “known” people, the go-to technique for public order policing. Instead, it means targeting those who are causing the trouble, and only those. Communication, once again, is crucial. No acting against the whole crowd.
If there is still a problem and a riot breaks out, go back to usual police tactics of beating up everyone.

Three interesting things emerge from where this approach is used in practice. First of all, self-policing tends to start happening: members of the crowd will be less likely to accept violent behaviour. Secondly, the police are perceived as far more legitimate: the “all coppers are bastards” effect dissipates. Finally, and most importantly, the situations do not escalate. When the approach was tested in Euro2004, in zones where police were using the approach, the riot gear never came out, and only one England fan out of 150 000 present was arrested. The approach, it seems, averts riots.

There are two things in the report that bother me. First, and most importantly, is the assertion in the report that using this approach will facilitate intelligence gathering. As a believer in the right to privacy, I am not particularly comfortable with this. Secondly, as an anarchist, I do not really believe in the necessity of the police in the first place. This report, though, shows they are not hugely necessary at a mass gathering: it is gratifying to see evidence that, when left alone, a crowd will tend to self-organise and decide on non-violence: this is one of the reasons I am so annoyed to see rioting described as anarchy: anarchy is the state of order naturally emerging, and people working together.

Police tactics for crowd control, as currently used, are provocative. Bringing in bigger, more dangerous weapons which will hit anyone indiscriminately will not make anything any better. If anything, it will escalate the situation, provoking a war between the police and anyone who is not the police.

It is, of course, the government’s traditional approach to evidence. They ignore it at the expense of pursuing populist political point-scoring. It will endanger us all.