Cafe Zoo

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

When most people use the term "anarchy," they do not use the term with a comprehensive understanding of the origin of anarchist philosophy.

Last week, I was talking about Mutual Aid, by Peter Kropotkin, who developed a theory of anarcho-communist philosophy.

"Anarchy" does not entail a lack of organization, but "anarchy" literally refers to a lack of command. The root "-arch" is derived from the proto-Indo-European *h₂ergʰ, which means literally "to command." Anarchy does not really entail disorderly conduct and was really never intended to. It was intended to entail a lack of command.

What most people refer to as "anarchy" really tends to involve a lot of commanding being done, merely by too many people at one time and not really to anyone's apparent benefit and without any clear purpose. Someone screaming incomprehensible commands at you, threatening to break your windows, and not giving you a clear idea of what they even want--or offering you a reasonable compromise where you can avoid them having to break your windows at all--is, in a way, the opposite of anarchy: more properly, this ought to be called "barbarism" because there is force but no clear purpose. When everybody wants to be boss but nobody really knows why they want to be boss or what they are trying to achieve by being boss, that is barbarism. Barbarism is the story of crabs pulling each other down into the bucket they could easily escape from by working in cooperation instead of treating each other as enemies.

Under traditional anarchist philosophy, the chief governing principle is really "mutualism": mutualism is the organizing principle where people voluntarily work together in relationships from which both are beneficiaries. Under the mutualist system, you would not willingly provide your labor or your time unless what you gained either equaled or exceeded the product of your labor.

To understand a NON-mutualist system, imagine that you were living in pre-Revolutionary France. Under this system, the only people that are allowed to own land are ones that have the approval of the monarchy or other members of the peerage. Otherwise, no land is owned, and this is enforced by the military. Some of the land is owned exclusively by dukes, but a duke has the power to grant some of his land to a local count.

HOWEVER, you are not lucky enough to be a duke or a count, much less a king. You are a serf, and by law, you live only within one county. You do not have a right to leave that county. To leave that county, you must have the permission of your count, who must get permission from another count or his duke, who is theoretically powerful enough to force a count's decision (but not always successful because counts can be hardheaded jerks), to allow one of his serfs to go and live in another county or otherwise on the duke's private land.

You no more have a right to walk over into the next county over than you would have to walk into Mexico without a passport or a visa. To understand how little freedom of movement medieval serfs had, they could not walk more than a few miles from where they were born without what amounted to a visa, which was incredibly hard and amazingly complicated to get and bound up in ceremony and also in corrupted and shadowy dealings and quid pro quo. By law, you are essentially an illegal immigrant if you are found outside of the county where you were born.

Furthermore, the only person in the world that you are allowed to work for is your count. As a serf, you do not have a right to go and work for another count, but you are only allowed to work for your own count. The only wages you are allowed to earn are the wages that your count is willing to pay, or your count might not choose to pay you at all. Your count, who is the absolute ruler of his county, might choose to try to compel you to work without compensation. If he were to succeed at doing so, he would not be condemned by other counts for being exploitative, but he would be told that he is really very clever and would be asked, over glasses of wine, how he succeeded at training such obedient serfs. The only reason why you earn a wage at all, assuming you do, is that it is otherwise impossible to get a serf to go and work on the count's land.

The count's relationship with you is ultimately a parasitic one. Ultimately, you would be better off without the count, and the count knows this. The count feels that he is clever because he has succeeded at creating a system where he has a right to exploit you for your labor without giving in fair return, and he intends to use the product of your labors to make his military even larger and thereby make it all the harder for you to fight back against him. The harder you work under his whip, the more empowered your count is to beat you down even further, and both you and your count know this. Year after year, the count's military gets bigger, and the bigger the count's military gets, the less likely you are to ever be able to improve your situation. The ideal outcome of this relationship, as far as the count is concerned, is for your children and grandchildren to have less rights and less freedoms than you. This is the count's definition of a successful and fulfilled life, and the count will never believe that any other definition of success is worth pursuing. If there is ever any chance that you could improve your situation and become equal or superior to the count, then the count, by his definition, is a failure as a count. The count will always, inevitably, measure his degree of success in life based on how good he is at using you as heartlessly as he would cattle. There was no such thing as a "benevolent count," merely a count who was more of a permissive idiot than another count. The dukes were even more ruthless.

Therefore, the idea of "mutualism" really means nothing more than giving you fair compensation for your labor. That is all that mutualism means. Under anarchist principles, this is possible because of the fact that you have a right to leave any employment relationship you are in at any time that you choose.

Under anarchist philosophy, then, we are all capable of living in mutualistic relationships where all of us benefit from the fact that we know each other. We do not need a commander or a leader. We need only come together as we choose, and we may part ways as we choose. We may also choose to work together on projects that are meaningful to all of us and which promote our mutual interests.

Some anarchist systems use an "inverted triangle" model. An example of an inverted triangle would be if two different groups of people had a good reason to work together, and they chose to negotiate that relationship, between their respective groups, using representatives that they might choose to elect democratically or who might volunteer with general lack of objection. Therefore, multiple groups of people might choose to attend a common event.

A practical, real-world example of the inverted triangle model at work would be a gay pride parade. Several different groups attend at a gay pride parade, and all of them attend willingly. None of them is really under the authority of any of the others as long as they abide by some basic standards of acceptable conduct and sign up using the expected process. Each of them carries their own banners representing who they are, and each of them that comes with a float builds it with their own hands and creative powers. There is a certain amount of friendly competition between groups to put on the most colorful display, but even this competition works their mutual benefit because the bigger and the more beautiful the show generally is, the better everybody benefits.

Under a traditional, right-side-up triangle, all of those groups would be headed by one authoritarian commander, and the people in those groups would follow only if paid or forced to follow. Those commanders would only cooperate if an even higher authority commanded them to. Everybody's behavior would be subservient to the vision and purpose of the most powerful commander in that particular "army."

Therefore, the anarchist "inverted triangle" just flips the command structure on its head, and everybody in the command structure is really acting on their own personal initiative based on an understanding that everybody else in the command structure has a basic common interest in working together.

There is also a bit of an "inverted triangle" structure to the Olympic Games, by the way. The athletes that take part in the Olympic Games are not commanded to be there, but they feel profoundly privileged to be there and to represent their teams. Every country is proud to have their teams represent them, and they send their teams to the games because it is a privilege to be a part of the games. While there is often a more traditional command structure on any given team, the organization system of the Olympic Games still has an element of inverted command structure. It is said that there is really so such thing as a loser at the Olympic Games because you would not be there if you were not already clearly and undeniably a winner. That is why everybody and their dog wants to be there.

Anarchist philosophy was born out of the French Revolution. The original anarchist philosophers were not perfect people, and neither was anybody that was a part of the French Revolution. The tyranny of the French aristocracy had made everybody profoundly angry, and the Reign of Terror was an outlet for centuries of stored-up rage. Let us hope that, in our philosophy, we have evolved since the time of the French Revolution.

However, anarchism was a direct reaction to the tyranny that the French people had lived under for centuries. Nobody understood better what tyranny was, since those people had lived under it and hated it. Nobody in history can ever more fully understand what it takes to lead a revolution. Regardless of their imperfections, which could be grievous ones, they knew how first-hand to start and to win a revolution.

Peter Kropotkin, an author that I recommended last week, only refined a theory of this kind of principle by studying animal behavior. I merely felt that it deserved to be noted that Kropotkin's ideas were not invented out of whole cloth. They were born out of the original French Revolution, and the French Revolution itself was a reaction against centuries of brutal serfdom and tyranny.

In the end, though, anarchy is the opposite of disorganization.

Anarchy means having the people already being so organized, in their mutual interests, that no would-be ruler could possibly command them to go against their mutual interests.

Zoophiles and transgender people and people of color are different identities that some of us might have all at once, but we have a mutual interest in fighting against tyranny. We have a mutual interest in saying, in one voice, that we choose to be free and that we will not be anything except free as long as we believe that we are free. When we are working together in our mutual interests, nothing can contain us.

And if somebody is attempting to divide us against each other, then I wonder why they are so afraid of us working together.

That was a mere elaboration upon last week's discussion, but next week, I will attempt to touch on something more refreshing.


Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

It's me, your favorite little hornless, fin-eared, smooth-scaled, black, pint-sized, shoulder-perching, non-anthro, hermaphroditic dragon. It's the dragon that writes a blog that was originally based on the fact that hir player happens to be a zoo, but sie does not always stay on that because there is only but so much you can say about dog sex before it gets kind of stale.

The good news is that this one is at least relevant to you knowing how to do successful activism, so PAY ATTENTION.

I am excited.

Firstly, I strongly suggest reading Mutual Aid, by Peter Kropotkin, as soon as possible.

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4341/pg4341-images.html

I will get to why.

First, I am a completely and hilariously derpy little dragon, here, and I will tell you why you should laugh at my blundering expense. It was right in front of me, and I read the most shallow interpretation into it without doing what it is my instinct to do, which is to start digging deeper with my little dragon paws.

Total derp moment, people.

When I was reading about the role of LGBT activist Harry Hay in the world's first SUCCESSFUL gay rights organization, I remember reading that Harry Hay had the intention of modeling the organization after Alcoholics Anonymous.

I thought, "Okay, so he wanted to create a sort of touchy-feely support group."

Queue hilarious laughter from the audience and the slide whistle, maestro.

*looks duly chagrined*

Here is why I am the most hilarious clown that exists, people. I took that explanation for granted without looking more closely at why Harry Hay might have said that, and I stand before you naked...wait...I always stand before you naked because I am a quadruped.

However, I have been a good herm! I have made amends! Praise be!

I happened to be reading about Alcoholics Anonymous for some profoundly unrelated and random reason, and I found out that the organizational basis of Alcoholics Anonymous was actually the theoretical work of Peter Kropotkin, the Russian ANARCHO-COMMUNIST!

The Wilhelm scream, maestro! Pan out, camera boy! Okay, bring it back.

*canters in place*

This really goes back to the fact that the Temperance Movement was originally a left-wing movement although a misguidedly authoritarian one, and Alcoholics Anonymous was a quirky anarchist counter-culture that was more focused on teaching self-acceptance and mutual support, which was not a widely accepted means of dealing with alcoholism before people understood the biological reality of addiction. AA might come across as very Christian, but there was a time when they were really a sort of secretive counter-culture that was influenced by the writings of Kropotkin.

Well, notably, Harry Hay was a communist, but he was not the Bolshevik type of communist. He was an anarcho-communist, which is a lot different. Bolsheviks and anarcho-communists really hated each other at the time, except that the American establishment did not know that because they did not know very much about what was going on in Europe. We did not exactly have the Internet for looking things up at the time, and the knowledge that we did have was riddled with misinformation and misleading or often even completely made-up garbage that took someone with a college degree to sift for accurate information...wait: that is still a problem...

Rimshot, maestro!

BUT THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT! An anarcho-communist is not the same as a Bolshevik communist. In fact, my friend @ZTHorse insists to me that, as far as he can tell, Kropotkin was really a libertarian, by modern standards. I could nitpick that Kropotkin really self-identified as an anarchist, but I will just let @ZTHorse have this one. What they called "anarcho-communism" back in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century is something many of us would call a form of "libertarianism" today.

Harry Hay also cared a lot more about natural science than he did about his anarcho-communist beliefs. Harry Hay's love for nature ran deep. He was one of the millions of little boys that love nature and want to grow up to become paleontologists, and Harry Hay never really forgave his father for pressuring him into studying law instead of letting him become a paleontologist.

Kropotkin's most important treatise was not really about anarcho-communism at all.

*pauses while the audience babbles in confusion*

Or was it? If you read Mutual Aid closely, it arguably forms a scientific basis for anarchism, but in the end, the treatise is really a defense for the inherent goodness of nature and, by extension, the inherent goodness of people. It just happens to be a fact that you can extrapolate a defense for anarchy from this conclusion.

Peter Kropotkin was really antipodally disposed toward the traditional "gladiator" version of natural selection, which is a version of natural selection that he correctly pointed out was never really considered by Charles Darwin to be central. While Kropotkin was traveling in Siberia and in the Manchurian province of China (Manchur was also the birthplace of the idea of benevolent dragons, by the way), Kropotkin discovered many examples of peaceful cooperation among many different species. Kropotkin thereby created a very different story of evolution, which was based on the ways that different living things support and help each other in a system of symbiotic and mutualistic relationships.

Harry Hay originally would have read Mutual Aid because it was one of the most beautiful treatises on evolution that have ever been written. If us zoophiles start from the same place, then I am certain that we will win.

Thank you for hearing yet another little diatribe from


your little pen-pal,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

Yes, backdating again, but I get this way anytime I get really engrossed in some serious reading.

Just in case you are completely unaware of how much fan content has been produced by the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic series, I can vouchesafe that some of the novel-length fanfics are actually really amazing.

It might seem like a lot of trouble for people to go to in order to create a homage to a show that was intended for little girls, but that misses the point. The show does exactly the opposite of what mainstream "adult" entertainment is trying to do. If you turn on the television, these days, a lot of the content you find is very sad and very tragic, or it has supposedly "sympathetic villains" that are really not all that likeable or relatable. In a way, MLP:FiM fandom is a sort of mass protest against that.

We study hard, and we work hard. We already have enough indigenous darkness in our lives. If we want to see tragedy and darkness and plotlines where the good guy has to be allies with bad guys to beat the seriously evil guy, then we can turn on the fucking news. You no longer need to resort of fiction for that shit.

Remember how the seer lady from Chronicles of Riddick described Riddick as a "different kind of evil" they needed to beat the kind of evil that was eating planets? That is our reality, right now. We don't need reality television anymore because reality reality is lunatic enough that we just no longer need to make this stuff up anymore.

To think we need to look to fiction for darker and more complex themes in our programming indicates a gross detachment from reality.

That is why the MLP:FiM fandom was such a roaring success, and the next generation will continue to be popular until the rest of our entertainment industry catches up with the fact that people want something sweet and innocent and wholesome on the television screen again.

We want Leave it to Beaver style programming, right now.

However, the novel length fanfics ironically have a lot more depth, and I strongly suggest reading some of them. Some of them are surprisingly deep, considering the simplicity of the show.

Anyhow, I was just devouring another of those, lately.

Take care!

Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others,

Having to backdate farther than I have before, but I have a good excuse, this time. I have just been completely floored by how amazing this young 19 year old friend has been. He was kicked out of his parents' home for coming out to them as pansexual, and instead of panicking, he moved fast to reach out to a friend to give him temporary housing, applied immediately for employment assistance services and to get resume help, and within a matter of weeks landed a job that he is happy with. He did not waste any time. He got his shit together, and he is on his way to a happy ending.

It is hard to come out, and a lot of time, the reason why is that we are afraid that we cannot make it without the people in our lives that might betray the trust that we are showing them when we come out. We do not always have the option or the self-confidence to strike out on our own to pursue independence. Some of us have disabilities, and some of us just don't have the courage. We often cling to relationships that are unhealthy because we are afraid to leave them, sometimes because there is really nowhere for us to go.

Independence is really worth the hardships that come with the transition. I have been through many of those hardships, and even though I lost weight, had infections, and went through several weird situations, I ended up being happier. I will not tell you that it was easy. That would be a lie. However, being free makes a person feel alive in a way that nothing else really does.

I just got kind of distracted by all of that.

Anyhow, I will try to have the next update out on the actual day that it is dated for.

Thank you to anyone that has been following me and putting up with my late updates,

Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others,

I prefer to send a unifying message to the zooey community, so I sometimes shy away from talking too much about mainstream politics in my blog, maybe more than I should. We have some great people in our community, and they have many different political views. I know what I intend to do this November, but what is important for my fellow zoos to know is that my heart is in doing what I think is right for the zooey community and also for my country. I do not really value you less just because you think differently. I do not make the decisions that I do in order to defeat you, but I make the decisions that I do on behalf of our collective triumph. We are really in this together, even though we think differently, and we really need all of us to make a whole.

For instance, one of my friends is, as far as I can tell, an Austrian-school libertarian, which is something that I guess from his own belief that a non-interventionist approach to society, beyond preserving a monopoly on force, must eventually lead to outcome of equality. He is one of the most important leaders in the zooey community, and he has stuck out his neck a lot, even at the expense of taking criticism from his friends, to try to make sure that everybody has a right to a voice in the zooey community. His dedication to being open to everybody has gotten us into contact with a researcher that might become our best hope of society becoming conscious of how anti-zoo hate has only translated into manufacturing a crisis in our community. If he did not believe that everybody deserved a chance to be heard, then we might not have had that chance.

Another of my friends is a self-described socialist, and he has brought a sense of warmth and kindness to the community. He is a leader, and he has the power to bring people together and to believe that our cause is worth fighting for. He helped to execute and to bring to life the noble vision of one of our community’s greatest heroes. This guy thinks like a revolutionary, and he talks like a revolutionary. He therefore inspires like a revolutionary. When this guy speaks, you can’t help but have a sense of hope. When this guy talks, it is suddenly just a normal part of everyday business that all of us are working together to try to make life better for all zoos.

These people are able to do the different jobs that they do because they think differently.

A television show that my skin-husband and I are watching, right now, is this show on ABC called “The Good Doctor.” You should watch it because the show is about an autistic man that apparently has a special sort of brilliance as a surgeon. The point of the show is that that man thinks differently, but because he thinks differently, it is easy for him to solve problems that other people cannot understand as easily. Human anatomy just makes intuitive sense to him. It’s child’s play for him to perform an emergency surgery in the middle of a crowded airport.

As a community, I think we could benefit from that kind of thinking, which is the idea that we need many different kinds of minds in order for us to all be whole.

I have political, sociological, and economic views of my own.

I trace many of my views back to the great Swedish economist, Professor Johan Gustaf Knut Wicksell. For most people that like to talk about their political views, the name “Professor Wicksell” does not even exist, but to the world’s top economic minds, he has been a giant in the history of economics.

Professor Wicksell, importantly, was a synthesis thinker. He united the theories of the French political economist Professor Léon Walras, the Austrian economist Herr Doktor Professor Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and the English economist and associate of Dr. Malthus, Mister David Ricardo. Those individuals did not think very much like each other at all, and Professor von Böhm-Bawerk was a legend for how much he despised Marxism. Professor Wicksell, though, transformed economics by proving how these disparate theories worked better when they were put together and used as a part of a united theorem.

If I wanted to fan the dumpster-fire, I could discuss Professor Wicksell’s views on the welfare state and progressive taxation. He was really just examining these using the the theory of marginalism, though, and I see absolutely no reason to squander time on political footballs when I could just directly talk about the theory of cumulative process, instead.

The cumulative process is based on the theorem, MV = PY, where M is the supply of money in the economy, V represents the payments structure constant, Y is the employment constant, and P is price. Therefore, the only things here that we are treating as variables, here, are really the money supply and price.

Oh, shit! That’s a lot of math!

Never fear, Alice! Follow the white rabbit, and boldly leap down that rabbit-hole!

*transforms into a gryphon and clicks hir beak*

Come on!

We can apply this theorem to sociology.

P is the inverse of the level of effort that it would take, in order to get someone to accept you if you as generally having good moral character, if are out to them as a zoophile or any politically unknown group. Essentially, it indicates how much people are willing to bet that, in spite of your incomprehensible and widely misunderstood sexuality, you are really an okay person.

M is the general supply of social acceptance in society, which means that M is lower if you are in a culture that is centered around the rejection of either one group of people or the other. If you are among progressive liberals, your degree of M in the social economy is low if they are focused chiefly on how much they dislike Donald Trump, and if you are among conservative Republicans, your degree of M in the social economy is low if they are focused on how much they hate Joe Biden.

However, this could happen also in the comic book superhero culture. If you are surrounded by people who are supposedly Marvel fans, but they are mostly talking about how much they think DC sucks, then your supply of M in the economy is low.

Regardless of what subculture or political milieu you are in, you can often tip the balance in favor of increasing the social equivalent of M by diverting the topic from giving negative feedback to rival groups over to giving positive feedback to relatively liked individuals. Therefore, as we approach November, let’s assume that you actually are a Democrat: rather than Trump-bashing, you would manipulate the social atmosphere by discussing your activities that you have engaged in to support Democratic political campaigns, and if you want to, you can make a further slap against negativity by admitting if you also supported the campaign of a Republican that happens to have a good track-record for being answerable to the electorate and keeping her promises.

When you turn the social discussion in a relatively positive direction, you thereby build up in people a habit of seeing the good in others.

If we apply Professor Wicksell’s cumulative process theory, what happens first is that, due to the higher supply of social acceptance in the social economy, you are thereby able to increase your own selling price, which means that it becomes easier to obtain the social acceptance that constitutes your profit. You have induced people into a situation where they are more willing than before to make new investments in new kinds of people that they have not tended to accept in the past, which is a win for you.

What really makes this like the cumulative process is that, when people start making new investments in new kinds of people, you thereby make the atmosphere more welcoming to incoming diversity, so rather than socially banking on “savings,” which would be to buttress the acceptance of groups that are already important in that milieu (such as gay rights or women’s rights if you are in a more liberal milieu), the people would be banking instead on new investments, which are really substantially more lucrative because of the new diversity that is added in spite of those new investments constituting a higher social risk.

Essentially, if the people you hang out with are heavily focused on negativity, they are like an economy where those that have financial means are putting their money into savings accounts or buying gold, since they want to wait for a more opportune and more safe time to start taking new social risks. They only really want to lift up groups of people that they are already prejudiced to believe deserve to be lifted up, even though doing so really accomplishes little in a culture where the acceptance of those groups of people really seems to go without saying.

If the people you hang out with are heavily focused on positivity, they are like an economy where those that have financial means are looking for new and unique ways they can try to increase their level of diversity. Instead of engaging in virtue-signaling by pronouncing their support for causes that everybody already accepts, at this point, they start sticking their necks out to start taking new risks. This actually does pay off more often than it does not, so as you build up people’s confidence in the efficacy of novelty being a means of enhancing them, you thereby create a recursive system of growth leading to more growth.

In other words, you can manipulate the social market by being a positive person.

I love my friends, but I want my friends to see that their diversity of thought is really a good thing. One of your friends might be a crazy Austrian libertarian, but you are a crazy Marxian (or Ricardian) socialist. What you have in common is that you are both beautifully crazy.

Most everyone’s mad, here. That’s why I am happy to be a part of this robust and diverse community. I understand how diversity of thought among us will help us grow. One thing that I know about society is that it's always a good idea to follow the weirdos, the outcasts, and the odd ducks of society. Wherever they go, you will find risk-takers and innovators. Wherever you find them, you will find a generation of social entrepreneurs.

Let's build the next culture of love.

Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others,

One of my regrets in life is that I only had one experience at tabletop roleplay, but I really loved my one and only experience at it. The gaming was done in a spirit of lighthearted fun, and nobody took the game all that seriously. I was a little bit put off by the fact that we were playing an evil campaign with a sort of undead theme, but as we got into the game, I realized that it can really be incredibly comical to roleplay the internal buffoonery and shenanigans of bad guys.

In general, I have thought of myself as having a chaotic-good alignment. "Chaotic" characters are the revolutionaries, the insurrectionists, the pranksters, and the other people in the story that like to stir up the status quo. A chaotic-good character is a sort of Robin Hood-like personality.

"Chaotic" is not, in the D&D universe, cast as necessarily antithetical to being organized, though, and chaotic characters can have a sort of sense of organization of their own. "Chaotic" is merely posed in opposition to "lawful," so even though you might act with logic and organization, there are times when there is really a need to overthrow the old paradigms in how things are done.

Let me tell you an example of how the chaotic-good character fits into the real world. I am going to appear to shift gears on you, here, but bear with me. If you are a little bit knowledgeable about economic theory, philosophy, and history, then you might have heard of Knut Wicksell, who was the father of the Stockholm school of economics that formed the basis for the Keynesian theory that really governs the economics of most of the incredibly wealthy Trans-Atlantic world.

On a side-note, us Trans-Atlanteans are not really either Marxist or capitalists: we are Keynesians, and even Milton Friedman admitted, once, "We are all Keynesians, now." If you have even tried to really educate yourself on modern economics, then John Maynard Keynes has at least been some kind of an influence on your actual views because if Keynes has not at least touched your philosophy, then you are a hack and therefore deserve for everybody to laugh at you. There are still hardcore neo-classicists out there even in the upper echelons of economics, but even they can't get away from the influence of Keynes.

However, Knut Wicksell has one important advantage over John Maynard Keynes insofar as winning my undying affection. He went to prison. In the time when Knut Wicksell was teaching, there were still enforceable laws against blasphemy in Sweden.

As another aside, a part of why religion is not as popular in the Nordic states is really related to the fact that they kept on locking up anybody that espoused religious views that were not canon with the Lutheran church. The widespread atheism of the Nordic states is really less a testament of the reason and rationality of the Scandinavian way of thought, and it has a lot more to do with the Lutheran church's profound incompetence at making friends and serious lack of humility. Religion has remained a more significant influence in the United States, by comparison, chiefly because we are more free-wheeling and self-made and individualist in our various approaches to it, so if you want to say "beer is what God wants me to drink at communion now" and still call yourself a Christian, people might look at you weird; however, they will not make any serious effort to stop you. In the Nordic states and much of western Europe, their churches were still jockeying for absolute spiritual domination, and their religious institutions often spent most of their time focused on making life as unbearable as they possibly could for either other religious institutions or lone wolf spiritualists or heretics. The Lutherans have really been uniquely incompetent at retaining their friendships, and the mistake that really put the final nail in the coffin was to set up an arrangement where you were automatically obligated to include a tithe on your tax forms unless you specifically stated, on a public document, that you didn't want to tithe a part of your hard-earned wages to the Lutheran church. The sheer bullying and moral intimidation inherent in this is one of the reasons why the people of the Nordic states did not really feel sorry for the Lutherans when some rabid black metal fans started setting their churches on fire; however, the black metal fans that did this were really a bunch of lunatics and not really people that you want to follow, even if you like black metal and dislike religion. Trust me, there are other things those church-burning wackertoons have said and done that you would probably find to be appalling. Notably, though, it was the Lutheran church's own fault that people's sympathy for them was not as overflowing with warmth and saccharine compassion as it might have been if the Lutheran church had not chronically bullied their people, and the relative humility of the Lutheran church in the 21st Century is directly related to the fact that they are aware of how badly they have shit the bed and aware of the fact that one more political miscalculation will get the last dregs of their entire institution dumped into the Atlantic ocean. The lesson here is that if you want your religious institutions to remain popular, then honor religious diversity, rather than creating grave-faced witch-hunts to harass, shame, and imprison anybody that has a vaguely heterodox point-of-view.

Digressions are chaotic, I know.

Knut Wicksell, though, made some absolutely hilarious remarks about the Virgin Birth of Jesus in a lecture that he gave in 1908, and I really wish that I had been there because he apparently triggered some grave-faced Lutheran snowflake so badly that Knut Wicksell was found guilty of the crime of blasphemy and, as a consequence, he ended up serving a two-month prison sentence, which was intended to convert him into being a humble, repentant sissy that would meekly crawl on his belly to the altar and pray for the forgiveness of his many sins so that he could become a reformed and submissively obedient Lutheran. Knut Wicksell, notably, only laughed all that much harder and went back to work.

The Lutherans brought it on themselves, people. They only have themselves to blame.

However, Knut Wicksell had spent his career pissing on everything in the world that was sacred. Knut Wicksell was ultimately more of an Austrian than he was a Marxist, and Austrians are very libertarian and tend to believe that interfering in the natural flow of the economy is generally just going to disrupt the system and impede its growth. However, Knut Wicksell's study of the theoretical work of the classical economist David Ricardo led Wicksell to the conclusion that, contrary to what Austrians might have wanted to believe, a liassez-faire policy would not really lead to a natural equalization in the distribution of wealth, and in the spirit of slaughtering sacred cows for fun, Wicksell created a powerful mathematical defense for why Karl Marx was actually right about one of his observations, which was that--under pure capitalism--the rich were destined to get richer while the poor were destined to get poorer.

In fact, Austrians are really very egalitarian, and it is not natural to Austrian thinking to take a positive view toward inequality. The Austrians just tend to blame inequality on excessive intervention, and they believe that their libertarian religion will lead to the world becoming a prosperous and egalitarian utopia full of diligent and hard-working and empowered people filled to the brim with the spirit of freedom and Calvinist work-ethic. Their insistence upon defending this belief verges on religious fanaticism.

Wicksell, though, is a man that does not care a flying rat's ass about anybody's fucking sacred cow. He was ultimately a chaotic character in the history of economics. He was someone that upended the holy institutions that came before him. He had an internal sense of order, which chaotic characters often do, but he would not kneel submissively before any other man's altar. He was never going to be doctrinaire. Hardcore Austrians hate Knut Wicksell because Knut Wicksell took their own theories and created an economic system that actually does what the Austrians erroneously believed would happen naturally under a liassez-faire government, and he did it without resorting totalitarian Marxism as his proposed remedy.

He proposed a magnificently expensive welfare state instead! The Swedes loved it!

Therefore, my opinion on how to create a strong chaotic character, when you are playing D&D, is to also give that character a sort of internal moral compass that that character believes in more strongly than the prevailing law of the land. Instead of creating a character that just does things that are random or wacky, give that character a set of beliefs that is so strong that that character would break all of the rules of society in order to pursue those beliefs.

If you pay attention to the flow of my digressions, it might look superficially like I was jumping topics a lot, but I really was not. All of my digressions there followed a central theme and flow, which was centered around the fact that I really do not have respect for someone that is doctrinaire. I follow people that are synthesis thinkers and that create new and wonderful things. If someone wants to win my heart, they must first be willing to break the rules, but secondly, they must prove that their reasons why are good ones.

If you play D&D, you can play a chaotic character that follows a sense of cartoon wackiness if you want to, but in the long-run, a chaotic-good character is implied to have an internal moral compass. That is not really random. That character has a clear guiding light in life. That character clearly has a set of beliefs that are important to that character.

I see myself as chaotic-good, but I am not random. I just know that a sickened system of beliefs or an unjust set of laws needs to be challenged. I might slaughter and cook your sacred cows, my Austrian friends, but my reasons why are not about destroying everything that you believe. On the contrary, my belief is that there is a better way of protecting the core and the essence of your beliefs.

A belief in liberty is one of the unique properties of the educated middle-class. Without a strong middle-class and a relatively egalitarian economy, your society is always going to be prone to authoritarianism. As long as there is an entrenched elite that has a vested interest in beating down anyone that could challenge them and a downtrodden class that is ever tempted to revolt and create an authoritarian kleptocracy, the cause of liberty tends to be a fading dream. You cannot produce libertarians without an educated middle-class.

Liberty is wonderful, but only Wicksell's vision and the visions of people that were influenced by Wicksell really gives liberty a chance to spread its wings. I am not really the adversary of the core beliefs of the Austrians. I have my own ideas about how to pursue them. I admire the ideals of the Austrians, but I am not their slave. I only slaughter and cook their sacred cows to save the temple that really has meaning to me.

I am chaotic-good.

I am Sigma.

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others,

What a great conversation I had with one of my oldest friends in the furry fandom.

By the way, I was not at FeralCon, but I was actually very pleased to hear about the emergence of a feral-themed furry convention. I have always liked the four-paw-drive characters a lot better than I ever liked human bodies with animal heads, which to me always looked profoundly weird. I would never go to a furry convention unless I could go in a quad suit while being walked on a leash, and my husband is not that open-minded. If you want to see Sigma in a quad suit, then hold your convention in the depths of winter when it is subfreezing out. When that is on the table, then I will start taking donations to buy one. I will start a Go Fund Me. I am actually being cheeky and humorous, here. I would buy my own quad suit.

Let me tell you this straight up: I love sociology. Officially, sociology as an actual science goes back to the time of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. By the way, I am not with either Marx or Durkheim, but while I am not doctrinaire anybody at all, I am more sympathetic with Max Weber, whose works would influence the Frankfurt School that was founded during the Weimar Republic. However, that kind of modern sociology is really an outgrowth of discussions that philosophers were having way back in the time of Plato, himself.

However, Polybius was really the most influential philosopher in regard to the modern sociology and philosophy of government. For instance, the "separation of powers" principle in the Constitution of the United States actually comes directly from Polybius. Polybius was one of the earliest and the most ardent advocates of the principle of mixed government. The fact that mixture and balance appeals to me also affects my appreciation of Max Weber.

Oh, but whoever thinks that I am going to become one of Weber's doctrinaire disciples is in for a disappointment. Sorry, @ZTHorse, but Knut Wicksell won my heart by getting himself locked away in prison for two months over a hilarious satire of the Virgin Birth of Jesus. Yes, Wicksell was a belligerent and outspoken atheist that was living in a country where, at the time, you could literally spend two months in prison for blasphemy. Weber did not have that kind of balls or that kind of cheek. This is the primary reason why you should start listening to Knut Wicksell.

However, I do not care a flying biphallic rodent's rectum what Knut Wicksell said about sociology because Knut Wicksell was not a sociologist. Knut Wicksell was an economist that successfully created the synthesis between Austrian School, Lausanne School, and classical economics (particularly as articulated by David Ricardo). This synthesis built the foundation for modern economics, which continue to be a very powerful force in American economics. He is one of my heroes, but he did not have very much to say about society or culture.

That is a shame because I think that the Austrian school of economics, with its cycles, could also be adapted to the examination of how cultures seem to go through the sorts of cycles that were discussed by Polybius and other philosophers of his time.

This brings me to the discussion of the Strauss-Howe theory of generational change. Strauss-Howe is not really doing something unique or original, but they are building upon the concept of cycles that were discussed by Polybius. However, remember: I am not doctrinaire ANYBODY. On the other hand, I do admire Strauss-Howe's concept that society goes through reasonably predictable stages of social change over roughly the course of an ideal (ie: wealthy and established and therefore socially influential) human lifetime, which goes on for about four generations (the time it takes for a grandfather to see his grandchildren graduate from college).

However, it looks to me like Strauss-Howe are talking about a sort of boom-and-bust cycle, which also makes their theory a bit of departure from the three-stage cycle that was discussed by Polybius and his contemporaries. Because of this, I think that Strauss-Howe might have been influenced by the Austrian School. In fact, I can almost guarantee that Neil Howe is at least somewhat of a libertarian. The fixation on cycles is just so unbelievably Austrian School, and even if you are a hardcore quasi-socialist Keynesian or Stockholmer, you are influenced by the Austrian School, whether you like it or not, which has a libertarian undercurrent that goes back to Max Weber, one of the Austrian School's influences.

To put the Strauss-Howe generational theory into simpler and less intellectually self-masturbatory terms, the theory adapts the old Greek concept of Kyklos to a sort of boom-and-bust cycle, where society waxes and wanes, over the course of an average octogenerian human lifetime, between communitarian and individualistic value-systems. Communitarian value-systems, in general, are a product of society successfully coming together during a time of crisis, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. In the post-crisis world, political leaders are valued based on whether or not they have the sorts of unifying leadership qualities that were helpful in bringing society together during the crisis.

However, these communitarian kinds of leaders, while effective, tend to have a serious problem: they are oppressively authoritarian. They infantilize their population, and they produce an offensive nanny state that revolves around the shaming of anyone that does not toe the line. On the bright side, they are usually successful at producing, for a while, a booming economy and an overall optimistic society that has high confidence in its government. They just create a system where it seems like anything you do that you were not ordered to do is shameful, somehow.

In fact, if you want a quick mindfuck to brighten your day, then I suggest reading some of the literature that was written by George Orwell during the 1940's. That guy was one incredibly astute individual. However, what is creepy is how similar his observations about society, at the time, were to what is going on today.

Successive generations come to resent living under a moral police state, though. The reason why American society did not unify behind their government during Vietnam was that, during the Red Scare, they had been subjected to witch-hunts and moral repression over even the slightest fasimile of wrongthink, and the people had it up to their eyeballs. They were sick of it.

Here is how you understand the Boomers: they were living in a culture that they did not really have any authentic sense of ownership over. It was something their grandparents' generation had given birth to and which their parents' generation had fed and nurtured. The Boomers really felt that they were being treated as silent partners. Instead of being invited to play a legitimate role as authors in their culture, they were just told to "shut up and follow the leader." Naturally, the Boomers stuck up their collective middle-finger and said, "Hell, no! We won't go!" The culture they were being indoctrinated into was something that belonged to their parents and grandparents, but it could never really belong to them. They realized that they needed to have their own journey in life and to figure out what they really believed.

Therefore, the Boomers set off a drive toward greater personal liberation and the seeking of an individual identity, and when they were on their rise to power, a lot of the social out-groups that had been ruthlessly persecuted and demonized, during their parents' time on the throne of power, gathered around them as allies in the pursuit of personal liberation.

Now, I am about to tell you why us zoophiles are, for about 25-35 years, in for a very long uphill battle. First, the good news is that, as individuals, we are likely to prosper because everybody will be prospering. Therefore, a lot of zoophiles that are in their late teens are going to be incredibly leery of rocking the boat. That generation of zoos will mostly be people that, overall, are satisfied with "the way things are." Even though they might be persecuted if they come out publicly, life will be tolerable for them, and they will not see themselves as having any vested interest in picking up the game-board and throwing the pieces into the air to see where those pieces fall. Everybody is going to have a very collectivist mindset, and zoos will follow suit.

In other words, the Homeland Generation is going to be the Generation of "Any Functioning Adult 2020." They will grow up believing very strongly that a leader worth following is mature, communitarian, a team-player, and at heart incredibly conventional.

Our efforts to organize are therefore likely to be restricted to niche subcultures. I am not even talking about widespread acceptance in the furry fandom. I am talking about the emerging feral sub-fandom that is starting to grow out of the furry fandom, but even among them, only a minority will really have a sense of easy acceptance of zoophiles. We might have niche acceptance among the tattoo subculture, but that will be one parlor in one American city where the artist is an out zoophile that proudly displays his zetas surrounded by hoofprints and pawprints in the window, not really a widespread internal movement in the tattoo subculture. We might have one shooting range in the entire country where a zoophile with a big zeta tattoo fearlessly goes in completely sleeveless.

In other words, our revolution is not something that is going to happen in a fortnight, but we are looking at a long-term war-of-attrition to claim small pockets of acceptance, and it's going to drag on and on and on.

However, those venues are going to be the kinds of out-of-the-way venues that we can expect to be preferred by the children of the Homeland Generation. These are going to be people that want to go down a diverging path. They are going to be attracted to anything that is culturally offbeat. They are going to be attracted to secret rooms within secret places.

By the way, they are going to fuck a lot. We are going to have to build a Lunar colony just for the sake of warehousing their spawn.

Those of us that really genuinely want things to change are therefore going to have to spend a generation shaping and influencing those sorts of offbeat out-of-the-way venues. We are going to have to make close trusted friends with people in underground subcultures that, for right now, are ignored by mainstream society. We are going to have to make close personal friends at progressive-minded gun clubs, cheeky animal-themed tattoo parlors, and feral-themed sub-fandoms of furry.

Assuming that I am correct that Strauss-Howe was ultimately correct to identify a "communitarian v. individualism" boom-and-bust cultural cycle, then we have our work cut out for us. Those of us that care a rat's ass about trying to change our situation are going to have to work the hardest we ever have in our lives during this period. We are going to be a minority even among zoophiles, but there is going to be a lot of work to get done. We cannot just passively wait for that opportunity because if we wait until that opportunity comes, then we will not be ready to seize upon it when it does.

This is really the time when those of us that care need to be at our most busy, and this is why, for now, I will continue developing and discussing my ideas as your devoted and patient zooey blogger,

Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others,

I guess that other zoophiles run into toxic anti-zoo individuals pretty often. Most people, even if they do not agree with zoophilia, can understand, "back off," and getting that through, to people around me, has been very useful to me when dealing with the public's chronic incompetence at dealing positively with the subject of zoophilia.

What does not work for me very well is humoring the bogus arguments that anti-zoos try to present me with that supposedly prove that I am really a dangerous, probably homicidally evil individual. The more I feed their drivel, the more I feed other warped individuals that want to treat this as something to stir up a panic over. It's a lot like the same self-defeating behavior as atheists that try to engage in "debates" with "creationist scientists."

When Bill Nye entered into a "debate" with Ken Ham, for instance, here is why that backfired. Ken Ham had the advantage and has always had the advantage of not really being confined to a responsibility to say anything that is remotely logically coherent or true or directly addressing the point. Bill Nye's mistake was essentially that he brought a knife to a gunfight. Worse, the publicity generated by it just brought in a huge amount of money for Ken Ham, and it really might have set back the cause of science.

If you are a person that has moral integrity, a person that is a brazen hypocrite will always be able to at least appear to dance circles around you. That person's worldview is based on nothing more than illusion. That person does not have a personal sense of obligation to discuss articles of substance.

Furthermore, whenever you are part of a widely misunderstood and once absolutely socially invisible group that our culture has not yet really perfected thinking about clearly, you are not the scientist, but you are the subject to be studied. If you want people to understand zoos, you need them to understand you, and they will not ever understand you unless they have had time to get to know you, watch how you behave, weigh you, measure you, and actually get enough information about you, as a person, in order to make a fair assessment of what kind of person you are.

The phony "debater" wants to take away that scientist's access to fair and valid information about you. The phony "debater" wants to drive you into a rage and thereby create an illusion that you are an inherently angry person when you really are not an angry person at all. The phony "debater" wants to create an illusion that you are determined to constantly throw your zooiness up in other people's faces when, really, the only reason you mention it at all is to keep the revelation of it from becoming an issue later.

Most people are actually pretty smart, and if you give them access to valid information, which is their knowledge of what kind of person you really are, then it is really only a matter of time before they start figuring out that, as a zoophile, you are really just another person that loves animals. Maybe you are even more fanatical than most.

In reality, the best lesson that I learned for functioning around non-zoos is to just tell people that want to make it a constant issue to back off and to defend my right to be an out zoophile that wants to talk about gardening or beer or football or whatever common interest I have with my non-zoo friends.

In fact, this is why I insist on hanging out in non-zooey communities. Zoo is a part of what I am, and I hang out in zooey online communities if I want to talk about things that are relevant to animal sex. I am not in the closet, to other zoophiles, about the fact that I am also a libertarian socialist, and sometimes, that does come up when I am talking to my fellow zoos. Not all zoos agree with my views on this, and that's okay. Most of them can respect that. Most of them, even ones that can disagree with me, can have a mutually respecting conversation with me about it and still be friends with and not have to always agree.

However, there are also people, in the zooey community, that are not capable of that kind of respectful conversation or that peaceful coexistence of points of view, and when I run into that kind of person, I have to get very rude. I have to tell that person, "You suck, back off." It is not that person's views that are the problem. The problem is that that person is toxic. The answer, in that situation, is not to engage that person in a protracted so-called "debate," which just legitimizes that person and really makes me look like somehow I equate to that person when I don't, but the answer is to stand up and say, "I already told you, back off."

When I stood up to that person that just wanted to troll me with a phony "debate," I was actually able to have a very fun conversation with others that, while we did not always agree, were able to honor the spirit of a lighthearted debate between friends, and I ended up liking them more, not less, even ones that I disagreed with on the subject of the moment. In fact, a couple of people that I had started out the conversation seeing as douchebags ended up being fun guys, and we had what I think were some positive exchanges. I would have never learned how much I really like these people if I had gotten distracted by someone that just wanted to waste my time.

Likewise, I am not going to be in the closet as a zoo around my non-zoo friends. I have a few friends that mainly want to talk with me about Noam Chomsky, and they are very firmly in the libertarian socialist or "socialist marketarian" camp in their political views. That is our point of agreement. When we talk with each other, we are talking with people that mostly agree with our views and with whom we want to develop our views and learn more great authors we can look to for inspiration. They know that I am a zoophile, but that is not really the focus of what I want to talk about with them. There are many parts to who I am, and this is one.

When I run into bullies and time-wasters and phony debaters at any venue, zooey or non-zooey, let me tell you the only language that they can understand: "This is personal because you got personal, and I am telling you to back off." Stand up for yourself. People are not stupid. People understand that if you just do not like a person or how that person talks to you, you are in the right to ask that person to back off. You do not really have to prove anything with that person.

As a zoo, you are not just a zoo, but you are many things. Zoo is just one. In this time where there are still anti-zoo witch-hunts raging in several different subcultures and interest groups, one of the survival skills that are a must-have is the skill of rebuffing someone that you cannot take on good faith and who will never take you good faith.

And the chief thing you need to know is this: people are smart if you give them a chance. You are not the scientist, but you are the subject for the scientist to research. You do not really have to prove anything to a phony debater or a time-waster. Respect your non-zoo friends, and trust them to figure out what is right, eventually. Give the mini-JMB's out there a chance to figure you out.

If you do not trust your non-zoo friends well enough to know that you don't really have to prove anything to a phony debater in front of them, then I ask you this: why do you waste any time on them at all? I pick my non-zooey friends well enough that I know for a fact that they are not deceived by bullshitters and frauds. I respect them, and they respect me. If I did not respect them and trust them, then I would not be hanging out with them.

I am many things besides being a zoo, and I am also many things besides being a libertarian socialist; however, regardless of which part of me I am expressing at the moment, I am always

Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others,

Happy Zoo Pride Week!

Did you know that the United States of America has 6 time zones if you include Alaska and Hawaii time? That means that, in 4 out of 6 time zones, I am actually being totally honest about my timeliness! That reduces to two out of three, and in the famous words of Meat Loaf, "two out of three ain't bad."

Let me level with you about something, zoos: we have got to start getting over our political differences.

The truth is that both major political parties are really politically diverse, and any given political party is based on the building of something that is called a "political tent." The people under that tent might hate each other, for the most part, but all of the people that are under that tent realize that, once they start throwing stones at the other guys that are holding up its tent-poles, then the whole tent is going to collapse on top of them.

Right now, one of the tent-poles that hold up the right-wing happens to be in power, but what you need to know is that that particular branch of the American right-wing is only a small subset. A man that was raised in New York City as part of a rich and influential family does not necessarily have the same worldview as someone that was raised in rural North Carolina. In New York City, being VERY openly gay or transgender has been profoundly normal since the 1970's, so in that city's culture, being accepting of that does not take you being open-minded or progressive. It takes you being at least slightly interested in fitting in with your indigenous culture.

The left-wing is also a political tent, and not all of them are socialists or people that hate guns. The left-wing actually has a strong and influential social libertarian faction, and many of them are actually lifetime gun-owners. However, they have their own causes that they are trying to support, and they know that they are not going to realize those causes unless they help support everybody that is under that political tent, even ones they disagree with.

Also, Jewish people, in the United States, are united under a political tent, even though their politics are otherwise the opposite of each other, on almost every other subject that exists, besides the fact that none of them want Americans to think it's okay to murder Jewish people. On everything else, they might want to set each other on fire, but if it is clear that any American politician or celebrity is an antisemitic bastard, they are united on the point that something has got go be done about that, since antisemitism, once it starts to spread, can become a cancer.

LGBT are also standing under a political tent. In fact, there is a very conservative, very prudish sub-set of transgender people that were extremely hostile toward introducing autogynephilia into discussions about sexology, and Dr. Bailey, after he published his book where he famously discussed it more openly than usual, was outright under attack, with certain influential transgender activists trying to bully and shame his coworkers into renouncing him or distancing themselves from him. Autogynephilia is still borderline taboo, even within the LGBT community, and for decades, there has been this subset of transgender people that have been pushing a narrative that "gender is not about sex." They had become so invested in this narrative that, when a scientist started talking about autogynephilia as a real thing that could be studied under fMRI, they went into a mortal panic because they saw a large part of their narrative disintegrating. This does not mean that all gay people are this frail or this prudish, but whether all of us LGBT like it or not, our community has its own indigenous right-wing. When you run into members of the LGBT community that are very thin-skinned and think that there is a police order that you HAVE to use certain words around them, that's what you are really dealing with. The rest of us, who are not really that thin-skinned, cannot really throw them under the bus too publicly because, even though we don't really think that way, they are holding up their tent-pole. We are holding up ours. We are not about to publicly start throwing stones at other people that are helping to hold up the tent. We adhere to the principles of respectful disagreement.

Us zoophiles come from many different walks of life, and the only thing we really have in common is that we have a vested interest in protecting both ourselves and our animals. We know that we could no more stop being zoophiles than we could casually walk out of our own skins, so the only path we really have forward is to build a political tent around trying to influence social and political and scientific leaders to try to look at us as human beings that are rightful and mostly peaceful stakeholders in society, not really people that are inherently dangerously criminal, and in this interest, it is important for us to learn how to work together with people that, for other reasons, we might otherwise want to pour gasoline over and set on fire.

Our political tent is going to have to be built across ideological lines. Socialists and libertarians are going to have to work together to the same ends. We are going to have to learn how to have respectful disagreements with people that, insofar as their contributions to the zooey community, we also admire. It does not matter if you hate vegetarianism: if a zoophile succeeds at winning over a subsection of the vegan movement to our side, then don't fuck with it. It does not matter if you hate guns: if a zoophile manages to make friends with a bunch of otherwise open-minded but also single-mindedly fanatical gun nuts, then don't fuck with it. These disparate groups of people, within the zooey community, have their own personal connections that are related to their own ideals and personal backgrounds. We all might not agree with everything some of our allies believe, but if we don't want to fuck up our own cause, we still have to learn how to get along with them.

If us zoophiles let ourselves get torn apart by our ideological difference, then we end up being a circular firing squad, and I think that this is what happened to our community in the late 1990's and early 2000's. When we first started coming together, I think there was so much tension over our differences that our own infighting may have created a "circular firing squad" effect, leading our first attempt to emerge to collapsing so badly that we ended up worse off than before, even leading to some zoos starting to believe it was a bad idea to try to change anything.

We zoophiles, at least us zoophiles that are left that have hope left in us, will have to learn the art of political engineering, and a large part of the art of political engineering is understanding the concept of a political tent. Under a political tent, you may find that you are working hand-in-hand and sharing resources with people that you do not always agree with.

Respectful disagreement is the single most fundamentally necessary skill that you will ever learn while operating under the principle of a political tent. It's okay if two people that disagree with each other get into a heated discussion. It is not really helpful if they start losing respect for each other as equal stakeholders, in the cause of making this world a safer place for us zoos.

This kind of political engineering takes time, but I think that, with enough determination, we can set up a system of relations between different wings of our movement that makes it possible for us to openly express what we believe without throwing stones at other tent-poles that, in the long-run, it does not really serve us to try to undermine. It is not bad to express everything that we believe. It is an issue if we make others feel that they can't.

That has been my thinking over the course of this past Zoo Pride Week.


Thank you, as always,
Sigma

Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others.

If you are a zoophile, then Animal Farm, by George Orwell, is a book that you ought to consider to be very relevant to you.

Before you read or reread or, assuming you remember it well and have no need to reread it, reflect upon this novel, I want to prime you with a thought, which I want you to bear in mind while reading the book.

Think about how there are some members of the American left that are on an anti-rape moral crusade, and they are certain that if you are not also on an anti-rape moral crusade, then you are a misogynist and knuckle-dragging neanderthal. They are certain that if you even accidentally dream about the idea of defending a politician or celebrity that has been accused of rape or even make the heinous suggestion that they have a right to a fair trial, then it is all but certain that you also are a rapist, and you just might be a pedophile, too! By the way, they hate zoophiles.

Wait a sec! Here I was, under the impression that the sexual prudes were the right-wingers! The left was supposed to stand for equality and for sexual liberation, not for waging moral crusades against the sexually impure! What the fuck?

You have to read Animal Farm yourself to truly understand where I am coming from, here, but what I am driving at, here, comes down to a particular scene that is associated with the quote, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." I do not want to give too many spoilers, here, so if you have not read the book, then please do. If you read the book until you have gotten to that scene, then you will understand that I am not making an endorsement of the right-wing at all.

Instead, I am making a criticism of how the left-wing has lost many of the things about them, which ever set them apart from the right-wing, that I believe made any difference that I genuinely cared about. In the 1990's, I was a young gay man, and in my world, the right-wing was scary. They were hideously mean people that would sneer at you with profound disgust, and if you tried to tell them they were wrong, then they would beat you bloody. At the time, gay rights was one of the darlings of the left, and the left were arguing that sexual prudishness is really outdated, even antediluvian. Because of that, they made me feel safe, and I was ready to listen to them. There were many important things that I learned because I did, and there are many things that I still believe the left are right about.

In the respect that made me want to listen to them in the first place, though, they have changed, not in a good way. In that aspect of them that once made me feel safe, they have been transforming more and more into a caricature of the hate-preaching conservative fundamentalists that once abused me for being gay. Sometimes, I can barely tell them apart.

I am a political orphan. All of us zoos are, and if you are a zoophile that thinks that the right-wing is your friend, then you are in for a rude awakening. The story of Finland's role in World War II makes a useful parable for talking about this.

The thing that most zoos know about Finland is that they are one of the few liberal countries that haven't created a horrifyingly cruel anti-zoophile law, but something else you need to know about them is the incredibly curious position that they were in, during World War II. At the beginning of World War II, the Finnish were technically aligned with the Germans, not because they hated Jews or liked Hitler but because the Russian government was trying to take more of their land, since apparently cutting them off from the Arctic Ocean by taking East Karelia from them was not enough for Stalin. Later on in the war, though, as the Allied Powers, to include the Russians, became focused on defeating Adolf Hitler, who also wanted to take things that did not belong to him, the Finnish government joined the Allied Powers. After World War II, the Finnish were left to pick up the pieces on their own.

If you are a zoophile, what you need to know is that Stalin may be bombing you today, but Hitler is going to be bombing you tomorrow. If you think that either of them is your friend, then you are a fool.

I am a democratic socialist, but trust me: I want nothing to do with the average Berner, and I have many heterodox views for a lefty.

For instance, I think that persecuted and downtrodden minorities ought to be the first people to try to get access to the most powerful weapons they can get, not the last. Unlike a rich conservative Republican who lives safe in a protected community and who will never experience persecution or adversity in their entire life, a persecuted minority could actually get killed because there are literally people in their world that are genuinely certain that they are such terrible monsters that they deserve to die. This applies, whether you are an African-American living in a city controlled by racist police or a zoophile. Unlike the fools at the NRA, we actually need a weapon that we could use to defend ourselves against a government that is literally at war against us.

I believe that Orwell's criticisms of Russian communism, by the way, inspired later writers in the science fiction genre, one of whom was James Blish.

Something that James Blish got into trouble for was a kind of trouble that James Blish and only James Blish could possibly get into. James Blish always had liberal views, even seeming to be an entire lifetime ahead of his time, but among other left-leaning thinkers, in the emerging science-fiction genre, I theorize that he lost patience with all of the people that were saying, "communism would be great if it were done right." James Blish seemed to be answering that sentiment when he said, "fascism would be great if it were done right," and he proposed a scenario where an authoritarian fascist government, led by a group of enlightened despots, had really created a sort of utopian liberal paradise. I think he was just doing it to be a geeky edge-lord, but he spent years arguing for this point-of-view. It colored a large amount of his writing. I think Blish was never really right-wing: he really just wanted to get people to understand how hokey it sounded to try to defend the authoritarian Soviet government for any reason.

In his Cities in Flight series, though, James Blish decided that he would envision a future where the United States and the Soviet Union were at peace between each other, but the reason why was that they had lost all of the characteristics that really made them different, which were really their only redeeming qualities. Out of frustration with this world where your only real choice was the flag of your oppressor, cities all over the world began to take advantage of a new technology that would allow them to safely carry their entire cities off into space, leaving Earth far behind.

People like James Blish and George Orwell were really incredibly liberal individuals. I think they may both have been more than one hundred years ahead of their time. In their time, though, they were political orphans.

When the only option you are allowed to have is the name of your oppressor, and you are told that you have to choose between them, then maybe it is time to stop doing what you are told.

I think it is the moral responsibility of people like us zoophiles, along with other political orphans like us, to start charting a path forward, where we can leave behind the left's newfound passion for hypocrisy and the right's entrenched and ongoing devotion to hypocrisy.

Since we have been among the first to get burned, we don't have an excuse for not recognizing that something has gone wrong.

Like Finland, in the wake of World War II, we are going to be left charting our own path forward, but like Finland, we have the benefit of knowing, far better than anybody, where both the right and the left both went tragically wrong.

Just like Finland eventually benefited from having the least excuse for being deceived, by the political polarization that followed World War II, I think that political orphans like us zoophiles will eventually be glad that we learned this lesson. Just like they were forced to see how insane it was to choose between agents of tyranny, we also are being forced to see how insane it is to choose between agents of tyranny.

I think that us zoophiles may awaken, someday, in a world where we are seen as a role-model and an example to be emulated...but only if we have the guts to try.

I say let's do it, but until it is clear that this is the direction that all of us zoophiles are trying to head in, I will go on pressing for us to have such an awakening as


your devoted and doggedly faithful zooey blogger,
Sigma