The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson? ― A. J. Muste

I’m currently in the process of evaluating Ulysses. Without Messenger, without social networks, I keep writing more (and longer) content than ever and I need a good place to store it all. Anyway - as a part of the evaluation process, I decided to move my library of quotes to Ulysses. I love good quotes and I collect them. Every time I find a good quote I store it for later. It can be something from a book. Something I found online, a piece of article, a quote from a movie, or a video game. I store it all, and use it during online debates (and I love to debate things online; just not on twitter). Since this is my blog, I am going to use it as a gallery of those quotes, so from today, each post will be featuring a random quote from my library. The quotes won’t be related to anything that I’ll write, they will be picked out at random from the whole list. The one above is just that.

I have watched the first hour of the Last of Us 2. Watched it being played by someone else, let’s play style. I wasn’t planning on buying it, I get too nervous playing horror games to really enjoy them. This one, I think I want to experience myself, though. The reviews seem to be all over the place, the critics give it 10/10s, and the player’s score seems to be hovering around 3/10.

I can imagine two scenarios.

  • The game is brilliant, but it features a strong LGBT+ representation, which triggers some assholes.
  • The game story is rather poor, but the critics rate it highly due to the strong LGBT+ cast.

It feels like I’m watching the Star Wars 9 shit storm all over again, except I have more faith in Naughty Dog than I had in Disney.

The GitHub controversy, mentioned last time made me go into a conversation with a friend about race, inequality, opression and all of that. We’ve spent literally hours taking our arguments and counterarguments apart. The upside of all that is that I learned many new things, two of which decided to post here.

One is the idea of Kaffkatrapping

One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap. In this essay, I will show that the kafkatrap is a form of argument that is so fallacious and manipulative that those subjected to it are entitled to reject it based entirely on the form of the argument, without reference to whatever particular sin or thoughtcrime is being alleged. I will also attempt to show that kafkatrapping is so self-destructive to the causes that employ it that change activists should root it out of their own speech and thoughts.

My reference, of course, is to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, in which the protagonist Josef K. is accused of crimes the nature of which are never actually specified, and enmeshed in a process designed to degrade, humiliate, and destroy him whether or not he has in fact committed any crime at all. The only way out of the trap is for him to acquiesce in his own destruction; indeed, forcing him to that point of acquiescence and the collapse of his will to live as a free human being seems to be the only point of the process, if it has one at all.

This is almost exactly the way the kafkatrap operates in religious and political argument. Real crimes – actual transgressions against flesh-and-blood individuals – are generally not specified. The aim of the kafkatrap is to produce a kind of free-floating guilt in the subject, a conviction of sinfulness that can be manipulated by the operator to make the subject say and do things that are convenient to the operator’s personal, political, or religious goals. Ideally, the subject will then internalize these demands, and then become complicit in the kafkatrapping of others.

The funny part is that when I stumbled across that term and the blog on which it was posted I got a little bit scared because literally anything else on that blog was about gun ownership plus some libertarian weird talking points. I stole the quote, added the term to my vocabulary and left. Only after finding the term on Wiktionary some days later I realised that the author of the weird ass blog was no one else but Eric S. Raymond. The Cathedral and the Bazaar’s Eric Raymond.

Another thing I learned, not really while conversing, but while researching the topic, is that the US used to have Slave Breeding Farms. And if that sounds terrible it’s because it was. It was as terrible as it sounds. Actually, it was worse than it sounds, and it sounds… I feel like even if I were a native speaker of English I would struggle to find proper words.

Slave breeding in the United States was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners to systematically force the reproduction of slaves to increase their returns.Slave breeding included coerced sexual relations between male and female slaves, forced pregnancies of slaves, and favoring female slaves who could produce a relatively large number of children. The objective was to increase the number of slaves without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the termination of the Atlantic slave trade.

Selective breeding between slaves with the aim of developing particular physical traits was common. Most slaves were unrestricted in their choice of sexual partners.

Hmm, you know what? That quote I put at the beginnig of the post - it weirdly fits.