Category: Archive

+++
title = “It’s What Happened Around Us”
author = [“Wasps”]
date = 2022-06-17
draft = false
+++

There’s hardly a need for an introduction paragraph. I could post some stock art of a pirate flag and you’d know what spurred this, assuming you haven’t just woken up from a years long coma and resisted the overpowering and righteous urge to hurl yourself through a window. The circus surrounding Johnny “Rape Her Corpse to Make Sure She’s Dead” Depp’s defamation trial aganist Amber Heard has been like asphixiation by helium, its certainly a bad thing no one seems to be handling well but a few people made funny noises because of it so most of us seem fine with it.

I’ve seen quite a lot about how many outlets spent gross amounts of money to drag Amber Heard through the mud. Depp’s anecdote about Heard shitting the bed got more coverage than his previously mentioned admitted desire to rape Heard’s corpse and every half witted response his lawyer managed to squeak out between shoveling handfuls of shit into her gob was treated like the most well played legal strategy since OJ made his hands swell. Its a scene we’ve seen whenever the world is asked to examine the gross reality of violence against women, in fact tactical use of apologia we saw in this trial has already inspired the sludge of the Earth to copy Depp’s tactics in case of their own coming under fire.

I’m not particularly interested in going into the media side of things however, Rayne Fisher-Quann has already done this in spectuaclar fashion, rather I want to look at the other side and talk about why the public is so eager to gobble up such slander. It would be easy to just say “Dumb dumb can’t think for self” and give myself a congratulatory wank, it would also be easy to tip toe around the heart of the matter and make this another episode of Men Bad: Tonight but neither approach offers anything of value or intrest to me (aside from the wank, of course) or you, seeing as how thats the same think piece we read about Kavanaugh and Spacey and Trump and so on.

My goal is not to paint Heard as a feminist icon or Joan of Arc, I’ll point to Fisher-Quann’s piece again with this excerpt;

> … I find no value in flattening the experiences or motivations of either party in this case to fit an easily consumable Marvel movie plotline. I’m not interested in buying into the dominant narrative that treats this trial like a soap opera, with characters that exist to be rooted for and against. Much of the popular discourse acts as though there are only two feasible options when it comes to Heard’s (and, really, any woman’s) innocence: either she’s an evil, psychotic manipulator who’s guilty on all counts, or she must have to be a perfectly innocent angel who’s never done anything wrong. I don’t think Amber Heard is a feminist hero, and I’m not saying this to make my support of her more palatable or to perform impartiality — I’m saying it because she shouldn’t have to be.

Only men get to be complicated in the public eye. We can go round and round on if the latest abortion clinic bomber was really a bad guy or just misunderstood and we can certainly have a sit down conversation on how at fault a man is for the rape of a young woman in a frat house, and you can make quite a killing with a morally grey retelling of Jerffry Dahmer’s crimes, but women will either be all or nothing.

If you can remember the confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh you certainly remember the rape accusations. Everyone with a connection to the outside world had a front row seat to a future supreme court justice getting emotional over calendars and a parade of talking heads discussing if the women accusing Kavanaugh were telling the truth or secretly eating babies when the cameras weren’t pointed at them. More recently, Elon Musk’s defense that anyone who accused him of sexual assasult should be able to rattle off a road map of each fold and flap on his skin. While both the Kavanaugh camp and Musk’s comment were condemned by many they were defended by at least an equal amount. In fact, there seems to be little need to defend them in the media at this point. Ever since some genius said “What if the lady lied though” we’ve gained a never ending parade of online sleuths to instantly fire blindly at any case where a woman threatens a powerful man. This leads me to my central point: Society has never really had an issue with violence against women.

Certainly we like to have a pageant about the thing. I think an apt example is the case of the Exonerated Five, a group of black and latino men accused of violating a jogger in Central Park and jailed on extremely, extremely poor evidence. If you do any reading on this case you’ll find the woman at the center of it, Trisha Meili, is often cast to the side for a focus on racism and injustice in the NYPD. This is not because of some non-existant rivalry between POC and feminist historians but because even at the time of the case she was more a side detail to her own attack. The main feature was that POC were once again tasked to prove they aren’t walking around with boners set to automatically fire on white women. Compare this to white-on-white sex crimes of the day and you find no similar circus. The problem wasn’t that a woman had been raped, the problem was racial etiquette wasn’t upheld. Similarly no one seemed to particularly care about if Heard had been abused or not, I’ve even met people who had no idea that was a central part of the case, but rather if Depp had ever said a naughty word or two. This is what I mean by “society has never really had an issue with violence against women” because we always seem to find a way to shove it out of the way for preferred topics. A rape in a night club will be met with the ghoulish gas explusions questioning what she was wearing, how drunk was she, what was the percise word choice and tone, if her body had at any point released even a molecule of the “lets fuck” phermone that sent the man into a blind frenzy, etc. This even occurs in cases around extremely young victims as any search into your local high school or catholic church’s history will show. But if a rape occurs and the case has even one interesting quality to the vultures who run things such as a minority attacker, relevancy to a hot button issue, or the victim being of high status (the only quality I can think of that takes the victim into account) then we may give her the benefit of the account. I can’t even really call it something similar to the whore/madonna complex, its more like a whore/possible whore in tragic circumstances complex. Its not what happened to us, its what happened around us.

In my stand up, I had a joke about the phrase “consent is sexy.” Essentially, I find it humorous in the most macabre way that we have to make fun sayings and phrases to remind people not to rape. Usually I pair it with things of a similar nature like “I before E except after C” or “Please excuse my dear aunt Sally” to emphasize the juvenile sexuality women have to fight against daily by breaking it down to the most simple level, our own trauma not being empathetic unless it sounds like Dr. Seuss wrote it. I’ve since retired the joke because it depresses me and this is precisely why, it’s not just how we talk about violence but how we don’t talk about it that follows this pattern. It isn’t enough that a human being has been beaten, raped, and left to die, we need to be able to pick out a greater narrative from it. After all, women are harmed all the time, that’s just life, come back when you’ve got something I’ll change the channel to hear about.

Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious asserts that the enjoyment of humor comes from its relation to suppression of serious talk. In order for a joke to work you have to overcome any inhibitions around the topic of the humor and then allow themself to laugh at the humor derived from the topic. For example, if someone laughs at a rape joke you can fairly accurately infer their distaste for rape comes from a societal teaching and not any personal moral ground. Now with that in mind, look at the following:

{{< figure src="/ox-hugo/amberheardtweet.jpeg" >}}

Any laughs that could be had from this tweet hinge on the viewer finding the appearance of a woman reliving immense trauma for a televised audience to be hilariously bad acting, to view a tale of domestic abuse the way a group of friends would view Manos: The Hands of Fate. Now consider the fact that this tweet and many similar tweets, memes, and videos went viral because of how many people saw a woman recounting true horror and lost themselves giggling. A popular saying online is that you can’t force a meme, that you can’t make something a popular image or joke without it naturally gaining that statue. No one had to force the now meme status of Heard’s case, we had already accepted that a woman’s trauma was entertainment first and tragedy second.

+++
title = “Iskra’s Choice”
author = [“Jacob Little”]
date = 2022-02-20
draft = false
+++

{{< figure src="/ox-hugo/sexuation.jpg" >}}

This was originally going to be three (or four) different posts, but I realized they were all connected and this was going to work out pretty well. Each section is smaller than the last, forgive me for this but that’s just how my point developed. A large part of this is an elucidation of sexual difference for its relevance to Iskraism. The rest is an incomplete explanation of Iskraism’s combination of sophistry and philosophy. A lot of Badiou is implicit in this, but I have purposely chose not to cite anything or formally quote any specific text to avoid entering into the discourse of the master or an academic discourse. We are not academic! This is perhaps the discourse of the hysteric, but Lacan’s four discourses are pretty much a sham anyways. In any case, it’s purposely informal, I use a lot of parentheticals (the most useful punctuation, and yet the most underused. e.e. cummings shows off the power of parentheses the best).

The great French psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan is often critcized for being difficult to understand. People exposed to the density of his Ecrits and the ramblings of his seminars have recourse to the accusation of “charlatry” towards Lacan. I do not seek to redeem Lacan in the eyes of those who do not (or refuse to) understand him, but it is clear Lacan himself did not help his case for those accusing him of obscurity. His _mathemes_ such as the one above represent a side of Lacan that is painful to work through for those unfamiliar with the mathematical formalism he attempts to reckon with. What’s ironic about the _mathemes_ is that despite their obvious difficulty, Lacan actually first created them for the purpose of teaching others about psychoanalysis. At the most simple, a _matheme_ is a formalization of a psychoanalytic idea or truth into mathematical formulas. Most people write this off as entirely unecessary, claiming that since Lacan has to then explain the formulas in normal language, he would be better off to just explain it without the formulas in order to reduce obscurity.

What I seek to show is the necessity of such univocal expression that the _matheme_ contains along with the typical equivocal expressions of language. Lacan refers to this equivocation through slips of the tongue, jokes, wordplay, and other examples of the joyful mess of language as “_lalangue_” a french neologism where he just combines the article _la_ with the french word for language or tongue, _langue_. For Lacan, _lalangue_ is the only way a subject can first even enter into the realm of language. A baby starts out in language by simply babbling and playing around with sounds and repetition. The domain of the symbolic structure then enters and sets rules down for language, grammar and spelling, which enacts a repression of _lalangue_. It is the task of the psychoanalyst then, to pay attention to instances of _lalangue_ for what they say about the unconscious.

## Sexuation {#sexuation}

The _matheme_ above is (perhaps unfortunately) one of the simpler formulas out there. This contains the famous “formulas of sexuation”: four formulas describing the cut or difference in the two sexes with the great conclusion that “there is no sexual relation”, there is no one to one correspondence between the two sexes or any notion of “you complete me” in the sexual relationship. There is only failure.

These formulas require a basic knowledge of the language of first order logic. When one writes \\(\exists X\\), the \\(\exists\\) operator is called the existential quantifier and can be interepreted as saying that “there exists atleast one X”. The \\(\forall\\) operator is the universal quantifier and can be read as saying “for all X”. \\(\Phi X\\) is a predicate being applied to X. So for Lacan, \\(\Phi\\) is the phallic function, castration, signifying a lack in the subject. A line over a formula denotes a negation, so \\(\overline{\Phi X}\\) would mean that X is not predicated, not subject to castration in Lacan’s case. \\(X\\) is the thing being acted on, in these formulas \\(X\\) is the set of humans to be sexed.

The masculine formula on the left is that

\\(\exists X~\overline{\Phi X} \\\\
\forall X~\Phi X\\)

meaning that all men are subject to castration, but there exists at least one man that is not subject to castration. This exception to castration is what makes the set of men universal, a closed set. This exception is the masculine ideal of someone that escapes castration like John Wayne that is necessary to constitute the whole. All men are constituted in relation to the ideal man, and they necessarily always come up short.

The feminine formula on the right is that

\\(\overline{\exists X}~\overline{\Phi X} \\\\
\overline{\forall X}~\Phi X\\)

Meaning that there is no woman that is not subject to castration, but not-all women are subject to castration. There is therefore no corresponding singular feminine ideal like there is for masculinity. The set of women is open and cannot be universalized. The feminine ideals are split between the demand for one to be both the virgin mother and the sex object at once. This “not-all” is what keeps women from being universalized.

What careful readers may notice about these two positions is that logically they in fact say the same thing! The feminine negation of the universal quantifier (the not-all) means the same thing as affirming the existential quantifier (there exists atleast one). Thus the sexual difference of Lacan does not reside (as conservatives would have it) in a contradiction between the two sexes, forever battling it out, but actually in a radical indifference towards each other. [^fn:1]. The radical antinomy and antagonism of sexual difference that scholars like to speak of actually resides in the contradictory formulas internal to each position. The masculine exception is logically impossible, and Lacan does not mean to suggest that it actually exists (it does not exist, it insists). The feminine not-all is also contradictory, to say that no one escapes castration, but not-all women are subject to castration seems absurd. If both sides mean the same thing, perhaps the two sexual positions constitute two different reactions to the same castration that they describe, masculine rejecting castration and feminine accepting it.

The two sides of the formulas of sexuation are a good explanation of the two sides of Lacan’s works: the precision and univocity inherent to mathematical formalism occupies a distinctly masculine position, whereas his purposeful ramblings, his jokes, and his wordplay are distinctly feminine. The _matheme_ aspires to reach the level of the masculine exception, free from the castration (lack) that language brings with it because one can only ever speak indirectly in language, whereas mathematical formalism allows precision and univocal expression. _Lalangue_ on the other hand embraces the incompleteness of the feminine set in all its castration and lack of exception. This idea is played out quite well in a book that Barbara Cassin and Alain Badiou did together called “There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship”. Badiou offers a reading of Lacan on the side of _matheme_ and masculinity, whereas Cassin praises the feminine side of wordplay and equivocity of _lalangue_.

One may question how heteronormative this logic of sexuation is, or perhaps one wants to consider how a non-binary person is constituted in relation to these categories of man and woman. Why only two? Just as a very brief defence, I would like to point out that what we are concerned with here is only sex (not in the biological sense, which is a dead end for Lacan) and not gender. There are only two logics here because those are the only two possibilites! Furthermore, man and woman are constituted from the same set \\(X\\) because to Lacan, they can only be constituted in (non-) relation to each other. A subject can either embrace castration or deny it. Many books and hundreds of essays have been written on this topic, and I just want to talk about what is relevant to my point here[^fn:2].

## Sophistry or Philosophy? {#sophistry-or-philosophy}

Cassin’s praise of _lalangue_ is to her an embrace of sophistry over philosophy. Praising equivocation and indirectness, Cassin claims that psychoanalysis requires a reading of the unconscious as a work of sophistry, containing all the slips and puns and such of lalangue, in short: the unsconscious has the ability to produce truth only by speaking indirectly, and this is precisely the goal of sophistry too.
In the opening to their book, Badiou and Cassin state that what they are dealing with is
“a new confrontation between, or a new distribution of, the masculinity of Plato and the feminity of sophistics” because Badiou remains attached to Plato’s rejection of sophistry and extolling of philosophy instead as the place for truth[^fn:3]. Insofar as the _matheme_ is the ideal of philosophy, Badiou sees its univocity as the only way to express truths.

The main characteristic of sophistry is its tendency to run into “impasses of the real”, the equivocation, ambiguity, and slips where language fails to be exact and instead only speaks indirectly. The real is Lacan’s word for that which exactly one is speaking about when speaking indirectly. The real is that which “resists symbolization”, it is the indicernable and the elusive that evades understanding and cannot be expressed in language without missing something. The real is that which is traumatic for the subject and something wholly impossible. Truth, as that which sophistry gets at indirectly and philosophy formalizes in the _matheme_, is situated in this register of the real.

These impasses of the real remain in the category of the equivocal, but Freud’s entire project shows how one can move from and equivocal expression to a univocal one. Freud bases his entire theory on equivocal expressions like dreams, slips, and jokes (_lalangue_), but what his project enacts is a move from the equivocal expression, to some univocal truth about the unconscious. Lacan’s _mathemes_ are a similar move from the equivocal to the univocal through formalization of the equivocal. This is why he says that the _matheme_ is a formalization of the impasses. Through formalizing the impasses of the real in the _matheme_ the psychoanalyst (mathematician) can approach truth in this domain of the real. Slavoj Zizek lays out this method of getting at the real with the _matheme_ by claiming that

> “for Lacan, the Real can only be demonstrated through formal logic, not in a direct way, but negatively, through a deadlock of logical formalization: the Real can only be discerned in the guise of a gap, an antagonism. The primordial status of the Real is that of an obstacle, the absent cause of a failure, a cause which has no positive ontological consistency in itself but is present only through and in its effects. To put it succinctly: one tries to formalize the Real, one fails, and the real _is_ this failure. This is why, in the Lacanian Real, opposites coincide: the Real is simultaneously what cannot be symbolized _and_ the very obstacle which prevents this symbolization. And this coincidence, the coincidence of a Thing with the very obstacle which prevents our access to is, in other words this overlapping of epistemological failure and ontological impossibility, is profoundly Hegelian.”

In other words, the _matheme_ remains faithful to the old Hegelian dialectical form of seeing how the way in which something fails is also what’s necessary and constituitive of the thing. The _matheme_ fails, but this failure of the _matheme_ to really talk about the real (since the real is always that which resists symbolization and cannot be expressed) _is_ actually the real! Therefore the real as expressed in the _matheme_ is not something to be known or not-known, it transcends such categories and instead falls under what Lacan conceives as something to be “demonstrated” and “transmitted”.

## Iskra’s Choice {#iskra-s-choice}

With this in mind, the ethics and the practice of Iskraism can be made clear. Our answer to the question of “Sophistry or Philsophy?”, “man or woman” or “_lalangue_ or _matheme_?” is that both is best, and the practice of Iskraism is proof of this! All our jokes, copypastas, and ramblings (babblings) are examples of _lalangue_, the attempt to speak indirectly about the real of Iskra. Clearly we see the potential here for a distinctly feminine enjoyment in the joyful mess of language, but there is a masculine side here too. All the math talk, all the philosophy talk, and the entirety of Iskra dot Money serious posts are an attempt at formalizing the real. Though we have not yet gotten to the level of the _matheme_ (we have made attempts but more to come!), I am still here enacting a project of formalization. But lets be clear: I am still trying to be funny! Iskra dot Money is itself just a bit (that I had to pay for), and it is absolutely absurd that we take it seriously. But this seriousness is a good example of what potential we have in formalization. Formalization can still be funny because of the absurdity of it. So what Iskraism enacts is a project of sexual difference, forever split between (feminine) schizo ramblings and (masculine) comedic formalizations. It seems obvious that you need both in order to both be funny and talk about something real[^fn:4].

We are big funny guys, big smart guys, and big schizo guys. Iskra dot Money is absolutely absurd, and I really shouldn’t share this with other people because they don’t really know what’s going on. What is Iskraism? Who is Luka? What is an Iskra? What ramblings are you talking about? Why are you talking about this like it’s common knowledge? The history of Iskraism remains a secret to those uninitiated. But lets be clear: this is all a bit. It’s all one big bit, that nobody really gets because it’s not funny. We do this to be funny but we don’t even get it because all we can do is evoke.

[^fn:1]: For more on the radical potential of indifference in the sexual relation see Javier Rivera’s piece: [Love as Indifference.](https://javierrivera-96889.medium.com/love-as-indifference-967da6ff935e) Those who know me well enough may guess I am venturing into territory I don’t feel qualified to speak on (joke).
[^fn:2]: Alenka Zupancic’s “What is Sex?” and Joan Copjec’s “Imagine There’s No Woman” are the two most authoritative works in this department.
[^fn:3]: Though for Badiou it is much more complicated than that. His opus, Being and Event, enacts a dethroning of philosophy, taking it down from the position of the “love of truth” to merely the “care of truth”. For Badiou, philosophy itself can produce no truth. Truth instead can only come from one of the four conditions of philosophy: politics, love, art, and science. This goes hand in hand with Badiou’s famous thesis that mathemtatics = ontology, insofar as ontology is the study of being (qua being). More on this in the coming months, Iskraism is far too deep in Badiou at the moment to speak any further.
[^fn:4]: This is what the renegade Luka, who thus far has only proven to be a firebrand revisionist in the face of Iskraism, misses in his stupid Medium posts. He is far too serious. Lets remind ourselves that this guy posts about Rosa Luxemburg’s kinks on twitter (and far more unspeakable things on Iskraism) but he wants to write serious posts on Medium. The invite to Iskra dot Money will forever be open to Luka because he is missing out on the ability to do something far better, far more interesting, and far more theoretical (and far more funny).

+++
title = “Immanent Critique of the German Character”
author = [“Noah”]
date = 2022-03-12
draft = false
+++

Germany is a stagnant country. Its people are conservative (not in the political sense), backwards, slow, smug, uninformed and lethargic. The french can bring themselves to riot against a government that fucks up too much but the german will just take it, retaliating only by watching unfunny and ineffectual satire on tv, thinking that he is thereby sticking it to his politicians. The german will feel superior to the stupid american meanwhile his country is technologically stuck in the early 2000s. The global public will praise the supposed quality of german engineering, science and technology even though germany has been a second rate player for decades now. Most germans educated in science and technology end up emigrating to other countries that are marginally less shit. Meanwhile he (the german) is utterly unaware of all of this and genuinely believes himself and his country to be, if not superior in the absolute sense, at least better in most respects to the rest of Europe. If the german does realise that his country is flawed, he will, instead of coming to reasonable conclusions, completely give into his innate superstition and fall victim to all sorts of conspiracy theories. Ah yes superstition, there is no better way to illustrate my point than to show just how superstitious the average german is. It should suffice to mention that homeopathic remedies are sold in every pharmacy and most germans seriously believe they work and represent a real alternative to the tyranny of (((big pharma))), of course it would not occur to them to ask “who profits from selling these?”. Not to mention his eternal fearmongering over “radiation”. The German is so delusional as to be scared of phones and microwaves. I rest my case.

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title = “A Deductive Argument For Communism”
date = 2022-06-06
draft = false
+++

Premise 1: We ought to pursue states of human flourishing

Premise 2: Communism would evoke a state of human flourishing

Conclusion: Therefore we should pursue Communism

\\(A=A\\)

This simple argument is a reliable tool in a Communists toolbox. It’s premises are basic, only one of which is usually disputed and it serves as a good oppurtunity to discuss communist theory. The most basic line of argument in favour of it is that it would end the domination of capital over man (cf Capital and other of Marx’s books on political economy). Which according to Marx is one of the main forms of Capital’s alienating power over humans, it is quite simple to argue that; as Capital is a totalitising abstraction which has captured the entire globe in it’s wake, it restricts human freedom, creativity, coerces us into unethical workplaces and jobs leading to all kinds of political and social conflicts. Communism is according to Marx, a world free from all of this. The alienation and gap between humanity and Nature would be restored (see Marx’s writing on soil science and Liebig) and domination of man over man economically would no longer exist. If Communism is indeed possible, we would see unprecedented levels of human development, spiritually, technologically and scietnifically if it was the dominant mode of production.

+++
title = “Sports and the Cult of the Body Under Capitalism”
date = 2022-07-15
draft = false
+++

Now that summer season has fully started and the holidays in the Author’s country are kicking in, one can observe with increasing frequency the promotion of the “Summer Body” or “Beach Body” everywhere, colorful advertisements for sports products and diet fads litter every magazine near the counter of your favorite grocery store. When going for a walk, one can observe all manners of people going about their daily fitness routines, be it walking, jogging, or even the fashionable “Street Workout”. The fitness industry stands at a global revenue of roughly 100 billion, although it has dipped down to about 55 billion during the pandemic. It is however quickly recovering and expected to soon succeed the 100-billion-treshold once again. And this doesn’t even include the weight loss and diets market, where 72 billion are spent each year in the United States alone. That money is equivalent to some median estimates of what it would cost to end world hunger. So, how did this industry happen to become so huge and what are the implications of it?

Sports themselves have always been a feature of societies, in the past as much as now. The ancient Greeks are famous for their Olympiacs, but even away from huge organized tournaments, competitive games have been played and observed in just about every human society. Roughly 1500 sites have been found in Central America thought to have been built with the purpose of playing the famous Mayan “Ball Game” (and no, the winner was NOT sacrificed after these games) in mind. It is clear that there is a natural human drive to participate in sports, either directly or as an observer. It has been posited that the factionalism observed with sports teams and the often assorted hooliganism serves as a psychological replacement for war in peacetime. Famous athletes are also often revered figures, garnering millions of fans and admirers around the entire world.

There is a certain culture around team sports, the partisanism one feels for their favorite team, the spirit between the players of a team working successfully as a unit to win a game. But what the Author will be talking about here is the culture and psychology in individual fitness, concerning the crowd of regular gym-goes, diet-followers et cetera. The Author considers themselves to be part of that crow and as such will attempt to deconstruct and understand its workings from the inside.

Especially in Bodybuilding, which is dominated by men, there is a huge focus on aesthetics. Of course, one of the most common goals of gym-goers is to simply lose weight, but many do not stop there, instead opting to pursue further goals of not only fitness but also the “perfect body”. But what is this perfect body, and where does the idea of it come from? There is no denying that human bodies can be very aesthetically pleasing, and the positive effects from being healthy and strong don’t need any further explanation. Yet, the Author doubts that these factors are the only ones that play into most peoples fitness goals – a much more pressing matter is often the issue of body image. And where does this body image come from? Like everything else, it is shaped by the material and cultural world around us, with its movie stars, fitness advertisements and social media platforms. An aesthetically pleasing body can today become a commodity to be fetishized on platforms like Instagram, where it can not only be admired by others but also judged in the form of “Likes” gathered from a posting. With enough time and effort, one could even make a living solely by being a “fitness influencer”.

There is also considerable difference between the body images for the male and female sex. While males are also objectified, and objectify themselves, this applies in an even higher capacity to women, who are already in current society often objectified by default, as their bodies are seen as commodities on a perverted kind of “sexual market” and regarded as objects to be acquired. The male body, supposedly, should also be one of strength and display of power, showing an edge in competitiveness and dedication. Women on the other hand are oftentimes even scared of resistance training because they have been told by society that strength is a masculine trait and thus would make them less desirable. According to societal standards, women should instead opt to be very skinny (oftentimes advertisements even display women with BMI so low that it could become an actual health problem) and feminine. Of course, what exactly is masculine and feminine changes in society constantly. Thus, both sexes are trapped in a constant race to better objectify themselves as commodities to be judged by other people. This leads to all sorts of problems in individual fitness, like rampant steroid abuse in some corners of the bodybuilding culture. It also leads to constant psychological pressure on the ones that participate in this culture, and an unhealthy sense of competition.

In a socialist society, there would of course stil be individual fitness and a culture around it. The Author however thinks that there could be a significant shift in how we perceive our own bodies, other peoples bodies, and the nature of performing physical activity with the goal of “betterment” in different areas which could overall lead to not only a more healthy society for those who participate in the culture of individual fitness, but also those who do not. Without the tendency of capitalism to commodify even the individual itself, psychological pressures would decrease and we would finally be free to pursue sports for what they should be – a celebration of the feats mankind is capable of. We must pursue states of human flourishing, and this is yet another small part of it.

+++
title = “A Response to Suicidality”
author = [“Balls”]
date = 2022-03-06
draft = false
+++

It has been recently propositioned to me that suicide is a radically individualist action. I will state
my position quite briefly and succinctly: this concept is one imagined by slow mind, perhaps
even retarded in its development, and reflects a fundamental deficit in the character of its
author.

I will begin my response with the first excerpt of interest:

> Suicide is a rare form of true individualism and is a real rejection of the forced seperation of
> one from oneself. The person who commits suicide truly asserts themself over their
> situation… and makes their actions their own actions against the wishes of family, friends,
> boss’s, teacher’s and others.

I am unconvinced by the definition of “individualism” proposed here. To the author, it is not the
exercisement of liberty, the existence of fundamental rights, or the prioritization of oneself over
the whole? No. The “individualism” outlined here entails only disobeying others, without any
elaboration or nuance. Suppose a society in which norms required the use of a toilet and
sanitation for defecation. In this society, the author would in “radically exercising” his
own individualism, not only embarrass himself but run contrary to his own obvious interests.
Such absurdity is the only logical result from a definition of individualism which does not
consider the motivations (did the author even want to defecate on themselves?) or outcomes of
actions; the only factor to be considered is whether an action faces widespread approval or
disapproval. Individualism would be nothing more than a snide contrarianism.
But the following lines is where the author truly overplays their hand:

> In the little time the individual has to himself for many it is dedicated to useless consumption
> of media… None of this contributes to the development of the individual into something
> greater or otherwise develops them.

Here, it is revealed that all the posturing of “individualism” and the brave “assertion” of suicide is
merely a facade. In truth, the author accidentally admits that they have no conception of the use
of one’s time beyond mindless consumption. Rational observers might point out the many ways
in which the author could develop themselves physically and mentally — toning their physique,
seeking opportunities of higher education, discovering a new passion, starting a family — but
such is unthinkable, the idea that others might dedicate their time to pursuits with meaning —
unbelievable! Were this person given the ability they so desire, to spend all of their time at their
discretion, they would still engage in the same cycles and routines of mindless consumption.
For someone so obviously attempting to be contrarian, this ironically reveals complete and utter conformity. And thus we arrive at the crux of this perspective: to the author, ending one’s existence is a more feasible reality than self improvement or discipline.

I will conclude in a very blunt manner: it is no coincidence that such a caricature would imagine
suicide as a victory. Because the suicidal man is not one of strength, but one of weakness. A
man who lacks the minimal creativity to imagine a better future for themself and the motivation
to pursue any act of self improvement in attainment of such. Pleasure, to such a man, is not
happiness, but the lack of pain, because such a life knows no such positives. And I suppose it is
inevitable that one who would chase immediate, hedonistic pleasure so thoroughly in life would eventually come to delude themeselves into seeing the finality of such laziness as death.

But to the rest of us, suicide remains the ultimate act of failure.

+++
title = “A Crisis of Iskra: A Response to Alex”
author = [“Sabrina Dracul”]
date = 2022-02-22
draft = false
+++

Recently, an article was published to iskra.money that made me drop what I was doing to
write this. Currently, I’m working on a large piece discussing war, pornography, and
lonlieness but when I read Alex’s article it made me so baffled by its sheer incompetence
that I had to reply.

Alex, the point of iskraism is to be thought provoking, funny, and an open forum. Your
piece was neither thought provoking nor funny and it has made me request that the mod
team be more selective in what they publish. I mean seriously, what were you thinking?
You drop acid once and suddenly you know more than any optometrist in history? A key
thing for any thinker to remember is that nothing they will say is original or unknown, if
you can think of it someone else has as well and they have written about it. No one has
ever thought to publish something so dumb as what you did. Think about this, you are the
first person in history to be this stupid and cocky about something so painfully wrong.

Did you think you were funny? Did you think this injoke would get a chuckle? It didn’t!
No one is laughing! It fucking sucks, it sucking fucks, I would rather have a buffalo take
a diahrrea dump in my ear than read that again. I would rather eat every shit my
grandmother has ever shat in her lifetime and wash it down with hydrochloric acid
followed by a full course of gelatin made of the leftover juices and slosh in a public
BDSM dungeon than ever read that again. You are a disgrace to this community, your
family, your friends, and your ancestors who gave everything to survive and reproduce
just to have you shit all over their legacy by publishing this.

This is the crisis at the center of Iskraism: that someone in the world gave this white boy
acid and now he’s going utterly mad, raving about all the revelations his drug induced
stupidity has given him. Why are we platforming this? Is it in the same way a zoo gives a
platform to monkeys smearing blood riddled stool on the windows of their enclosure? I
am beyond baffled that anyone greenlit this! I place a curse on the heads of Alex and
Jacob that they will touch grass yet forever be just out of reach of getting bitches. Fuck.