Liberation of Love

TL;DR

My experience is that whatever the Patriarchy is, it's more disorganised than organised, more spontaneous than convened. Patriarchs are decentralised and fully distributed with multiple redundancies, like plant cells, not snake heads.

If my experience was to have the ring of truth, then pound for pound, the single best way to domesticate patriarchy into something progressively benign, would be mate selection. Not an easy task, it is definitely not as simple as being like "well society is patriarchal, high-status males will be the most patriarchal, low status males will therefore be the least patriarchal."

However, I think this intuition of mine, is a paradox of liberty - understanding feminism as women's liberation, I can see this confusing vortex that emerges from the agency & autonomy range of feminism that rules out combating patriarchy through mate selection. 

Because if women are to be free to choose the romantic partners they want, then if they wish to choose a man an the basis of attraction, who has a history and/or predisposition to either or both covert and overt violence against his partners, then to preserve her liberty it is incumbent upon him to deny this part of herself - only then is she free to pursue her hearts desires.

It makes sense to me, but strikes me as...well, fucking stupid IF patriarchy is largely disorganised, which I have a privileged position to observe to be the case. Like, worthy of ridicule, ridiculous. That's what this post was about.

Preramble

I want to disclose up front, that I have my own process of what I call progressive learning - and this process often involves learning that I don't even know what something is. For me that is progress, and it might also be referred to as "unlearning" - like the opposite of a magic eye, imagine staring at a picture until the figure dissolves into static noise. 

This post I'm going to be exploring, not even ideas, I'm going to start with words that hover in a wordcloud around feminism, because feminism is one of those things I've unlearned an assumption that if I say feminism and you say feminism we know what we are talking about.

Feminism is obviously not "just a word" to say "feminism is just a word" would be a deepity. But it's not well defined either. So a few years back, Judith Lucy made a series for our national broadcaster, and in one section she got made up to "pass" as male, in order to sit around a pub talking to men and asking if they were feminist. Judith defined feminism as "a belief that men and women are equal."

That is a definition I can get on board with, but clearly it's not a universal definition. The things I immediately notice, is that it isn't particularly informative - what does "equal"? Mean, what I'd hope, is that if I asked Judith "do you mean equal in dignity and respect? To be equal under the law?" that she'd say "yes, that's right" and I'd be all like "sure" because its true. But she may not, she may hit me with "equal means equal" and I'd be like "you mean literally equal? Like the same thing?" and if she said "yes" to that, I'd have to say "on those terms, then no I'm not a feminist, I think the categories have utility."

And then there's the implied passivity of Judith's definition, I think that men and women are equal therefore I am a feminist by sitting on a barstool, holding a belief in my head to be recalled when questioned by a national treasure comedian and strategic sarcasm reserve, and a beer in my hand. And that part in the documentary, I found hard to credit, largely because by my recollection of the segment, the dressing as a man was a bit of a gimmick, something to do, but I think Judith was trying to prove that a bunch of men don't realise that they are feminists, so there may also have been an implied activity to Judith's definition, because if you believe men and women are equal, why don't you get off your fucking barstool and make it happen in the real world.

However, Judith wasn't really asking these blokes if they were feminists in good faith then, to risk being topical, this is like asking anyone in a NATO, ANZUS, AUKUS whatever alliance country in early 2026, "do you support the Iranian regime?" and what, something like 98% of the population of the free world is going to say "No, come to think of it, I don't support an autocratic theocracy..." fair enough, but it doesn't follow then, that anyone can reasonably conclude from the premise "I don't support the Iranian regime" that they therefore "Think operation 'Epic Fury'" was a good idea worth supporting.

I don't want to pick on Judith either, that show was sincere pap made for a generally crappy broadcaster that is the second best Australia has had for decades behind SBS.

Looking at the word Feminism

Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes.[4][5][6][7][8][9] Feminism holds the position that modern societies are patriarchal—they prioritize the male point of view—and that women are treated unjustly in these societies.[10] Efforts to change this include fighting against gender stereotypes and improving educational, professional, and interpersonal opportunities and outcomes for women. A person who advocates for feminism is known as a feminist ~ Wikipedia English, "Feminism" page opening paragraph.

All pretty reasonable, and citations out the wazoo. 

The word "feminism" I'm going to hazard a guess predates the Sex-Gender distinction which appears to have been popularized by New Zealand man John Money in his book "Man & Woman, Boy & Girl" in the 1970s, given that the first non-proto but formal feminist appears by wiki-consensus to be Olympe de Gouges, and maybe feminism as a term comes from her 'Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne' ("Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen") in 1791.

Now I don't want to be like one of those idiots who thinks that prior to the invention of colour photography, human eyesight was monochromatic, or prior to Newton's laws of motion, gravity didn't exist. Whatever the Sex-Gender distinction can be usefully applied to, probably predates our ability to draw that distinction in several languages including English. 

I'm not an expert, I acknowledge that there's people who don't believe in a Sex-Gender distinction in terms because men are men and women are women, I've heard them, I know they exist, I've heard their arguments, I'm not compelled by them. I suspect, but don't know, that there might be serious people who take seriously the Sex-Gender distinction from the other direction, suggesting that Sex is nothing, Gender is everything and all of it is performative. But I don't know.

This distinction allows, maybe in the aforementioned "range of social movements" an interpretation of feminism that is not so much "pro-femalism" but simply, pro-femininity. On the gender side, the performativity side, or whatever language may prove necessary for clarity in communication, secondary or tertiary sex characteristics, uncoupled from dependence on primary sex characteristics - the language part I'm going to flounder with.

But feminism has I believe within the scope of interpretation - a position of "it's okay to be feminine" and a discrete specific application of such an interpretation might be "it's okay to wear lipstick."

Here simply would be advocating for "equal validity" of self-expression, but this interpretation creates the problem of categorization - what is feminine? what is masculine? and is that binary sufficient or necessary?

I took a tour of a Pre-Columbian archealogical site in Mexico, and our tour guide mentioned that the society that lived there used to demarkate class-and-or-vocation by hair style. So there's be like the peasant cut and the priest cut. Given how easy then, it would be to forge credentials, who has what haircut would need to be policed. So I think there is an interpretation of feminism that advocates for equality of the expression of femininity, so that women aren't policed into wearing lipstick, while men are policed out of it in order to establish greater and lesser roles in society.

For example, I think of this Iggy Pop meme, discussed here on reddit. I think that while I'm sure Iggy is still  beloved by pretty much everyone, the meme wouldn't be considered up to date, just going by the pictures this seems like a Y2K Iggy Pop, but if there's scope in just the word feminism, the concept of feminism, that would include 'pro-feminine' then Iggy's old meme would be a feminist meme because it's saying 'I'm not a woman, dressing like a woman is fine, women's aesthetics are fine. They are legit.'

And maybe not, maybe such an interpretation of 'feminism' will never rise to the level of social convention, it cannot be interpreted as a pro-feminity movement, but the Venn diagrams of feminism the range of feminism, all has to be inside the circle of woman, with no independence from the gender underpinning the associated behaviours we call in English, feminine. 

In which case, it's a liberalism issue - freedom of self-expression. Your rights end where mine begin and so you can't police my expression of femininity.

The point of all that elaboration and exposition, was hopefully to illustrate the lack of an intrinsic meaning that renders the word 'feminism' as easily intelligible. This is not to make the error of conflating the unintelligible with the unintelligent, my sense is that broadly people 'know' what most people mean when they say feminism, even if on request they discover they can't put it into words. 

But though the unintelligible can be intelligent, like direct experience of phenomena as Susan Sontag and before her Simone Weil argues, it can have this limitation of being hard then to discuss, and hard to establish a shared understanding of meaning.

Before I move on, my best effort to render feminism intelligible, is that a plurality of my friends and loved ones, would expect me to understand it to mean the struggle to render the experience of women (cis and trans) as materially equal to that of men, under a grab-bag of outcomes.

And again, that's approximating a common center with very fuzzy boundaries. My totalitarian friend for example, regard any dedication to men's issues as counterproductive to the point of being anti-feminist, instead of being something more akin to independent like say climate change...and I'm sure more extreme than my friends, there's a unifying theory of feminism and ecology, which would argue that fighting catastrophic climate change and the patriarchy is the same thing, even if most lay people could not connect the dots of necessity between closing the pay gap and restricting global warming to beneath 2 degrees.

The point isn't to mock or ridicule the parts of the range of feminisms that I don't personally understand or even vibe with, nor even to foist upon feminism an etymologically asynchronous burden to promote femininity. Just that there is a range, and it's potentially confusing to those with little realised investment, on a barstool whether we've had the conversation or not.

It's a big feminist world out there.

The Word "Liberation"

Liberation is easier for me at least, to understand, it means to be freed of something. Again though, that's a wide remit, and perhaps the best illustration is the widely used and little understood economic jargon "neoliberalism" or "new-liberalism" which has very little to do with political liberalism, best mapped out in John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" 

No, neoliberalism refers to "the freedom to take production surplus" basically, it used to be if you paid someone to make pies, they earned money through wages and the owner of the oven (bakery) through profit or rent. Let's say the baker makes 10 pies an hour, sells them for a dollar a pie, they sell out every hour, and the baker is paid $8 an hour and the owner keeps $2. (In the spirit of reductive oversimplified economic stories, these are "air" pies that involve no ingredients to be priced in) 

Now the owners all like "what if we upped pie production?" or alternatively "What if we upped the price?" and relax, I'll do both. For a brief period, the "post war" period, if the baker worked an extra hour at the owners request to make 10 more pies and bring in $10 more the only way he'd agree to that was for $8, and by the 70s the additional hour a day may have required $9 extra or even $10 extra rendering the owner's ambition pointless. Otherwise, with a strong bakers union, and possibly even conditions of full employment, the baker could refuse, walk out, have the owner over a barrel.

Or if there was suspected surplus demand, the owner could be like "the price of a pie is going up 10c" and if they still sell out every hour, the baker isn't going to not notice, and again would walk out or quit or whatever unless the owner promptly agreed to increase his wages to $8.80 an hour.

The point being, that prior to Neo-liberalism, economic growth was divided up between capital and labour (to be reductive) a very ahistorical period in the wake of World War II up until the late 70s, 1980s where there was massive social mobility, real wage growth, a growing middle class, increasing home ownership in a lot of nations.

Neo-liberalism "freed" capital to capture the economic growth. It ran programs of deregulation (making more behaviour legal like mergers, creative book keeping, foreign ownership, gig work, sunday trading etc.), privatisation (getting rid of public sector competition not only in the provision of goods and services, but as competing employers), deunionisation and a bunch of other shit.

And again, why it happened and whether even some reform was necessary I believe to be controversial and I don't have the grasp of history nor lifespan to comment on that. What's generally agreed is that real wages have stagnated across wealthy nations since about 1978 and wealth inequality has risen since that time and is now destabalising societies across the world even where in large chunks, the asset class have been successful at pointing the finger at immigrants for people's worsening prospects especially in the face of catestrophic climate change.

So yeah, liberalism as a word, can get very weird in application. So let's finally get into it:

Liberating Love under or over Patriarchy

I now feel confident to start talking the shit I wanted to talk about. But only in a clarity sense, not an authority sense.

See Patriarchy is another nebulous word, ripe for Motte-and-Bailey rhetorical strategies where I'm seemingly having a conversation about a vast conspiracy until I seek clarity, and it turns out we are just talking about a statistical emergent status quo with unknown and undetermined causes.

If you couldn't parse that last sentence, relax, the question of Patriarchy is: "how organised?" and I think this is a valid question worthy of investigation. Personally, while I would never deny aspects of Patriarchy are organized, the 'manosphere' for example, it's not a random collection of podcast clips, their are podcasters producing the content, there's a formula for success, there's target markets, there's a press circuit, there are diplomatic efforts to interfere in the legal status of manosphere personalities.

But I'm overwhelmingly of the opinion, that Patriarchy is mostly disorganised, almost overwhelmingly disorganised. And Patriarchy when it is it's more boring but defensible form of simply describing outcomes that favour men and disadvantage women, is a very big tent that anyone can participate in regardless of sex or gender.

For example, a mother can use her unrivalled access and opportunity to shape her children's attitudes to sex and gender, to raise sexist sons and daughters. Historically, this might have been attributable to a working class Catholic living under a regime where the whole community would deliver a runaway wife back to their husband. If dad came home in his singlet after a whole day grinding pepper at the pepper mill and his daughter Princessa told him that mum had made her brother Machismaximo do the dishes after lunch because there was no such thing as 'women's work' and 'men's work' mother Orthodoxia-Virginia-Sagrada would have got popped in the eye by an arm swol with manual pepper grinding by her husband Cesaro.

But right now in the 21st century, you have mothers doing the modern analogue messaging of "boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses" when they participate in the daughter's body dysmorphia simply by setting the example of dieting, wearing athleisurewear and disposing income on botulism. 

And it takes someone with I don't know maybe a masters in economics, or cybernetics or anthropology or something to apprehend that the indirect consequences of a mother befriending a daughter on the mutual interest in beauty & "wellness" to attain status in intrasexual competition, while simply affirming her son, a relative stranger to her who disappears on weekends into team sports is "very handsome" regardless of how pimply he is, and he could even be reading The Female Eunuch and The Second Sex for recreation, and be creating a consumption-income gap as she raises her daughter to view "preventative botox" as a necessity, and her son just needs enough calories to run out a full soccer match.

Right? It is too hard for me to paint how big this picture is, and all the causal chains, and the presence or absence of malice, specifically misogyny or internalised-misogyny. And I'm not the person to do it, but also not a person tempted to get reductive. 

Disorganised Patriarchy is hard, it is unconscious, emergent, spontaneous in my opinion, it is why depending on the definition of Patriarchy, but taking it as at core, any societal organised around male enforcement of property rights - no non-Patriarchal society has ever been observed or discovered by anthropologists and archaeologists and historians in the history of humanity - whether society was hunter-gatherer, archipelago fishing-based, agricultural settlements, nomadic pastoralist. No exceptions among the ancient river-civilizations of Egypt, Sumeria, China and the Indus valley, not found in isolated tribes of the Amazon, the arctic circle, Australia etc.

So my presupposition is that male-secured property rights is just this simple solution humans gravitate towards to create something remotely stable to organise their lives around, and it could possibly be demonstrated and replicated via some kind of economic game experiment but I'm not an academic. There is a cybernetics (the study of systems, not the building of terminators) principle that in any system whatever component has the most options defacto controls the system. What I take this to mean, is that if you have a bunch of control knobs, and all bar one go up to 10 and one goes up to 11 in its settings, then the "master-knob" even though its effect might be weak, is the knob that goes up to 10. 

And that's what or why I'd guesstimate that patriarchy can crop up regularly in a disorganised fashion (not centrally planned) based on a general relative additional option available to men rather than women, caused by sexual dimorphism (which Chimpanzees share with us but Bonobos less-so) of recourse to violence. Now, I want to stress I'm not advocating a genetic-fallacy argument here, that because that's where Patriarchy likely comes from, therefore Patriarchy is the natural order, therefore good. I am describing what you are up against, if you are up against Patriarchy. A starfish not a snake.

Maybe, maybe among Bonobos, an ape genus we are as closely related to as Chimpanzees but I find books like "Sex at Dawn" dumb with their subtext that we simply chose the wrong apes to most closely resemble, that's not how history happened nor happens.

Now, I've somewhat poisoned the well, but I have no problem coexisting with much louder and much more organised voices exploring the idea that Patriarchy is organised, which is to say, it resembles an organised religion as an institution and can be approached as such. Youtube channel "Breaking Down Patriarchy" has a video "Where does Patriarchy come from?" whose title implies a social-construction premise and another, "Is Male dominance in our DNA?" that I feel, are good enough steel-man explainers on Patriarchy being organised or disorganised from a radical intersectional feminist.

In terms of disorganisation, while religions certainly have played a role in perpetuating Patriarchy, it seems apparent to the naked eye, that Patriarchy much more successfully and efficiently replicates everywhere than the world's major religions that pour tremendous time and energy into replicating themselves and are incredibly inefficient at doing so given they are prone to splintering into sects, and post enlightenment, post Darwin, prone to having to abstract themselves into near secular meaningless to survive coexistence with an education system, or otherwise just see interest and attention dwindle with each passing generation, with each passing year.

There's this entertaining but ridiculous post-apocalyptic movie "The Book of Eli" where Denzel Washington is in possession of the sole remaining copy of the Christian Bible, and he's on a mission to get it to San Francisco where it could be transcribed and replicated, and Gary Oldman needs to capture it because he thinks with it he can seize control of the new world order. 

It is absurd because I think it is impossible at this point to eradicate all copies of the most circulated text in the history of literacy. Even if a nuclear bomb went off in every major city in Continental United States there would be a bajillion copies of Gideon's bible in motel room drawers in the middle of nowhere.

But supposing if, all holy texts were destroyed, and all clergy were abducted by aliens. Some religion would almost certainly be invented in the vacuum I'm sure, people are just wired to be superstitious and solipsistic, but the odds that someone in isolation would ever recreate any of the specific religions we currently have on earth is zero. I assert this because there's only one way Christianity, or Hinduism, or Scientology could be recreated and that is via revelation God would have to send another prophet or incarnate another avatar to repeat what he'd said.

Religions are almost universally received wisdom, based on an epistemology of revelation, not say empirical scepticism. 

If we destroyed all scientific knowledge, which we are doing constantly through the scientific process anyway, but retained the scientific method of discovering knowledge, we would arrive at the exact same conclusions with the only thing changing being time (and accreditations). With science, people will invent powered flight, flying buttresses, submarines, salted caramel again even if we destroy all the recipes. 

And I think, if Patriarchy were to be smashed, it would crop up again spontaneously everywhere and anywhere because its so disorganised.

I am not advocating a resignation to Patri-fatalism, I'm persuaded by the evidence, that scientific progress is cumulative, but moral progress is not, hence why there are an alarming number of people in the world who want to give fascism and like, Stalinism another crack, and such enthusiasms for bad ideas likely correlate to distance from the historical moral lesson measured in time.

(Recently I heard a commentator on the SCOTUS decision to render inert the Voting Rights Act, compare a justice's opinion to umbrellas - where it was asserted that the argument went 'we don't need umbrellas because look we are dry.' having forgotten that we are dry because the umbrellas keep rain off of us. Which I think describes the difficulty of moral progress, if a generation are born under umbrellas they grow up not realising what rain is. Hence we get BIZARRE turns of history like the young left becoming anti-free speech.)

If you will, religions need to be organised, we fucking call them "organised religion" there's a coordination effort to keep the community together and to indoctrinate the young. Religiosity is disorganised I think it exists in the structure of human consciousness, animism is instinctive we recognize patterns even when there are none and attribute motives to unconscious phenomena.

Organised religion is eroded by education, defensively, I haven't done the survey but would guess, that most Christian sermon's try to avoid the subject of cosmology, because when push comes to shove, an indifferent universe will shove intelligent design around like a ragdoll, the evidence is fucking stacked.

And on this front, I think, that the best way to resist and pacify and dismantle disorganised patriarchy as an individual female in this world, is likely to be - via mate selection.

The Fallacy of Division and Composition

I'm just going to pull a bunch of examples of the fallacy of composition off of Wikipedia, because who has the energy?

"Every brick in the wall is rectangular-cuboid-shaped. Therefore, the whole wall is rectangular-cuboid-shaped."

"If someone stands up from their seat at a cricket match, they can see better. Therefore, if everyone stands up, they can all see better."

"If a runner runs faster, that runner can win the race. Therefore, if all the runners run faster, they can all win the race."

 The fallacy of composition is where you make an inference from a component, a part, and apply it to the whole, as you can see above. It's opposite is the fallacy of division and here's some examples of it, again taken from wikipedia because who has the time?

The second grade in Jefferson Elementary eats a lot of ice cream

Carlos is a second-grader in Jefferson Elementary

Therefore, Carlos eats a lot of ice cream

Society may well be patriarchal, but it does not therefore follow that your household is patriarchal, that your classroom is patriarchal, that your relationship is patriarchal, that you are patriarchal. At the same time, if you get on a protestant tract of "doing the work" to root out your internalised misogyny rid your own mind of patriarchy and it doesn't follow that this is the path to society ridding itself of patriarchy - which would be the fallacy of composition.

It is more that particularly in wealthy democratic countries, there is vestigial institutions of the 20th century project of open societies, giving us space to have private lives, personal lives, individual choices.

What I would say is that I have friends that grew up in matriarchal households, I have friends that in adulthood partnered into matriarchal relationships, and much rarer egalitarian partnerships. I have seen relationships that were patriarchal in surprising ways, as in the male dominance of the relationship was attained through things like whining and sulking and having panic attacks.

Suffice to say, there are such a variety of outcomes within the personal power of the individual, that I struggle to imagine a way that personal power could be denied.

I conceptualize it as a kind of "fit your own oxygen mask first" application of that range of feminisms, and while that may seem so obvious that on my part it condesends to the point of mansplaining, but for me an example would be "Men Have Called Me Crazy" the memoir of Anna Marie Tendler ex-wife of comedian John Mulaney who is current husband of Olivia Munn whom Time magazine listed as one of 2025s "Women of the Year"

I have not read, nor intend to read "Men Have Called Me Crazy" because I saw Mulaney's post-rehab comedy special, and had seen his previous special where he did a massive bit on "my wife" referring then to Anna, while presumably he was desperately shoving cocaine up his nose. Like to me its transparent that Mulaney is living at a nexus of bad choices, and his graduation from rehab to fatherhood with a different woman might be a material improvement for him, but does not vindicate him as a great choice made by either Anna Marie Tendler nor Olivia Munn.

But they are free to.

What I did do was listen to an hourlong review of Anna Marie Tendler's autobiography, hoping, nay expecting that it would be a sober reflection by an adult woman on the fucked up situation of having your celebrity coke-fiend husband leave you for another woman to have the child he told you he never wanted - like I was expecting to hear about the memoir of Rebecca from Ted Lasso, instead it was someone who didn't realise their power to live their own life and seems to have had since their 20s a series of relationships with wealthy men as a beautiful peripheral to accomplishment. 

I don't wish to assert that it was, or should have been obvious to Anna Marie that she was making bad choices. I'm asserting that from the outside I'm doing this silent maths that seemingly accomplished men are chasing after the hair and makeup artist not their female peers, and I am fully projecting a more banal setting that would render this more obvious where Ted the CFO is in a relationship with Christine the CTO whereas Bob the COO is always hitting on and taking out to lunch and dating the young female interns. 

I wont deny the existence of fundamental romance that arises from two personalities coming into contact with one another regardless of circumstances, but Anna Marie stands as an example of a pattern of behaviour of buying into the composition of Patriarchy, and perhaps Olivia Munn too who now is possibly bringing her life experience to her role in AppleTV series "Your Friends And Neighbours" 

The odds are stacked, admittedly, against celebrities and subsequently their partners simply because they are desired and in many ways unparrallalled in their freedom to choose the worst partners possible for them.

But Anna Marie, based on the review of her book I watched, allegedly blames men, hates men, for what they have done to her, in a very pronounced way, and as alleged by the reviewer, demonstrates no real evidence she takes any personal responsibility for choices she made in her life. 

Which gives me, what I suspect, is the counter-approach of women's liberation, and I'll use a cartoonish example due to the limits of my ability to express an unintelligible idea like attraction - it is the freedom to date an obsessed failed MMA fighter with cool sleeve tattoos and not have his violence directed at and enacted on you.

Even Steel-Men Rust

The Australian government is currently running an advertising game promoting conversations that each individually "bring us a step closer to a world without child sexual abuse."

Destigmatising taboos around the subject I think is a noble effort that likely will lead to some and maybe even significant reduction in child abuse and exploitation. 

In the Brothers Karamazov, a claim is made that "if God does not exist, then everything is permitted." and I think it is important to just acknowledge that this quotable quote isn't actually an argument for God, certainly not the Christian God Dostoevsky seems to think is the answer to everything he writes about.

In an uncharitable literal interpretation, because humans are bound by the laws of physics, we can infer a God that does not permit us to fly, to build perpetual motion machines, to contravene thermodynamics etc. That God that exists has everything to say about the motion of bodies and nothing to say about morality. 

But more charitably, if we assume that it is referring to what is permissible with respect to morality, then an observer might notice that everything is permitted. At least by god. Not by society.

What isn't permitted generally requires some form of policing, and effective policing at that. Societies have variously permitted or denied divorce, permitted or denied homosexual intimacy, permitted or denied the borrowing of funds for money.

Some things, a society can somewhat effectively forbid - like homicide, on account of forensic evidence once murder can only be got away with by effectively hiding a body, homicides begin being measured at rates per 100,000 population. Other crimes, like fraud are extremely difficult to effectively forbid, because certain types of fraud are forensically identical to a failed business - someone gets a business loan, buys inventory, sells inventory says I can't repay the loan, I have no money, I'm bad at business. Now whether they stole the proceeds of selling the inventory or simply had costs exceed revenue is pretty difficult for investigators to determine.

But even in the case of more forgiving forensic based law enforcement, the difference between reducing the homicide rate of the wild west or prohibition to that of the 21st century, and reducing it from the rate of the 21st century to zero grows exponentially more onerous, we are talking about incredibly intrusive police states to bring about a world in which nobody can ever end the life of a fellow human being, a solution to homicide that isn't even theoretically possible - see Tom Cruise's 'Minority Report' and its exploration of pre-crime.

As such, women being free to love dangerous men, I lack the imagination to steel man. It posits a super-organised patriarchy that has some kind of "good/evil" switch in its back that just needs toggling. It appears to have no basis or foundation in social sciences like psychology, history or literary criticism.

I do not personally understand it beyond a wanton demand, and would analogise it to "I want to fill the executive position with my next of kin (nepotism), but I want to be liberated from the possibility that my next of kin will be incompetent."

It might feel like a strawman, but technically such a demand demands something of the next of kin you wish to elevate through nepotism, like they need to "pull their socks up" to quote Hannah Gadsby and endeavour to pull nepotism and meritocracy together by exerting the effort to not just be the next of kin, but to be the best candidate.

Here enters the "nice guy" made famous as the self-deluded "nice guys of OKCupid" precursors to Incels, but far more normalised. This was in my opinion, an unfortunate cultural observation, and while originally something specific to OKCupid, curated and meeting a specific criteria I think is demonstrated to beyond reproach, contemporary to its moment I had conversations with female friends about the generalised "nice guy" and the unfortune I began to percieve through these discussions.

My original position, was a reasoned one, that "the friendzone doesn't exist" but a confident female friend assured me it was very real, and generally, another's confidence causes me to lose confidence, but in a more involved conversation with a less confident, more open minded female friend, I feel we converged on the friendzone being plausible - something to do with you can risk dating a stranger because if the relationship fails and you become estranged, no loss, whereas if somebody becomes a valued friend, then if a relationship fails and you become estranged, you lose a friend.

I feel this is plausible so long as it remains unintelligible, because the friendzone remains functionally irrational if one thinks that valued friendships can't develop independent of relationship status. For most people what makes breaking up hard is the losing the friend part, often the best friend.

I never sought to deny however, the existence of these "nice guys" they demonstrably existed, and the terminology of distinction was "guys who are nice" vs "nice guys" with the test being how a guy treats people he doesn't want to have sex with. 

Because the nice guys of OKCupid were transactional and entitled. I think, even though the tumblr that was NiceguysofOKCupid was taken down fairly early, the meme was successful, or maybe I just aged out of hearing nice-guy-esque complaints and frustrations.

Believe it or not, it used to be so ingrained that SNL parodied it in the sketch "Not Getting Any" where Michael J Fox and the SNL 'Bad Boys' early 90s cast, seemed to method act the straight male nice guy roles, and probably in the case of 5 comedians that got cast in a life-changing show, they probably didn't do that well in high school or college in the 80s. But such complaints were much more normalised, I think without high school dating dynamics far removed from contemporary ones (although I believe in recent times in terms of dating and romantic relationships, it's never been less available to teenagers than right now, nobody is hooking up.)

Part of this phenomena that has now polarized into a more concentrated fringe of incels, and hollowed out the middle of mildly frustrated guys that crushed on a female friend but never had a relationship or intimate encounter for various reasons, was a credulity gap. It was my speculative theory, that in general guys do try to become desirable to women they are interested in, and part of that involves listening to what women self-report as desirable traits. These self-reported preferences may however, be reported because they are socially desirable, and thus something someone might want to believe about themselves for example, that they are not superficial, that looks don't matter to them.

It may also be possible, that the self-reported preferences were true, but with an implicit caveat - these traits were desirable in men they were attracted to. The difference between "I want a man who is smart and funny" and "I want a man who is tall, smart and funny." Speaking of SNL, Gilbert Gottfried wrote a piece on this exact complication in a PLayboy Magazine Op-Ed "Women Say They Want A Guy With A Sense of Humour. (They Don't)" of which I can't find a link to the original, and maybe Playboy magazine went bust already, but it is written up and broken down with greater complexity on the linked Dr. Nerdlove post.

This is to say, it's hard for me, not to strawman the thesis of liberating women from patriarchy such that they don't have to choose someone to romantically pursue with consideration to their own participation in perpetuating patriarchy as a result of that choice.

Fundamentally, I believe that choice exists. And I speak as someone superficial who has been incredibly choosy about the women I got in relationships with. In my own case, there are women whom I like as a person and am physically attracted to, their are women I do not like as people and am physically attracted to, and their are women I am not physically attracted to but like as people. I pursue the former, ignore the middle and friendzone the latter. 

I also believe that as a male I have been in educational and business institutions where I had the privileged vantage to see female colleagues make bad choices, when there were not creepy entitled unfuckable niceguys, but nice guys available to them.

I am not priveleged to have the vantage of women taking on male partners as an individual renovation project, I only have on hearsay that it is a common cliche to think "I can fix him." But I can certainly relate to it albeit from the opposite gender alignment so find it very plausible.

The liberation this post is about though, is to delegate that renovation project to society. A collective effort to raise men and boys so their are no "fixer-uppers" just as there are no incompetent or sub-par nepo-babies.

Maybe that communal project is possible, but I feel like a reno, it will likely be reversable if not constantly maintained, and the foreman with the most powerful incentive to drag mankind to this liberated future, is most likely in my opinion, a woman directing her own choice of mates.

"Envidiosa" A Case Study in Liberation through Restriction

I continue to watch my way through Envidiosa, the Argentine Rom-Com that is often frankly confronting. The series protagonist Vicky, is a cartoon character, and as such where she departs from her grounding in reality is in her ability to constantly say the quiet part out loud.

Episode 1 of Season 1 features Vicky's meet-cute with Mattias, the only character Vicky has chemistry with. But love triangles persist because Vicky is victim to comparison hence the series name "Envidiosa" or "Envious" for those who cannot make the connection. 

Emotionally as a watch, it is probably more akin to the original BBC series of "The Office" where Gervais' David Brent makes us constantly cringe as he indulges his own compulsions to be unprofessional. 

We see Vicky relentlessly spurn Mattias to pursue material triumphs she feels necessary to impress her friends and former lovers. We see Vicky waver and lose the epiphany she needs, when she gets derailed by her female friends' "accomplishments" for example, her sister deciding to move with her partner to a house in a gated community, ideal for raising children, puts Mattias further from Vicky's mind.

Having just concluded season 2, I feel I have to say Envidiosa is a very good show, coming from the diminished budgets of outside the Anglosphere. 

Where I relate to Vicky, is that she intuits that if she could just exert enough control over her environment her emotional issues would be rendered inert.

The last panic attack I had, alarmed me, and my initial impulse was that I needed to remove the anxious from my life, because their anxiety and coping strategies were what brought out the behaviour in me that I panicked over. 

It was however, fortuitously obviously unfeasible. You cannot excise the anxious from your life without becoming some kind of hermit, which itself isn't really feasible in property obsessed Australia. Gone are the days where you could just head into the mountains (which Australia also lacks) and establish a hermitage in a cave. I also have neither the hunting nor gathering skills.

Anyway, where I could find agency, was in handling my own shit, bounding my own behaviour.

What I think might surprise you though, after this case study that suggests that Vicky Mori is me and I am Vicky Mori; is my conclusion.

The Talk that Boys Need to Have

And probably girls too.

Even if women can never be liberated from the patriarchy, I do fundamentally believe in bodily autonomy arguments, and as The Cruel Sea informed us in Blackstick "heart is a muscle and it pumps blood Like a big old black steam train My veins are the tracks And the city is my brain My stomach is the ocean and it swallows up the sun At the end of a summer's day My breath like a breeze Blows all those storm clouds Away..." 

Okay I let that run too long, but the point being I don't believe in a mind-body dichotomy, and nor, as those lyrics suggest an individual-environment dichotomy. It all interplays and interrelates, and in respecting that, I think boys need a talk delivered with suitable gravitas, sobriety and authority to inform them, that women's choices need respecting.

That you child, may like women, and may like a woman, and she may knowingly or unknowingly choose someone other than you. And you may possess the clarity of mind to see down her road and see the tracks are set to divert her from what she expects and what she'll experience.

That the young man may feel confident of what expectations they could achieve together if she'd only choose him. 

And with all this, in mind, it is upon him, to respect her decision, her choices, her judgement and most of all, her freedom.

That respect entails feeling your feelings, and an ethical obligation to allow her to succeed or fail in the relationship on her own, without any intervention or undermining on your part.

What that respect doesn't entail is evaluating her judgement, judging her judgement which not only can you do, but should you do, because you enjoy the same liberty to choose wrong yourself, and sometimes it takes others to show us ourselves.

It likely also doesn't entail you to intervene to ensure the success of her choosing by dismantling patriarchy especially to make it incumbent upon you to dismantle what she is propping up. 

That's on the other guy.

What Could be Wrong With Me Part Thrice: White Knightin'

I debated whether to include this in this series at all. Largely because it overwhelmingly just effects my love life, not professional relationships, career choices, living arrangements, animal husbandry etc.

The other aspect, is that I've been well aware of this construct, how it applies to me, and how to manage it for over a decade now. I'm sure back there somewhere there's a post about it.

But, recently I've been pondering a question that means I could get something out of writing this up, then I think that already in this personal journey, the value of considering, as it were, interaction effects between the possible things wrong with me, can certainly help make salient how complicated shit is and that answers and solutions are not easily come by.

Think back to the disclaimers I wrote out (or alternatively, go back to) about how lay person or 'popular' psychology appears to be in this space right now where the modal person has two hammers and too much confidence, one being ADHD and the other being ASD. 

I've chosen to word these posts 'Could be' for twofold reasons, with the obvious being the subjects of each part may not prove to be something wrong with me at all, but there's also a bunch of things that are wrong with me but I don't have under consideration. For all I know ADHD and/or ASD could be in my personal mix somewhere, the reason I find them annoying is because what they may explain explains nothing I care about to the extent I don't even find them interesting, and I have entertained these run-of-the-mill suggestions not only in the past, but whenever they come up. eg. "Could autism explain why I get irritated by people who chew with their mouth open?" Fucking maybe, but in terms of shit that debilitates me it's just not even on the radar.

Reading your Unauthorized Biography

This construct is not any kind of official DSM-IV type pathology, it preexisted as a colloquialism much like a 'Peter Pan' complex for people who err towards pathological attempts to affect a youthful experience. Though to my knowledge, there's no well known literary 'White Knight' the trope or meme referred to. I know in old US TV shows like the Lone Ranger, due to shitty reception and resolution and black and white pictures, storytelling was visually aided by having the good cowboys wear white hats and bad cowboys wear black hats so the action could be followed in the wide shots.

And it's been a long time since I read any version of King Arthur and the Knights of Camelot, maybe somewhere in there a particularly chivalrous and heroic knight wears all white at some point and bests Lancelot in a tourney. 

Regardless, I already understood "White Knight" to be widely understood to mean a rescuer. Typically boys who wound up in relationships with emotionally unstable girls and tried to rescue them, via a relationship.

By the time I was entertaining, in response to a pattern that had been emerging, whether I might have a compulsion to date hot-messes (more on this terminology later) I just plugged it into google hoping for a wikipedia entry and finding instead a book: The White Knight Syndrome: Rescuing Yourself from Your Need to Rescue Others by Mary C. Lamia & Marilyn J. Krieger.

Books written by clinical psychologists typically feature case studies that are 'constructs' taken from several patient histories and given a pseudonym to keep it all confidential.

When I picked up a hardcopy of this 2009 book in a store and opened it to a random page, I found a case study in the chapter "White Knight's in Training" about a construct named 'Ron' who's mother had confided in him her fears and anxieties as a child, seeking an empathic listener to self sooth her own stress. 

This happened to me throughout my adolesence, my mum kept me up to date on the challenges my dad faced at work, the bullying she was experiencing from her vice principle and all the outcomes she was stressed and worried about. 

We have to presume, that this activity made her feel better, saying it aloud maybe arrested her rumination for a while and allowed her to get on with her day. Her behaviour was as instinctive as mine.

I, for example, assumed my mum was telling me all this shit for some reason, she needed my help, wanted to pick my brain, was looking to me for solutions, I was likely, simply a captive audience. 

Below the level of my conscious awareness, coming to someone with problems they can do nothing about creates a profound sense of impotency and frustration. Not erectile dysfunction impotency, but the impotency of the sports fan watching their team lose in the clutch on TV. You care and yet can do nothing.

I sell myself short. I have an innate talent at not getting bullied, though not a violent person, or a particularly powerful person, not of intimidating physical stature and so forth, I have no memories to draw on of when anyone who tried to fuck with me. I have only ever been fucked around by people, and probably even as a youth, I would have been full of good advice, and even been in a position to correct bad advice as regards being bullied.

Anyway, similar to how I had a meta-analysis of research into adult children that go no contact, like most adult children I am more than willing to forgive behaviour for the past. It wasn't malice, it was incompetence driven by someone's own story. 

Furthermore, even though the behaviour persists, I am a) an adult not a child now, and b) capable of setting boundaries. 

So let's talk about the book and how it helped me: Though my story resembles strongly the construct of the "overly empathic" White Knight, reading and rereading the book, the White Knight Subtypes: Overly Empathic, Tarnished, Terrorized/Terrified and Balanced Rescuer.

I mean I'm kind of already bored. The subtypes map kind-of onto attachment styles, anxious-preoccupied (lay term "needy"), dismissive-avoidant, anxious-avoidant, and secure.

I don't think the book from memory quite spells it out for you, but with attachment styles, generally it's arranged in a 2x2 grid with postive-negative thoughts about self-other. So for example, if you have positive thoughts about your partner and negative thoughts about yourself you get anxious-preoccupied, I'm going to guess negative-negative produces anxious avoidant, and positive-positive gives you secure attachment.

Secure attachment translates to "Balanced rescuer" subtype, where you can support your partner through difficult times without losing yourself nor becoming overly identified with this White Knight role, such that when it's time to take off the armour, it's no big deal.

The other thing to note, is that while "balanced rescuer" sounds temporary, it's more that you play heroics if and only when it is called for, but there's also just a temporary or transitional white knight experience, and that is where your environment has you play one of these dysfunctional rescuer roles, but change the environment and it is not an issue.

That was my main takeaway from the book and processing my unconscious behaviour with it to understand my own history. Generally I have positive self-regard, and positive regard for my partners, I lack the fear of being alone to actually be with anyone I don't regard positively. (Indeed, I have only recently been contemplating whether the times in my life I have told someone that I would rather be alone than with them, either directly or indirectly [eg. rejecting/breaking up without excusing myself via an attraction to someone else or being observed happily single] was something damaging given societal norms where men are often asked to accept this kind of rejection, but women aren't.)

But I can transition through these negative subtypes, particularly the overempathic/tarnished. There was little about the terrified/terrorizing subtype that I could relate to, and frankly it is what I would be afraid of.

The main difficulty, is that I don't easily recognize what I am attracted to in a person. It is where I seek the familiar on the basis of emotions motivating me, not conscious thought.

I came to think of it in terms of two Tarot Major Arcana - Strength, representing one of the four Christian virtues, and The Moon, that speaks to me about undiluted anxiety, but Tarot's arcana are very very Christian in theme, and not even mystical, but like book of revelations shit.

Basically, I very often mistake behaviours that are adaptive for anxious women, as strength.

It's pretty much the same logic as Homer's "A man with lots of ivory is less likely to harm Stampy than a man whose ivory supply is relatively low."

One of the most charismatic women I ever met, took me a very very long time to come to appreciate the charisma was riding atop a lot of anxiety. Anxiety I can offer little to remedy, and didn't.

The second time I came across this correlation, I had a panic attack, and cut off all contact and sought advice. In that situation, I had much to remedy my own anxiety.

The third time, well, I set boundaries. I remained calm. Had a very turbulent relationship, and with some irony, whereas my efforts to "rescue" in the past, based on a delusion of the curative properties of my love, produced resentment; in one of those bitter twists of irony, my refusal to play the role of white knight, particularly a dysfunctional subtype, induced resentment.

So I was already providing support so others could rescue themselves. 

That's the clear distinction, and to one set of purposes, where this post could end, as, if it is something wrong with me, I've had a handle on it for quite some time, it doesn't damage me anymore, nor others. 

But where rescuing others with magical love is a delusion, support is a skill that can be acquired through practice, I can't provide my own testimony as to whether I provided sufficient or insufficient support, competent or incompetent. It is likely I haven't yet attained journeyman status in that skillset.

I consider any white knight syndrome in myself, resolved. While this is a personal triumph, I have actually experienced devestation on the faces of some people when I've explained when and how I overcame this. As though self-rescue, as a concept, is threatening and/or alienating.

Vestigia

The last part in this series I speculated on the highly speculative construct of plutophobia, an irrational bigotry against riches. A section of that meandering post rationalized the bigotry as debilitating on account of the disproportionate destruction of poor heritage, compared to the rich. Namely poor people's stuff rarely gets heritage listed, and is often first to be demolished and replaced. 

That sent me to google maps satellite view, to check how much of the public schools I attended remained.

In a pleasant surprise the loooooooooong rows of portable classrooms where I did year 7 remained, but a few had been removed and replaced with new buildings. Specifically the old home-economics classrooms where I recall making tea cakes and fruit salad in year 7 that seems to be gone and it kind of makes sense that it would be replaced with a proper culinary instruction facility. 

Betwixt the chaplains office and the old home-ec rooms, was a little courtyard, a bbq area and that seems to be gone. Here I have memories that for a while, our recess thing to do, was play "perfect match" an activity if not conceived by my friend Bryce, certainly lead by and maintained by him for what could have been a week, a fortnight, three months worth of recesses. 

I mean other weird shit happened too, and I can't really recall how I spent all my recesses, I feel at some point we just had a bbq worshipping ritual. The memories have decayed, at least in my ability to retrieve them as I hadn't thought about Year 7 recesses since maybe my first months in year 8 at a new school.

Anyway, back to "perfect match" I remember very little detail. I remember I was in 7K our homeroom was down that bbq end of the corridor, and 7J was across the hall, and with 11 classes of 30+ students in year 7, we were all kind of ghettoised into clusters of two or three classrooms that functionally where our year level, like we had nothing to do with 7A or even 7F. 

The game would have been more akin to an improv-theatre sports style game, where we were pretending to be characters rather than ourselves on a dating show, but I kept matching with this girl pretty much every time we played. I remember Bryce was there of course, and I'm fairly confident Shannon was in that group, Heff was in that group but we never matched, the girl I matched with, I don't know where she came from, where she went, she definitely made an impression and having unwittingly scratched at this geographically cached memory, it is now itching like a motherfuck.

Let's call her Husqvarna, because she had a husky voice. She was vivacious, confident, extroverted. She had a nice beak, natural blush, hammed it up acting wise like what a Los Angelino would consider a very natural personality. And when we were paired it felt very natural. Yet, I never crushed on her as evidenced by the fact that I don't know her name. I recall being made nervous in an exciting way by her physical proximity, dare I say contact, when we were matched. For fucks sake I am only now just experiencing limerence with respect to her, from the shelved perspective of my 12 year old self.

Likely somebody did crush on her and she disappeared into a relationship. Now, I know I crushed on our editor for The Arch Magazine, the school paper, a year 12 girl and I can't remember her name either. I was a frustrated young man for my first years of high school, and it's unremarkable that little boys who barely have pubes but have begun that magical journey are attracted to girls and women much older than them - physically. But also are attracted to girls their own age, who enjoy the advantage, such that it is contingent on wanting male attention from boys their own age, of being around, sharing classes.

My asynncronious cognitive development though, probably means I struggled to relate to girls my own age, I had a natural affinity for the company of adults. I could converse fairly competently with adults, especially since I had no qualms about saying piss, shit, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker et. al. So I suspect I just struggled to be attracted to girls my own age and in my vicinity, who ironically in their relentless pursuit to pass as more mature than they were, struck me as very immature.

But this is the vestigia of my White Knight Syndrome, Husqvarna is actually relatively rare. The simplest explanation as to why I didn't crush on her, ask her out, make a move etc. was that I didn't know how, I had no experience. Me and my fellow loser friend Q, for which that's shorthand, his name is Quentin, spend many many many hours during our teens discussing 'signs' that maybe the girl we liked, liked us back and maybe we should ask them out. 

This may clash with gender stereotypes, that you know, it's girls and their girlfriends that see questions like 'okay but how did he say it?' as valid and useful, but my other friend Paul once turned to me and was like 'Yes! she borrowed my pencil! It's a sign.' and in my experience rejection anxiety was pretty common, it's a post mobile devices thing that guys started just sending pictures of their dicks to girls and getting done for distributing child pornography.

Bleh, so in hindsight, it seems clear to me that we were matching in a game where we were pretending to be dating game show contestants largely so Bryce could live out his fantasies of being a gameshow host, because incidentally we were likely attracted to each other. I was, in other words, in. And it was likely a clearer sign than other bullshit I'd agonize over with Q and certainly the bullshit he agonized over with me.

What is rare about Husqvarna, is that she is a figure from my past that I recall liking but didn't approach, didn't even think to approach. That's really rare.

For example, in my senior high school years, I experienced strong limerence that kept me up all night for this girl in my year that had become single right when I had become entangled with a very hot-mess. In a rarity for me, I was already dating a troubled girl but was then frustrated by feeling circumstance had cheated me of a relationship with a troubled girl I had much more in common with. 

After a few weeks, my relationship was over and I was clean and free to ask out this girl. I just choked up any time I saw her, I wanted to approach her but couldn't. Husqvarna by contrast seems potentially to be "here's this great person, she'd be a great girlfriend for some lucky somebody." Without out it occurring to me that I could be some lucky somebody.

When I was unpacking and processing this white knight shit, with a psychologist, which I needed to do to get out of a bad place I was in, a problem I came across again and again, was that I could easily identify better prospects for partners than the ones I became enmeshed with at that time, and this vestigia is hard to put into words - something like 'appeal without attraction' 

I would put it to my shrink like thus, "it's like I'm rich, I have heaps of money, and like the girls that promise a nice stable relationship to be with seem like they are rich too, and that seems pointless - like giving a million dollars to a millionaire. what seems logical and sensible to me, is that I should share my wealth with someone poor."

And you know, there was a lot going on there, including the painful realities of life that love at best, can support and comfort someone, but can't cure or fix anything. And that often an opposite is alien, frightening, disturbing and that keeps us all apart. As Alain de Botton, who was not my shrink says in a bunch of his talks - what we mean by true love is not someone who can fix us, who can make us happy, but what we are actually looking for something familiar, someone who can make us suffer in a way we recognize so we know the love is real.

My dysfunctional white knight tendencies have been, by my own estimation, sufficiently bounded for so long that they at least, do not make me suffer anymore. Those boundary fixes were quite easy to implement, a simple recognition that people's issues they bring with them, are theirs to resolve, and to usurp that responsibility is unloving and disrespectful. 

Acceptance is not a passive act, I also positively accept, that due to my own attraction to a type I will describe, as convenience, as "hot messes" that there's always a high risk that the relationship will fail, and I will be powerless to stop it, all I can do is my best to do right by the relationship, by doing right by myself. 

What was hard and first discovered with the panic attack incident, was coming to terms with the fact, that I was always going to be attracted to hot messes, and even with my experiments to go out, run in the opposite direction, and find women who weren't hot messes, in getting to know them, the most promising prospects of life beyond my type, we would achieve a level of intimacy, of familiarity where they felt comfortable, to be vulnerable, to reveal to me, that they in fact were, also hot messes.

This phenomena that I had to come to accept, with difficulty, I refer to as "The Lesbian Bar of My Life Has No Fire Escape."

So let's try and see if I can't shake something loose from the vestigia that does interest me:

Hot Messes vs. Trainwrecks

Have you heard? tohm's a White Knight, you know, one of those guys who has a chronic need to rescue his lovers. [breaks into run] Hey tohm, tohm! Hey, hi. So...um, funny story actually...I don't know if you've heard this, I told some people and you know, maybe it's getting around but yeah like so yeah um like anyway, funny funny story btw. Yeah, I've been seeing a psychologist aaaaaand...yeah well it turns out I have anxiety...[pause]...[searches eyes for human response]...yeah, I'm kind of a hot-mess.

The above is a type, a type I will refer to as a "train wreck". My type is the "hot mess" and not my type is the "train wreck." 

The thing is, I can't put it into words, some women when I discover the damage they live with, it becomes compelling. I experience limerence, it draws me in. When Ale and I went on our first date, the way she complained about how life had screwed her over was on the verge of causing nervous ticks, and it just made me want to kiss her, which I did, and then a rejection and a month of precious time we could have had wasted, we were a couple. The secret was getting rejected.

Then and obviously I'm not going to name any train-wrecks or even drop breadcrumbs on the bent tracks that point to the wreckage, there are women whose damage brings out the Jerry Seinfeld in me, that almost sociopathically wishes them "good luck with that." or a simpler "yikes."

What is, however, the difference? 

The simplest one is likely just a matter of attraction, as in physical attraction. In this regard, I am similar to what I understand a 'nice guy of okcupid' to be, often simply shortened to 'nice guy' which crowds out 'guys who are nice', for those unfamiliar, and too lazy to start googling just as I am too lazy to go find links for you, the 'nice' is sarcastic, 'nice guys' need their scare quotes because they are not nice at all. They view sex as transactional, and the currency as some form of chivalry, they do not see women as people, and as such do not understand that women are entitled to have friends. They get upset because they view behaviours that are banal in the context of friendship as courtship, that is taken.

Basically every woman they are attracted to, is running the Tinder scam of going on dates to get guys to pay for stuff. 

The all important regard though, is that I have heaps of female friends, and generally more experience of 'nice girls', than being a 'nice guy' myself. My test for "nice"-guyness is fairly simple - how do you treat people you don't want to have sex with? 

But under the White Knight delusion, the false conceit that love can cure all ills, that's where my double standard certainly kicks in. I am not a free-lovin' dirty hippie, there are only certain people I am willing to love.

Bringing me back to Husqvarna, again sticking to simple explanations I know so little about that girl from another home room whom for some innumerate iterations of a pretend dating gameshow I matched up with most frequently if not every time, that I have no idea what damage she may or may not have, whether she was on type or off it. 

Simplest explanation was that nothing happened due to inexperience. A real "what was that?" after something flashed before your eyes and after the fact someone explains "that tohm, was a romantic interest. It's gone but there'll be others, many others."

But why did it flash by? Because I can remember my first experience of limerence, of crushing on someone, and that went back to primary school. I'm not talking about playing mummies and daddies on the playground where it's just blind imitation, but the psychological experience of getting someone in your head like a song can. That first happened to me in grade 3, so about age 8, a romantic attraction without the sexual. A desire to simply be in someone's presence.

Flashforward to post Husqvarna, I became aware of the distinctions in my own heterosexuality. Firstly that there were numerous girls and women who are sexual non-entities to me, I understand them to be women, but to suggest that I could just decide to find them attractive is frankly ridiculous. Then there are a large number of women I find attractive, but among other things, I don't want to spend time with them, don't want to talk to them etc. post my sexual awakening in adolescence, it was far more frequent to encounter women I'm physically attracted to but not romantically attracted to or interested in. 

Apologies, I'm doing too much unpacking of my sexuality. But yes, let us not lose sight of the simple explanation that for me the difference between a hot-mess and a train wreck is the presence or absence of romantic attraction.

Where I feel this differential is inadequate, is that if I add men into this Venn-diagram I'm going to get men I behaviourally do a lot of emotional labour for, and gladly, that I have no romantic attraction to. There are other men that while I'd never go so far as to stick a hose down their throat while they are drowning and turn it on a la Ray Crock "The Founder" of McDonald's corporation, there are men whom Seinfeld like, I can only wish "good luck with that."

And here, there could be a sexual component, in terms of, does my care factor diminish if I esteem them as a sexual rival? I can only say no, for twofold reasons - some of my best friends have been sexual rivals. Just yesterday I was chatting to Rolphy, we have an ex in common, Bryce, gameshow host that kept matching me with Husqvarna, we have an ex in common, Brenton one of my closest confidants in high-school had many a crush in common, Stacey cut my lunch once, but it wasn't really a rivalry because I didn't have a chance...I could keep going, and Intrasexual competition tends to settle down in adulthood. 

The other fold, btw, is that I at least, experience pronounced sex differences between heterosexual men and heteronormative women, and am often mistaken as to who I should have regarded as a sexual rival. My late 20s early 30s in particular was eye opening, as many women often opted for men they could have a parent-child relationship with, and whose emotional immaturity rendered them quite dangerous, more so than the bad-boy archetype, I had nothing on the anxiety-boy archetype.

Now, I feel like there is a qualitative reason I perceive and experience a difference between what I'm calling Train-wrecks and what I'm calling Hot-messes. But yes, you can't spell Hot-mess, without "Hot" there's probably something telling in that.

What I'm not going to do, beyond my opening paragraph which is a psychology book style construct of amalgamated conversations I've actually had, is write up any case studies of "train-wrecks" under my general policy of not saying behind someone's back, what I am not willing to say to their faces. Now often people hear me talking about people behind their back, and assume I am a hypocrite who does not live up to their own standards, in which case they are usually underestimating what I am willing to say to someone's face, but in the case of Train-wrecks, that's beyond my courage, particularly since intrinsic to my usage, is my unwillingness to get entangled in their problems.

So why do I even use train-wreck? It feels kinder than dumpster-fire, but still implies a kind of public spectacle. And there's something there...yeah, feels right. Oversharing, definitely which can take too forms, firstly being indiscriminate in the audience you share your vulnerability with, that is not intimate but public. Secondly, overly impatiently sharing when we have not built up that kind of relationship, in fact, I hardly know you.

Like I definitely understand theory of mind; such that, while I know I'm trustworthy, I know that you can't know that, and I judge your judgement in oversharing with me. It is more so that, than thrill of the chase, but maybe that as well, given that it's a reasonable inference that a good place to start with any personal issues we have, is to take stock of our own judgement.

It could also be something to do with me, with affiliation, that's the real demarcation for me as train-wrecks have not cropped up randomly in my life. The people we know are seldom an accident. Just doing a short mental inventory, a single connection has introduced me to two-thirds of the train-wrecks I've encountered in my life. At least. But a third is significant, like I don't think it's the stink of affiliation.

Coming back to the labels I've chosen to use, I'm thinking "hot-mess" is also a kind of oxymoron, especially if we are treating 'hot' as a synonym for appealing, whereas "train-wreck" is not an oxymoron, it's possibly a subject and a preposition, and as such a valid sentence in English, I'm not a grammarian. But it's obvious. A train-wreck is a big obvious spectacle. It is obviously a bad idea to get involved, whereas a hot-mess is a paradox, it's intriguing, a seeming gamble.

Yes, this feels promising, like I've put my finger on an intuitive filter I have. Train-wrecks are the people that when you get trapped in an abandoned carnival at night, and all the rides suddenly and mysteriously turn on, and just as you are in the middle of remarking that this situation is "like the beginning of every horror movie ever" they interrupt with "I think we should split up."

There is also a synthetic vs. organic component, chance vs. non-chance. Here it is likely that we are all by default hot-messes, born into confusing circumstances and guided largely by inexperienced and/or unqualified fellow travellers in a vastly chaotic closed system. A Hot-mess reminds me more of headphone wires that will become tangled through the stochastic motions of being in a pocket while we walk, though in people that tangle can become a veritable Gordian knot, particularly if a White Knight attempts to untangle it with love instead of fingers. A train-wreck is engineering error, or driver error, the wreckage is characterised in my experience, usually by a brash overconfidence - someone has typically bought into a narrative uncritically and literally full steamed it until they are sitting among the wreckage of their life in a state of confusion, or worse, when observers can plainly see the engineer is going to derail, but the engineer is too self-unaware to see it. Sorry, I should have been clearer that many I unconsciously class as "train-wrecks" are really "pre-wrecks."

My life however, doesn't provide me with any real control. For example, and this is a safe example in terms of anonymity, I don't think I've ever met any women who lives with the horrible affliction of OCD, certainly in terms of a White Knight Syndrome, OCD is not going to be cured by a lover's love, so a control condition would be if I had met two women with OCD and come to regard one as a hot-mess I was drawn to romantically, wanting to help them, and another I regarded as a train-wreck firmly in the friend zone.

Let's get this train moving along though, because I think I've gone as far as my thoughts can take me on this question, I'll have to dredge up more into my active memory from long term storage.

The Ironic Safety of Train-Wrecks

I just want to make clear, the only sense in which I am repelled by train wrecks is romantically. And I am attracted to few enough people for it really to be a major source of feelings of rejection, besides if you are a train-wreck, you have bigger problems to concern yourself with than what I think of you, except in the sole instance where you aren't aware you are a train-wreck, and that happens in this era of normalized conspiratorial thinking.

I am happy to be friends with train-wrecks and can even be concerned for their wellbeing. This is motivated by my belief in a more universal human dignity, but in that concern it has historically been no issue at all to just accept my own impotency as a person of no particular qualification to help get a life back on track. 

But my white knight issues then, are, and have always been, no issue for the train-wreck. The subtitle of the book is "Rescuing Yourself from Your Need to Rescue Others" I feel no need, and to be clear it is the felt 'need' of the White Knight that is the problem, not that you keep rescuing people. Most often people in relationships can't and don't rescue their partners. 

I would almost bet, that while many clinical psychologists may recommend to a patient that they need to 'get out there' close to none would ever prescribe that someone 'just needs a boyfriend or a girlfriend' Relationships can be something that enriches our lives such that we highly value them, but good relationships are more likely a symptom than a cure.

As Dr. Gordon Livingston prescribes: First Earn, then Expect.

Mama Mia!

We are going to have to get over something, and it may come up when I say this next thing: I likely didn't know what to do with Husqvarna, my recurrent "perfect match" because she in no way reminded me of my mother.

Believe me, I have been fucking freaked out by some resemblances between my friends' partners and one of their parents. It's nothing we like contemplating, how common it is for someone to want to fuck their own mother or father, but it is also banal.

Take me for example, you've just met me, and drawing on a real example this time, you hit me with the small talk 'what are you going to do this weekend?' and I respond 'Killing prostitutes' how do you respond? I would guess the most likely response would be to call me out for my problematic views that must certainly propagate male violence against women, and marginalised women at that, but that's not the way to my heart.

We're talking about attachment theory here, and my response to your question is an implicit punishment for attempting to initiate an obvious conversation aka small talk. If you want us to grow closer, you need to pick up on that and 'yes-and' me. Something like "I've read about that, did you shave off your moustache because of the police sketch?" to which I might say "the repressed homosexuality comments really got to me, I abducted that journalist and showed him a slide show before setting him on fire in a wheel chair." 

Now we are bonding over our contempt for the social safety of banal conversations about weekend plans. 

None of this, has anything to do with my mother. I raise it though, as an example that if you hadn't guessed the thing to do, we are quite unlikely to wind up in a relationship. Equally, there's going to be a bunch of potential romantic partners permanently out of my reach, because I don't really know how to have small talk. 

And if you and your dad just love puns, this is how you wind up with a partner like your dad, because eventually at the watercooler you are going to be fucking in with the guy who loves puns, whereas I would throw my glass of water in your face.

Ironically, even though I only recall Husqvarna from a context where we were both entirely performative, pretending to be game show contestants, my feeling is that she was quite authentic, a WYSIWYG person aka the best kinds of persons, which was true of the other female contestants Heff and Shannon that I can recall too, when I come to think of it, all very unlike my mother.

Where my White Knight Syndrome was at its most literally overempathic, and therefore dysfunctional, when it was doing the most damage to my mental health and fostering the most resentment, where it was, in other words - least safe, least bounded and at breaking (me) point - a friend of mine pointed out that the catalyst for the expression of my dysfunction was "quite performative" in their persona. 

Something that had never occurred to me, but once pointed out, obvious. My own version of mistaking danger (performance) for safety (authenticity) and safety (the "Strength" tarot card) for danger (the "Moon" tarot card)...that half I'm less sure about.

Because the authors of The White Knight Syndrome: Rescuing Yourself from Your Need to Rescue Others, in an interview I found with them, told an anecdote of telling a colleague about their idea for the book they were working on and the colleague said "so you mean...women" which is to say, this behaviour is so widespread among women that it is almost a universal, at least a fairly safe, generalisation.

And here I arrive at the vestigia best characterised as "the law of large numbers" to which I made an aforementioned allusion that we are all hot-messes, but not all of us are train-wrecks. Another book helpful, but more recently consumed by me on this front, is "The drama of the gifted child" which is not about the lay understanding of giftedness, not the 2% of the population who could in theory excel at schoolwork, but the gift every child has for surviving childhood emotionally no matter who their parents are, by subduing themselves in whatever way necessary to become the child their parents want them to be.

If it helps, think of dogs, dog's intellectual capabilities sort of max out at somewhere near the cognitive capacity of 5 year old children, where they excel at is in attuning themselves to the owners they depend on in order to survive. For many dogs this works out fine, their needs are met in a stable, predictable routine throughout their lives. Other dogs get all kinds of mental and emotional issues, sometimes translating into physical ailments like hives.

Author of "The Drama of The Gifted Child" does not mention dogs or dog ownership, that's my own analogy, but what it suggests is that pretty much everyone once you get to know them, is a survivor of their own childhood. So even if I were to successfully navigate around the hot-messes with their tattoos and piercings, their interest in crystals, their disorganised chaotic lives and go on a date with a successful career woman, overeducated and over travelled, member of a mixed netball league and paying off a mortgage on a townhouse, by the third or fourth date as they became more relaxed and more vulnerable I'd likely be beginning to learn the hollowing out of their personhood they feel is a result of chasing a perception by their parents that is acceptable.

It basically means, that my ability to throw a stone with my eyes closed, and hit someone with long intractable issues is not as impressive a magic trick as it seems. It's kind of like a mentalist guessing that someone in the audience today likes pizza.

That I have tended to romantically gather the low-hanging fruit of woman with an interest and side hustle in Wicca, is a product of my plutophobia, my asynchronous cognitive development "avoiding the middle" wasteland of mediocrity.

When I became conscious of my unconscious tendency to mistake "The Moon" for "Strength" I started actively trying to break my own patterns, to date the unfamiliar. It was a formula somewhat like (physical attraction + friendship = ask them out on a date) and I had some success at going on dates, but no relationships came from it.

The last time I experienced an adverse affect to my white knight predisposition however, was a panic attack I suffered when I came to recognize patterns between someone new and the person who had forced me to learn about my white knight tendencies.

Instead of donning the armour and riding out to the rescue, I panicked, fled and sought rescue myself. 

Q answered the call giving me a book on the hippocampus that explained mindfulness techniques I could use to get a hold of myself. Rod answered the call by welcoming me to the human race, pointed out that in my panic I'd just gone and done the thing I was afraid of happening, and had a good chat to me about how anxiety is not in fact a condition or affliction but a normal human emotion felt in the presence of uncertainty, that what I needed to do was not flee anyone and everyone that might tempt me into white knight mode, but come to accept that we all have head candy and that that's pretty good. A more nuanced view of not optimising our lives, but accepting a standard we can be happy in the presence of.

After that I understood, and even though life hasn't constantly come up tohm since, I don't think about it too much, it doesn't need much managing. Except...

The Worst Managerial Arrangement

My university, RMITU, most often referred to as what it likely really is RMIT, sells itself on "Work Integrated Learning". At about the midpoint of my first business degree, growing extremely frustrated with my inability to select electives and even more frustrated with how often a subject had 30~40% of its assessment be a dreaded "group assignment" I realised with horror, that RMIT was trying to sneak by us that group assignments were a direct manifestation of "work integrated learning" presumably because in real workplaces people contribute as teams like departments. 

I still find this assertion so annoying that I am tempted to waste words here, as to why group assignments are a false analogy to office work. Fuck it, two obvious ones is that office teams don't change every class - four times a day, and the work is often routine and in a linear flow, not simultaneous, and workplaces also generally have layers of management, not flat organisations like every fucking group in "group assignment." This lack of management is a kind of decent segue though and why I brought up the group assignment obsessed RMIT business courses.

The most common solution to the myriad problems of group assignments - namely the coordination costs and trust issues, was that one person volunteers to do the assignment and everyone else shares in the grade. Logically, the person with the most to lose, is the best student, the one most capable of achieving a high grade if the work isn't diluted by lesser contributors. They can effectively bribe their group members with a higher grade than would be achieved if they contributed.

But I noticed this didn't happen, as often I was the student in the group with the best grasp of what was needed and how to go about it, but I was the least motivated to do the actual work. I resented, and resent, to this day, the implication that I don't have anything better to do with my time than get high grades.

What most often happened, was that the group let the most anxious manage, they got a sense of control that relieved their anxieties, and we got to slack off.

The thing being, that highly anxious students can also be C, D and even F students. There was more than one occassion where I got emailed the assignment a day or two before the due date, was horrified, and had to redo it in an all nighter.

What of relationships? Given the romantic nature of modern relationships, my experience is that many resent or find insulting any parallel between a romantic relationship and a working relationship.

But relationships require management, and as Gordon Neufeild pointed out, two people can't drive a car, both he and his wife can't both be on top while having sex. He points out/asserts, that healthy relationships involve switching of Alpha roles. Taking turns. 

My Aunt Nancy says the way of our family is "if someone's more eager we get out of the way" and I have to trust she's observed enough of a thruline. I feel it is certainly true that both my father and I in relationships defer to the most anxious to manage the relationship.

I certainly, almost never seize control, deferring in relationship decisions, but this is not all.

I also shoulder the responsibility of making the marriage work, so in other words the worst managerial arrangement of all.

Last year, I was literally in this managerial arrangement, I had a boss that made shit sandwiches and I was expected to eat them. Without any romance though, I quit instead, albeit responsibly rather than dramatically.

In relationships however, this has not been the case, I've been fired. I experience relationships largely as an accumulation of pressure until it breaks. Even with my newfangled boundaries that have me supporting my partners to step into their own agency rather than appeal to me to rescue them.

I am always at my unhappiest though, when made to feel not a romantic partner, but a wish fulfilling genie. 

Envidiosa

My stories I'm watching at the moment, is an Argentinian comedy series on Netflix "Envidiosa" or "Envious" in english. I recognize, but cannot relate to the protagonist of the series Vicky. 

The premise is a 39 year old woman who is recently seperated from her fiance of 10 years David. Though she broke it off because David wouldn't marry her, David went on a trip and married a Brazillian dance instructor he met on that holiday. 

Vicky has a circle of female friends, and her envy expands beyond David and his new wife he married quickly after delaying for 10 years with her, to her friends who are getting married and having children. 

She has two love interests, Nick her boss who is wealthy but unreliable, and then the obvious right guy for her Mattias, a 40 year old guy who works in the Chinese restaurant next to her apartment building who keeps helping her pick up the pieces after disastrous melt downs.

All the while, episodes are often framed with Vicky sitting with a mysterious rash across her face, or a torn dress and gum in her hair, arguing with her psychotherapist that she isn't motivated almost entirely by envy and comparison.

By around the 4th or 5th episode of season 1, it's super obvious that Mattias is who Vicky needs to be with, and the plot starts to feel contrived that she keeps going back to  Nick and blowing off Mattias or friendzoning him.

Where the viewing experience is therapuetic for me, is understanding via Vicky's experience of dominance of the narrative, that she foregoes love with Mattias because Vicky's envy and comparison rule him out via an inability to meet her material needs. Whereas Nick has the distinct possibility of being an instrumental partner that can validate Vicky's esteem she needs from her friends, from David and so on.

But there's 4 seasons, I'm sure unless they kill Mattias in season 2, that the show will lose my interest because Vicky has no uncontrived reason not to learn the lesson she needs to learn by the end of season 2. For now though, I'll keep watching and might update this post.

I don't know, if I identify more with Mattias or David, certainly I have the experience of being either transitionally or more enduringly made to feel that I as a partner am a means rather than an end, and I suspect in many ways the vestigia of White Knighthood has been making my bed to lay in for all of my adult life.

When you companion yourself to someone who is muchly defined by their attempt to outrun the darkness they feel is chasing them, this is a romantic risk you will always face.

What's curious is, the question of whether I can ever consciously identify a Husqvarna in time to act, and whether I can bring the energy, the enthusiasm, necessary for someone healthy to accept a relationship, convinced, that I want to be there, and not pondering the inner workings of a hot-mess as I hold her hair while she pukes up another bad decision.

Conclusion

We must imagine Husqvarna happy.

Tax Reform vs Clown College

 To my best ability to discern a fact, without watching any news, the Australian government released the 2026-2027 Budget with some tax reforms that will kick into effect July 1st, 2027 so the financial year after next.

In my opinion the reforms are good, some tax relief for the productive economic activity known as work, and grandfathering out of a capital gainst tax discount on the unproductive economic activity of speculating on the asset prices of housing stock, as well as grandfathering out negative gearing.

I've been side eyeing some op-ed headlines trying to beat the war drums of furore against any touching of the obscene tax incentives to "invest" in property. Without reading the words that were said, these people are clowns and I thought I'd commit a few words to this proposition.

How Are Houses Capital?

Yes, capital gains tax is levied against the proceeds that arise from the change in price when someone sells the house and land package if it's positive. So if you bought it for $100,000 and sold it for $1,000,000 you would have to pay CGT on $900,000 margin, which if that was your primary residence (I believe for 6 months) in Australia you pay nothing and by the way, this post shouldn't be in any way construed as advice based on the Australian Tax Code I'm pulling these numbers out of my arse and the discounts out of memories of a subject I've had very little interest in historically.

But, okay, "shares" are capital because they are a means by which a company can raise funds for productive investment (in theory) and in return the investor gets a stake, or a share, of any future profits paid out as a dividend, or this capital, this stake in the company can be sold on an exchange and the price theoretically, is some reflection of the net present value of the expected future earnings of the company. (This doesn't necessarily work in practice.)

Less abstractly, a tractor is capital because while technically you could buy one for fun to get you from A to B in your private diversions, mostly tractors are bought by farmers to massively increase the productivity of their farm labour, allowing them to move hay bails for the heard in a matter of minutes instead of hours when they had a horse drawn cart (also capital) the can tow a plough and get a field ploughed in an hour instead of a day or week. 

An espresso machine is capital because it enables a cafe worker to make coffees for a dozen customers in 10 minutes with all their tediously specific orders. A pizza oven is capital because it cooks pizzas. A deep fryer is capital because it fries chips. Suction cups are capital because they enable glaziers to fit glass into its frame. A crane is capital because it can lift construction materials up to the top stories. A ship is capital because it transports goods across the ocean.

Now how is a house capital?

There are legitimate answers to this question, but in reality the more accurate answer is that houses are not capital. In some pedantic manner, they may help people do work by providing them a space in which they can keep office attire in a condition that allows them to keep their jobs, it prevents them from getting diseases and viruses that would impact their productivity if they were homeless, it gives them a fighting chance of keeping mental ill-health in check to the point they can function at work etc.

Also as of very recent times it can be asserted that there's like a 30% chance now that a house will have the dual function of residence and office with the post covid work-from-home revolution of video conferencing and internet connection.

But tax deductions for a home office are I believe, already provided for, and yes, entreprenuers have operated businesses out of the house for centuries, but relatively few people become work from home shoe cobblers in the 19th and 20th centuries. It's really at the 20% elapsed point of the 21st century that work-from-home approaches normal, and for most workers while they will need a whole room for privacy, their home work stations are gonna be like 2m^2. 

Housing is traditionally unproductive in economic terms. It's the least productive piece of acreage on a farm in the frontier days of Australia, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina etc. and in your Russian and British period novels involving some young chap struggling to make it in the city and having to contend with a widower landlord and her charming daughter, we can infer that home ownership rates are incredibly low, with a few rich families owning pretty much everything and everyone else renting.

And as I like to point out whenever I can, the clue is in the term of art "landlord" this is a feudal occupation and the landlords no longer saddle up and ride out against the pillaging would be landlord from the next fief over to protect their peasants. We just have this cultural artefact where through "home ownership" a "landlord" effectively buys the right to levy a private income tax.

Right. The way a "house" is an investment is functionally that it can ostensibly be used as housing by a worker. That worker who does productive work can pay this private income tax in a number of different ways, and Gary of Gary's Economics has a great video explaining that the differences don't really matter. A worker can pay the private income tax in exchange for housing either as rent, profit or interest. 

I am assuming that how paying rent to a landlord functions as a private income tax, but anticipate, rightly or wrongly, that the average aussie bogan might not see how borrowing money to buy the house is also a private income tax.

So I'll introduce another question: How much would you sell a goose that lays golden eggs for? The naive answer would be that you wouldn't. You'd be a fool to give up $53k per egg for the rest of that goose's life. Wrong, let's say the goose averages an egg a day, I don't know shit about geese productivity, that's $19M a year. You would calculate the Net Present Value by basically dividing the expected earnings by 1 plus the going interest rate on typically treasury bills or something and compounded for a time period, in this case the life of the goose. That will come up with some astronomical figure yes, but from the perspective of the goose holder they are getting paid out something close to the lifetime earnings of golden goose eggs right now, they don't have to wait for the eggs to be lain. 

This is what a landlord does when they sell you a house, at least in theory, Australian's I believe are objectively insane, but not irrational in what they pay for housing. When aspiring first home owners buy a house off the landlord, what is often lost is the process taking place where the landlord is saying "I could rent this to you or someone like you for 10 years and collect 60% of your wages for those ten years, I'm only going to sell it to you if you pay me, now 11x your annual salary." 

So Australian first home buyers are functionally tennents who pay a lump sum premium private income tax to avoid the ongoing private income tax paid in monthly instalments. In exchange they get some not insignificant perks, but they also borrow money to pay this private income tax for those perks and the interest repayments are also yet another private income tax, and the hope that thus far has been fulfilled in Australia, is that you can persuade the next person to borrow even more to pay you back, to bail you out effectively.

Now bringing it back, housing isn't really capital. It's not like a tractor or an espresso maker or an e-bike. It just houses people, some of whom are workers and many of whom are children. We also know through real estate maxims like "Location, Location, Location" that very little of the worth of a property comes from the housing structure itself, it is a positional good meaning that most of the wealth comes from the amenities around the land like infrastructure, parks, hospitals, schools, even the other houses such that an ugly house lowers the price of the beautiful heritage cottage across the street that's view it spoils and the beautiful house raises the price of the ugly house that has a great view of it.

There are cases like mining barracks where a company houses its workforce and that housing can be considered capital. And yeah commercial property can be considered capital because you aren't supposed to live in it.

It shouldn't have been called capital gains tax in the first place though, because land is a positional good, a different factor of production to capital, and this has been present from Adam Smith's start and then obscured to keep the landed gentry in the money for centuries.

Orthodox economists are clowns too often treated seriously particularly by the news media. 

Negative Gearing

Negative gearing is overdetermined to be awful. Nobody should be apologizing for it, at best they should express be expressing trepedation at the cost of removing it, but that it inevitably must be removed or Australia will continue backwards as an economy.

I don't want to do my full spiel, but a lot of young people don't understand what negative gearing is in principle, they just think it's a tax discount they would be smart to take advantage of or something.

Basically, imagine you are rich, you pay a lot of income tax. Then you go out and you make a bad investment that loses money. Negative gearing is the means by which the government says "well done, we'll go broke, not you." and let's you the rich person, deduct the losses incurred from your bad investment from your income tax.

So it encourages, let's be blunt, dentists, to bid up properties to inflated prices instead of paying income tax that would finance law & order, education, national defence, the national disability insurance scheme, healthcare etc.

Like our government literally pays the richest people to make housing less affordable.

They are fucking clowns too often treated seriously particularly by the news media..