ALPHABET SOUP:

I found a peculiar chart online. This details the distinction between the alpha-male and beta-male paradigm in such a manner that exposes most clearly the dark underpinnings of this otherwise popular class structure.

What stood out to me at first was this: most of the qualities associated with the beta are actually relatively positive and favourable qualities. Some of them are so intrinsic to the common sense of human life that one feels strange defending them: on one hand, I feel like I’m stating the obvious; on the other, I wonder what believing it to be obvious says about me.

Some of these are intrinsic to a healthy psyche, whereas the alternatives are red flags for narcissism and other personality disorders, including one that literally defines an alpha as narcissistic. Additionally, most of the beta traits are often listed as social skills conducive to healthy relationships, such as the ability to negotiate, the ability to appease, and the willingness to agree. Tolerance of offense, listed as “disrespect”, is ostensibly a beta trait, though it is essential to a healthy ego. 

Most of these are rationally self-evident; for instance, most men who are not self-entitled infants understand that you can’t make everyone like and respect you, since people are far too diverse and complex to accommodate that sort of egocentric fantasy. Even “neuroticism” looks good by contrast with narcissism, and we know from history that the former produces far more interesting works of art and literature. 

In summary, the “beta” traits seem to be those which any rational, willful woman would desire in a mate, and it follows logically that the amateur psychologists who profess the alpha traits are operating under the presumption that women are neither rational nor naturally willful. This implies that these men have not only projected their own feminine tendencies outward, upon women, but as a result their relationships have suffered so tremendously that they seldom meet a REAL woman who forces them to confront their delusions. You know these sorts of people; within minutes of meeting them, you can tell what they are about to say, and when you learn that they have trouble sleeping at night, haunted by dreams of women who had been raped, you know why, smirking inwardly, for they must learn the meaning of that dream for themselves.

Finally, there is the question of accountability. The writer listed as “Rollo” seems to corroborate this recent tendency for corporate executives to treat work and love by analogy to some sort of a “performance”. (Quite apparently, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not classified as a performance, since most of Prince Hamlet’s finest monologues and soliloquys are expressions of “beta” tendencies and attitudes, i.e. the Romantic Ideal.) There is a tendency for narcissistic men to forget that in any system their ability to make decisions depends directly upon decisions made by others. It follows logically that the best way to manage a team is to hold every constituent equally responsible for the common welfare, for this alone can motivate every member to see projects through to completion. While a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, this does not permit team players to simply lead a witch-hunt against members whom THEY perceive to be weak, for comparison with others is indicative of the team member’s losing sight of the goal. That being said, it’s obvious that when one points the finger one has three more pointing back, in most cases, and if one wishes to find the TRUE enemies of social welfare, one has only to wait; they have a way of revealing their weaknesses.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

DAT!NG ETHN!CALLY: [({“Who You Truly Are” is probably quite boring.)}]

Dating Ethnically: “Who You Truly Are” is probably quite boring, or it’s no more interesting than anyone else.

Having grown up as an Honours student has two advantages: one sees delicate matters such as race very differently from the average person, and one also sees a LOT of Asian women.

Honestly, who knows how old they are? Not I.

Before I lead you to believe otherwise, allow me to assure you that this article has little to do with praising Asian women in an elitist fashion. So much of what makes East Asia beautiful in general defies verbal classification, and it would be an affront to the Spiritual traditions which helped to form these nations to elaborate.

What this article responds to is a deeply troubling term: “yellow fever”. I’ve grown up with this expression in the back of my mind, and while its proto-Fascist implications have dissuaded me from fearing it, thinking that at a certain age I would transcend it, I am reaching an age wherein I’ll have come to accept that some people never “grow up” by my standards, and neither will I “grow up” by everyone else’s. 

What “yellow fever” implies is a sort of bizarre phobia. Predominantly, it is the fear of white men dating Asian women, and, as the term implies, it puts the blame upon white men for even CONSIDERING the possibility.

Horn-rimmed glasses are optional but preferred.

Every civilized nation in the World of Men tends to idealize its own women, and universally each nation tends to hold its women to some standard of Beauty. Some of these standards are certainly superficial, though the admiration of them is indicative of refined taste, as one admires a flower. 

Let’s keep in mind that a truly environmentally conscious society not only takes steps to preserve the environment but takes time to appreciate it; human beings are no better than plants, so admiring a woman as one admires a flower is deeply progressive. Yet even on the strictly human level, or perhaps the mammalian level, beauty is reflected in upbringing. National identity is, for instance, very important in Japan, wherein outsiders are often satirized by the media. In particular, I think of Asuka from Evangelion, a German girl who is a sort of misfit owing to her domineering, competitive temperament. Obviously, the Japanese nationals in that show demonstrate more tact. 

In short, the notion of what it means to be a beautiful woman depends upon where you happen to be. Yet this is not entirely RELATIVE. If we were incapable of escaping our own cultural conditioning, human beings would never have REACHED the civilized state to begin with. Some standards for beauty, in other words, carry universal weight, not so much in the sense that All Rational Beings must agree to these standards, but rather in the sense that even outsiders can appreciate them to the point of veneration.

It’s not simply a natural phenomenon, since even genetics are a cultural process of evolution derived from the selection of mates. Yet this is where I stand on (the topic of) Asian women: everything which is stereotypically beautiful about them, alongside the rest of their culture, is beautiful to me, not because I have some skewed, Western conception of them (a presumption so prejudicial that I can’t believe it passes for politically correct) but rather because I am not bound to a strictly American aesthetic standard. The same drive which inspires me to avoid Russian women compels me to explore women of other nationalities with other standards for beauty and behavior. I don’t simply keep the Other at a distance with the passive-aggressive intent of assimilating Her into some global standard. I respect the Other AS an Other, and instead of trying to “get to know her as a person” (depending upon what brand of American television she watches, what gym she attends, or what her favourite household pet is) I actually want to know what it is like to be an Asian woman, and I see no reason to apologize for that in a progressive society. 

Besides: my dog is a Pekingese, and I love him unconditionally. I also practice Buddhist meditation and play Japanese video games. There is simply no way around the fact that Asian culture saturates society. “Who you are as a person” is largely the product of your identity as a Consumer; very few people alter the very course of human history, and yet we can respect people if we know WHERE THEY ARE COMING FROM. Hence that English idiom which refers to someone’s origins also represents that person’s point of view.

In 2018, Kim P. of creditdonkey.com reported that a meager seventeen per cent of married couples were “interracial”. One would expect, of course, that most monoracial couples would be Asian, since Asians account for a majority of the world’s population, whereas most black people, for instance, would be involved in interracial couples, since it’s simply improbable that the person you fall for according to who he or she “truly is” will just HAPPEN to be black, especially considering that many African Americans celebrate the life and teachings of Martin Luther King. As it turns out, only eighteen per cent of African Americans marry a non-black, whereas Asians lead the world in terms of biracial coupling, with twenty-nine per cent of their population marrying non-Asians. Clearly, “yellow fever” has some historical precedent as well as some teleological value, and the sentiment is not entirely one-sided.

Why, then, do women continue to feel “fetishized” by men for being Asian? Simply put, the same force that drives black people into isolation is that force which drives Asian women away from white men, etc. Every nationalist wants to believe that his women are the finest in the World, but he refuses to agree with an outsider who could not possibly understand True Beauty. It’s not just that white men tend to keep people segregated. Human beings segregate themselves. Those few of us who lower our blinders and fall in love with another culture’s standards lead the way progressively.

Norman Reedus (left, obviously.) plays also the titular role in Hideo Kojima’s new game, giving “players” in every sense someone to root for.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

B3TAT3ST!NG:

The Dream of Fritz von Franz:

The dream begins when Fritz returns to work. He is informed by his boss that, while he did work for the Company for several months, and while the company did owe him one hundred dollars as compensation for this labour, the sheer desperation of his condition has dispossessed him of this entitlement. Additionally, his attempts to receive compensation by returning to his FORMER place of employment are deemed threatening, so he must be escorted out promptly by his competitors. Fritz tries to phone his old Supervisor, hoping to bypass the bureaucracy, but his cell phone has run out of battery. He is forbidden to charge it on the corporate premises.

Absconding to a café, Fritz von Franz discovers that his charging apparatus has been damaged by the Security Guards who are now inexplicably his competitors, despite the fact that his position was never in the Security Department (though he is reminded bitterly of the axiom “Everyone is in Security”). After asking seven other patrons (all of them, inexplicably, female) if they have a matching charger, he finally encounters a woman who does. Yet before he can manage to avail himself of her device, seven other men come forth (out of nowhere?), each with a different phone, claiming to need their phones charged by her. Though some of these phones Fritz knows to be of an incompatible model, the woman explains curtly that she can only charge one phone at a time, and she must be careful therefore to choose only the most competent phone. Since Fritz’s phone will not even turn on, he has been disqualified from the competition.

Salvaging what few funds he requires for this task, Fritz buys a Universal Charging Apparatus at the local cellular phone store. He returns to the café to charge his phone. Shortly thereafter, he overhears a woman complain that her phone has run out of battery. Generously, Fritz approaches her, offering to let her use his charger, which is adapted for every cell phone currently in use. Yet before he has secured her consent to this convenience, one of the aforementioned Security Guards from his former place of employment intervenes. The Guard explains that in Fritz’s absence the Guard has been promoted to regional manager, and while Fritz was busy buying a cell phone charger the Company has merged with the café. Furthermore, the Guard has determined Fritz’s tactics to be monopolistic and competitive, so Fritz is forbidden to either share or use his cell phone charger on the premises. Additionally, the woman tells Fritz that she has no interest in a cell phone charger that has almost certainly been used by plenty of other phones, imbibed with their deficiency and worn from their abuse. Frustrated, Fritz returns to the cell phone store, only to find that it, too, has been subsidized by his former employers. Fritz asks the Guard who operates the store now: how were you hired? He replies: I acted like I didn’t really care or need the job.

At this moment, Fritz wakes up to his Reality.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

to AW!LDA PARADA VALENZUELA, regarding SARAH NEMUR!.

No, she had not only the right but the responsibility to report on you. You violated the trust of the organization that you had all conspired to join, and this violation of trust precedes any pretense towards loyalty you might require of her. She behaved as an innocent adherent to the Greater Good, which was the integrity of the team, whose single unifying purpose, precedent over any deviant interests, is the representation, UNRESTRICTED, of the Truth, our natural birth-right. The World of conscientious reform cannot wait for your debauchery, and no man or woman can be forced into silence by one’s fellow PUBLIC SPEAKERS.

Dm.A.A.

IKNOR!TE:

The concept of “human rights”, “individual rights”, and “natural rights” is fundamentally inextricable from the notion of “being right” and “living rightly”. If, for instance, suicide is wrong, according to the intrinsic value of an individual life, then the individual has the RIGHT to survive. If tolerance and complacency in the face of oppression is wrong, then the individual who lives with it has the RIGHT to speak out against it, even if it is only in one’s own defense. In every instance, rights and responsibilities are identical once framed within the context of a universal value, without which rights would amount to little more than feelings of entitlement and responsibilities would become the instruments of an impersonal, arbitrary and inhumane social order. In other words: HAVING a right, BEING IN THE right, and DOING the right THING, are one.

Contemporary philosophers try to deconstruct this notion, but in the process they only reveal their own shortcomings. In the wake of several devastating totalitarian regimes, we cannot afford to be Benthamites, presuming upon the Utilitarian pretensions of “greatest good for the greatest number”. This intellectual puzzle for excessively clever minds is actually child’s play for the devout monk who loves. Genuine altruism seeks not to put the Other at a distance nor to focus exclusively upon the Other’s distinguishing qualities. Compassion is by definition suffering with another; when we love others, truly, we regard them as individuals with needs not unlike our own, and weighed against their own, honest expressions of these needs as THEY understand them, we can help them to fulfill these needs, thereby healing the world by helping one individual at a time. This attitude of compassion is an appeal to the universality of human longings, and it transcends all boundaries of culture, nationality, and business interests.

Philosophers with very nationalistic or communitarian tendencies, often not without binding affiliations to their name, tend to behave as though natural rights have done little more in practice than to defend personal privilege. These philosophers are tempted to bypass human rights in the interest of vague notions such as “enfranchisement”. Yet for all of their talk of how the intrinsic nature of human rights was never “proven” they do nothing to prove that groups have some sort of natural value. Suffering, while it can be transmitted empathically, is an individual affair, as is innovation. Groups do not “do” anything, effectively. They do not feel, think, or invent; they simply MAKE us feel, think, and invent along certain lines. Groups have no rights, so it is absurd to try to appeal to the social progress of any group if one dismisses the value of every person. As I have indicated, it can only restrict our access to the universality of compassion. A person who claims that “black lives matter” but who scoffs at the suggestion that “all lives matter” has absolutely no foundation upon which to warrant her politics; while I can agree that all lives matter, for that includes me, and by extension I might extend compassion to those whose lives are (I am told to classify as) black, being told that not only do black lives EXIST but that they MATTER is ridiculous if I cannot even prove that my OWN life, within which this knowledge is phenomenologically contained, matters. Furthermore, if I can admit that ALL lives matter, I need not even the distinction of BLACK to DEFEND the rights of a person, which immediately eliminates epistemological confusion and allows the healing process to be direct, especially since it does not attempt to use the same thinking which produces a problem to solve it.

While human rights might have had little direct effect upon the civil rights movement, they were nonetheless the perpetual means by which that movement was vindicated. Had Dr. King not been educated in philosophy, we might never have found reason to defend his propositions. Any time that a mob is gathered in agreement, often violently and subversively, the mind’s instinctive reaction is to either fight or flee. One cannot derive anything of substance from a group, and wretched is the mind which is caught in it. Fascism only dies with the death of groupthink.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

TOO RAD(!CAL) to Be-a-DAD(DY ISSUE:).

Okay, so here’s a RAD!CAL notion: how about, if you wish to eliminate misogyny, you begin by dispossessing yourself of misandry? I’m pretty sure that none of you ladies would prefer to live in a patriarchal society that determines your entire station in life based upon some binding, universalized standard for physical beauty and engendered behaviourism, so if you maintain that this has been your plight throughout history, why allow yourself the shame of perpetuating the cycle of abuse? The entire distinction of alphas and betas, presumably beginning in Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, is evocative of a rigid class structure that is perpetuated with the consent of an oppressed populace that is happy in slavery, despite its looming and terrifying problems. I should make clear that I AM sympathetic, to an extent, with the distinction. Obviously, female autonomy in sexual affairs implies that every heterosexual woman has a “first choice” in selecting mates, and this implies the possibility of a “runner-up”. In this sense, the distinction of alpha and beta is valid, RELATIVELY, and only so, for the nature of a man’s status in this case depends entirely upon the woman in question. Why, then, must this be universalized? Obviously, a rational woman would not allow her purely personal preferences to be skewed by public opinion, since she would only by so doing be empowering the same society which seeks to restrict her freedom. A man may be YOUR first choice, but he ought not to be EVERY woman’s first choice, and you have nothing to gain by desiring a man BECAUSE he is already desired by others; you only predispose yourself and others, often against their will, to competition and confusion, devoid of genuine intimacy and trust, and EVERYBODY loses in such a conflict. Furthermore, if men were possessed of the notion that being coveted by multiple women were desirable, they would take this aggressive and uncompromising attitude WITH them into politics, psychology, religion, and the arts and sciences, which is precisely what your project is attempting to mitigate and to inoculate. If WOMEN were allowed to emulate this sort of behavior, instead of feeling ashamed for it, then they would be no better than the WORST men in these professions, and the BEST men would have found a reason to grudgingly restrict the social mobility of these unruly and irrational women. Do not fall for it.

P.S.: There appears to be a growing terror in the opinion that while men will judge you superficially in order to determine whether or not to sleep with you, women will use the same criteria to determine whether or not a man will RAPE them. More often than not, these “beta males” are well-rounded individuals with very well-integrated animas. While the stereotype appears to be that a man who is involuntarily celibate is somehow maladjusted, experience shows that plenty of men with neurotic complexes regarding women are disproportionately active sexually, simply because women are willing to assume the same toxic roles which these men project upon them and venerate accordingly. Men with healthy, integrated animas tend to see only the best in women, UNTIL THEIR GENEROUS EXPECTATIONS ARE DISAPPOINTED, usually by rejection on shady grounds. Conversely, the women who tend to reject these men will often reject them irrespective of their actual, real-world qualifications, simply based upon an unintegrated animus. What women consider “creepy” in a man is obviously not the man’s responsibility, since these irrational feelings of contempt for strangers are invariably the products of our own projections; in the case of the heterosexual woman, it is a projection of her own repressed masculinity, and often only hyperfeminine women tend to make these projections. A “beta male” is simply one who tends to resemble the negative animus, the unfavourable father, or the “bad cop”. (as you can imagine, law enforcement exploits these infantile projections to the point of cliché.) Alpha males do not in fact CONTAIN any of the positive qualities which women ascribe to them; they REPRESENT them. A growing man cannot spend his entire life conforming to Mother’s wishes for what a good boy ought to be, and a growing woman must come to terms with Daddy.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

When Law is Lawless:

One of the central themes in the Corporate Trilogy is that modern theme of Law. My chief contention is this: that there are people who live below the Law, people who live above the Law, and those who live in between. All three groups of people break the Law, inevitably, from time to time, but not all of them understand the Law. Laws, Rules, and Regulations are simply social contracts. Their function is to protect one group of people from another, and only the latter is required to follow them when the Law works well. This fact has been apparent to me for so long that I can hardly function in society without it, and I always struggled to imagine what the mindset must be for someone whose understanding lies beneath it, though I have made it my ardent project over the last four years to develop such an understanding. Some of the individuals to whom I have conveyed this understanding, hoping to find solidarity in Spirit, were themselves criminals, yet I was shocked and outraged to hear my theme dismissed outright, as though I were mistaken for asserting it. I had always presumed that anyone who was sufficiently intelligent to hold my company and attention would be allied in agreement with the most basic of intellectual Common Sense, and this was what I attributed to them as the motivation for their deviant tendencies. Nothing in my education had prepared me to encounter such motivators such as survival, trade, and that most nebulous of social trends: status within a pack. I could understand such drives such as Social Justice, Reason, Science, Philosophy, Friendship and Religion, but those I would speak little of because I had presumed them to be so indispensable and essential that they would immediately be understood as my own motivators. This presumption was not wrong, for though I was disappointed by my fellows I also remembered that it was out of courtesy for them, without which life could not continue, for faith must be reciprocal, that I ascribed to them the same motivations that I, observing the Golden Rule, would for them to ascribe to me. Everywhere I turned, I found corroboration for the Universality of these claims, a binding yet unspoken pact at the core of our common history and precedent over any strictly individual deviations. I was right. But I was not prepared for them being wrong. They did not defy the Law because its Byzantine bureaucracy and blatant imperfections, its historical inconsistency and the drive to constantly revise and to improve upon it, were all so mind-numbing that they simply could not be bothered with it. They did not part with convention on behalf of the Public, but rather on their own behalf, yet this was not motivated by the drive to rise ABOVE the rules. Growing up had once meant this: that one has followed the rules for so long that one has transcended them, and by becoming aware of what they represent one becomes qualified to create NEW, BETTER rules, for both one’s own identity and for the betterment of all beings. Such a striving for transcendence is so essential to Life that it is shocking to imagine living without it. Yet some beings do. Some beings do not regard Law as a social contract. They hate police officers for interpreting it to serve those whose value transcends it; insecure about their own qualification to violate it, they would rather drag everybody around them down to its level, where inevitably this same confusion corrodes it. This is how people become victims OF the Law. A man who blames “slow drivers” for most car accidents on the freeway has simply found in legality a shelter to quarter his own narcissistic bias. Obviously, ALL car accidents involve “fast drivers”, including those who drive at a legal pace but, whereas ONLY MOST of these accidents, by my own interlocutor’s admission, involve slow drivers, and we must employ our common sense regarding physics to assume that every such instance involves the slow drivers colliding with fast drivers coming in from behind. Is it impossible that the Law, written by fast drivers, requires revision? Of course, those who created the Law knew that it was more important to restrict speed than to punish sloth. The tendency to relax the former restriction at the expense of the latter party has been symptomatic only of a loss of sensibility in the work force, wherein speed is somehow rewarded as though it were not only the most effective means by which to be productive (which it is not) but also as though it were an end in and of itself. The Law has come to serve those who lie beneath it, even though they would drive well above its limits. It is time that we remember that its true function was to protect those who lie above it, those few criminals who end up rewriting the law to be more sensible and mature. What I have expressed today has not been a partisan or preferential bias. The identity I uphold is greater than any other in the present day, for it is informed by the entirety of human history, and though not all such history can be accounted for by any one man, any individual who walks the road towards Enlightenment will find cause to extrapolate along these universal lines.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

BETTER4ONE.

I predict, however fancifully and hopefully, that Americans will come to realize that the mass shootings, riots, and frequent murder of young black men will only come to an end after Bill Cosby is exonerated.

The simplest question is this: which is worse? For one innocent man to go to jail, or for fifty women to get raped? It’s obvious; it’s not a matter of opinion: the former is worse.

Fifty innocent victims are well aware of their own condition and victimhood; trauma is made bearable by the comprehension of one’s own virtue, which is, after all, amplified by victimhood. Such is the Socratic notion of victimhood, though there is of course the more contemporary, Sartrean alternative: that we must be held responsible for our own happiness and misery. In this case, fifty women getting raped equates to fifty individuals who knowingly and willingly entered into relationships, of one sort or another, with a man whom they had reason to suspect. It may be true that the reasons they had to suspect him were unsubstantiated, but all the more reason remained for them to be held responsible for disbelieving them.

From a Socratic point of view, the fifty victims each come out better off, each one prospering morally through the relative immorality of their oppressor, but only because they do not unify against him, in depravity, (for what else is a lynch mob?) but continue to stand alone in dignity, preserving the value of the individual by so doing.

Conversely, should an innocent man or even a guilty man be convicted without hard evidence to incriminate him, the precedent would be set for the erosion of the entire legal system. No longer would the law be designed to protect those INDIVIDUALS who lie above it, but rather it would be sabotaged and commandeered to serve those GROUPS who definitionally lie BENEATH IT. Any woman who testifies on behalf of this erosion would be guilty, and then nothing could justify or alleviate her suffering.

Furthermore, we know that our system is just so long as it prioritizes the protection of innocence above the punishment of guilt. We cannot reverse the sorrows of the past, but we can prevent further sorrows from emerging OUT of those sorrows, which is precisely what is prone to happen in the ABSENCE OF a Just Law. Punishment is only the THIRD function of the Legal System; the first is prevention of a crime, and the second is prevention of mob rule. We must ensure that prior to any consideration of punishment, which can only PARTIALLY assuage the TRUE victim’s suffering, and less so to the extent that that victim possesses the virtues of mercy and forgiveness, we prevent the ABSOLUTE suffering inflicted upon an arbitrary SCAPEGOAT.

If we might consider the possibility that one man lies about fifty women, we must just as surely consider the EQUAL possibility that fifty women would lie about one man. It would simply be mad to consider not only that the sheer number of accusers can sway the scales in their favour (when obviously only hard evidence can tip them), but also to consider that ANY rational being would commit so grotesque a fallacy (the most chilling fallacy: ad populum) would already be a form of betrayal against all Humanity.

Regardless of whether or not the man is guilty, we must preclude the conclusion until evidence is produced, and though I feel patronizing for explaining this, as though to children, I should humbly remind my readers that the more people we entertain who attest to something without evidence, the more obviously invalid is the testimony, for evidence has a way of coming forth when enough people are invested in finding it; even ONE person, operating independently, can find evidence for a mystical phenomenon if he or she is sufficiently “biased in favour of one’s own confirmation”.

If even ONE person has that sort of access to any truth, why can’t a mass of fifty? Certainly, numbers begin to tip the scales in the defendant’s favour. We know the motivations for lying, especially since they are no more noble when one enters into employment for a man that one inwardly resents. We also know that conspiracy needs not to have centralized leadership in order to mount; a stand-alone complex can be founded entirely upon an idea, a meme which is propagated through a mass media which we are all participating in. If people burned witches in a time before computers, based entirely upon appeals to authority on the part of the clergy, how much more vulnerable are we now, when each one of us can hear the same sermon through a cell phone that we carry in our pockets!! If media normalizes behaviour, yet we all co-create culture, and the former passive relationship to “truth” is counterbalanced by the active role we take in synthesizing it, then is it not TRANSPARENT that out of the seven-point-seven billion people inhabiting Earth, whose access to the Internet is championed by the United Nations, a measly fifty might produce a lie that is only as effective as our primitive instinct to feel uncomfortable speaking out in a large crowd, a vestige of our tribal heritage which is then sublimated through the channels of a global stage to the same extent that we feel the drive to transcend our tribes and to become global citizens??

Again: despite this, we are all alone. Only the defendants and the plaintiffs truly KNOW what happened, and even they might profoundly disagree. But consider our one alternative to Socrates: Sartre. (Since one has yet to find a more convincing critic or a third option outside of proto-Fascism.) Suppose that all of these women truly are guilty not only for their perversion of the Law but also for their victimhood itself. MUST they live with the shame of what they have done to their scapegoat? Ought these fifty GUILTY women not to go free of that, instead of imprisoning him?

[({Dm.A.A.)}]