Freedom VS democracy

[I wrote this some years ago, I don't remember exactly when. It was lost in the drafts folder.]

Some people condemn all government as authoritarian.  They take the government we have today as an example of "democracy" and condemn democracy as just another form of government control over people's lives.  But the word "government" doesn't mean "authoritarian control".  Democracy is a form of government.  And democracy isn't about legislatures interfering into private peoples lives.  Democracy is about private people acting as legislatures. 

The United States of America has corrupted the word democracy.
The USA is not, and never has been, a democracy.  It was never intended to be.



What we have is a republic.
Under a republic people or localities designate representatives, and those representatives make rules and jointly form the government.  People vote for congress members by county or city (more or less), states elect senators, and party electors vote for presidents. A citizens participation consists of about 20 minutes every four years or so.  Congress makes all the laws.  The president designates people to run government agencies.

Democracy is government of and by the citizens themselves.  In a true democracy, instead of passing legislative and executive responsibilities to someone else, the responsible citizen participates in the process.
 In the state of California we have a partial democracy.  Any citizen can propose a new law.  They can go out and try to collect signatures, and the people they stop take a moment to read the proposal, and then sign it (or not).  If the citizen gets enough support it appears on the ballot, and everyone has one vote.  If it passes it is as legally binding as a law written by the legislature.  That's an example of democracy. 
In a large scale democracy the function of government officials is just to file paperwork, run elections, implement what the people decide.  In a true democracy the people who work in government have no power.  They are bureaucrats, not decision makers.  The decision makers are the citizens themselves.  In a democracy people have both a right and a responsibility to participate in the process of deciding how society and the economy will be.


Many people are very concerned about government abuses or authoritarianism.  People hate being told what to do - even when it really is what's best for them.  People want the freedom to not wear a seatbelt and become disfigured or die in a car crash.  Personally, I find this more than a little immature.  It reminds me of the rebellious teenager who goes against what their parents say just because they said it - ignoring that the parents probably learned the hard way the lesson by doing the same thing themselves.  Maybe that is something most people have to go through; but one would hope we all grow out of it...  But I digress.
Some say democracy is a "tyranny of the majority" and that no one should ever be coerced to do anything.  They suggest that all group projects (i.e. everything which is "society") be done on a unanimous consensus basis.
But remembering that democracy does not have to have an authoritarian ruler or hierarchy, there is no reason to assume people are being "forced" to do anything.

Consider this example:
Four students are assigned to be in a group together, and complete a joint project which will be a significant portion of their grade.  The teacher allows them to decide on the topic themselves, but they must all contribute to one narrowly focused paper.  Chances are not all 4 will agree on what to do it on.
Maybe two people agree, but two others have different ideas.  Each person argues their case, and in the end, if no one has changed their minds, it goes to a vote and the idea with 2 supporters gets done.  The other 2 go along with it - not because they were forced to (nor any threat of force) but simply because they need to work with other people to accomplish their own goals. Sometimes working with other people means not getting your way. 
That is democracy.

In this example their is no hierarchy.  No one has any more power than anyone else.  There is no tyranny, no authority, no coercion. If one person was absolutely not ok with the chosen project, no one is stopping them from dropping the class.
Having 100% consensus 100% of the time, even in a group of 4 like-minded people is perhaps a noble goal, but is totally unrealistic.  Having 100% consensus on a national (or even neighborhood) level is simply a joke.  But the fact that a rule is made that not everyone agrees with does not imply some outside authority or threat of force.
In any free country, citizens are allowed to leave anytime they like.  Although it isn't an explicit "right", anyone can immigrate to another country if they prefer the rules somewhere else.. 
In a commune, where a number of adults all live in one shared space, if one person refuses to do any chores, doesn't contribute to rent or food costs, makes noise while everyone is sleeping, and generally ignores the rules everyone else collectively agreed to, I doubt anyone would argue the group is overstepping its bounds in asking that individual to leave the shared space.
Following the rules that the people collectively decide on is a reasonable condition of living in a country and enjoying its benefits just as surely as it would be in any commune. 
Because of this, simply staying is giving implicit consent.


Freedom is an extremely popular idea.
Conservatives argue for economic freedom.  Liberals argue for social freedom.  Libertarians argue for freedom of both, so long as one person's  doesn't infringe upon another, and private property and national boundaries are respected.  The constitution guarantees freedom of speech, religion, the press, and to assemble.  Anarchists argue for complete freedom for everyone, all the time.

Freedom is contrasted with a monarchy handing down proclamations, fascism (and the implicit connection with nazi's),  brutal and oppressive dictatorships, government abusing power and taking advantage of people.

Whenever an idea becomes so obvious to a people that it is taken for granted by all sides, when a philosophy or theory becomes an axiom, its a good idea to take a step back and question it.  The idea of freedom, of self-determination, of autonomy, has not always been seen as the most valuable or basic of human rights.  We have gotten to a point where the only thing debated is how best to achieve it, instead of asking why it is even the goal.

Why is freedom inherently valuable? - even beyond extent of improving human condition or increasing individual happiness.  If it "just is" then it is no more than dogma, an axiom based on faith.

In context of a repressive dictatorship, relative freedom has value - because it can improve the state of human happiness and equality. 
But beyond that, it becomes a religious conviction, which is repeated until it is accepted.

The insistence on freedom, whether it comes from an anarchist, a libertarian, or a conservative, is for the most part a straw man, a red herring - it is a retort to an argument which nobody was making in the first place.
Even within the most repressive dictatorship, (outside of war, prison and slavery), people are - and have always been - free to live their lives as they choose.
Citizens are allowed to choose where they live, who they associate with, what they do for a living, when to eat dinner, what to eat for dinner, who to marry (family may have a say, but that's a whole separate issue).  For the most part - outside of religion's influence on government - governments make no attempt to control those actions which affect no one but the actor himself, or other consenting adults who choose to associate with them.
What governments do regulate is all the actions which affect other people involuntarily.
If someone wants to go out into the wilderness and be totally self-sufficient, no one is stopping them.
The reality is humans are a fragile and social specie, and almost no one would be capable of doing that if they wanted to, and almost no one wants to.
The reality is that, since we live in society, the vast majority of our choices DO affect others around us.

Consider the statement: "I think its great that there are many choices of high mileage cars for sale.  Personally I drive the most efficient car I could get, and it saves me a lot of money.  But what's even greater is that everyone has the choice to drive whatever they want, even if its a big SUV".
Obviously there is the environmental impact.  There is also the fact that the SUV will do much more damage to a victim should the driver accidentally crash.  And since gasoline is a supply and demand commodity, the fact that one person wastes gas by driving a bigger car than they need means that the price is driven up just a little more.  Whether its breathing clean air, being able to afford gas, or being able to travel safely in the streets, one person's decision does not just affect themselves, it affects everyone.

In a global economy, each and every economic decision which any person makes ultimately affects everyone else.  And while that affect is very small when it is just one person out of 6 billion, an entire nation of people acting selfish together can really add up. 
Enter the tragedy of the commons.


To a large extent "freedom" is an illusion anyway.  Those who can afford access to distributing mass media have spent the past century refining ways to manipulate people.  Psychology is employed in advertising and in politics, and we are indoctrinated from the time we can talk in regards to what we should value and desire. 
The very ideal of freedom and self-determination itself is the best example of this: we are bombarded with it from all angles, the rugged self-made individualist American Dream on one side, and the rebellious non-conformist activist on the other - supposedly at odds with each other, but both playing into the ideal of 'individual freedom' which, ironically, was invented by and supports the one thing they both can agree to hate:  the government.


Democracy, of course, requires a certain degree of cohesiveness among citizens, and a willingness to make (small) individual sacrifices for the overall good, knowing that oneself is a part of everyone, and everyone does better when everyone does better.  It is a bit like a union - if you cross the picket line you may get your individual check, which is good for you - but if you sacrifice that extra pay for yourself now, everyone ends up with the health plan and vacation time (and "everyone" includes you).  The citizen cuts back on luxuries when their nation is attacked, and pays taxes willingly.  The individualist buys the SUV and crosses the picket line.
Problem is, once that one person crosses the line, the workers collective loses power.  That power is taken back by the company.
Citizens vote.  Consumers don't waste their time.  As citizens become more and more focused on themselves, they lose unity with other citizens, and in doing so give up their power.  Which leaves a vacuum which politicians and the wealthy move into without resistance.

Nothing undermines democracy more than a populace who feels morally entitled to self-determination and believes deeply in individualism, and nothing supports government abuse of power more than the undermining of democracy. 
The irony is that the ideas of freedom, self-determination, and lack of authority came largely from government itself, as a method of limiting democracy - thereby giving itself more power.  The irony is that the groups most antagonistic to government - anarchists and libertarians - are those most enamored with the very concepts which prevent government from being effectively run by the people, leaving a void which the elite class fills.

Regardless of what one believes in theory, this is the reality of what has happened in this country over the past century.
It was a deliberate push by both corporations and government to change the psychology of Americans from being citizens (which are a part of something larger than themselves) to consumers (who are beholden only to "I, me, mine") and it had the intended effect.
Today people have a rearrangement of priorities: lots and lots of material goods, comforts, and conveniences, and they are loath to give any up. 
They do not feel they should have to make any individual sacrifices to the greater good.  In fact, that concept (rightfully accused of being "socialism") is equated with communism (where the government owns literally everything, and makes all macroeconomic decisions), fascism (which promotes total devotion to a monoculture and essentially worship of one's own country) and even evil.


Another axiom is that production of wealth is inherently good. 
Consider an extreme example -a sort of monarchy in which the king gets benefit of 100% of wealth creation.  Every time any citizen goes to work, they get compensated enough to afford basic necessities, but the rest all goes to one man.  If GDP goes up, whether by the invention of new technology or by people working harder or longer hours or by a decrease in waste and increase in efficiency, all the additional wealth that is generated goes to the king, and the king alone. 
In this example while it might look good on paper to do something which "supports the economy", in reality this doesn't help anyone.  Hundreds of millions of citizens get literally no benefit at all.  But really neither does the king, since he already has more than enough wealth as it is.  In this extreme scenario there is nothing particularly good about increasing economic activity or wealth generation.

 Now consider a slightly less extreme example: a small aristocracy.  Instead of going to one man, all increases in wealth go to a small subset of the population, which stays almost entirely along family lines from one generation to the next.
This less extreme example is... exactly what has happened in reality over the last 3 decades or so in America.  There has been no real income increase for the working or middle classes after adjusting for inflation - while the highest fraction of a percent of the population's wealth has skyrocketed to absolutely unprecedented levels.
Increasing GDP is useless in terms of impact on average person.  What we all too easily seem to forget in that the purpose of the economy is to support people, not the other way around.

Consider the sort of sacrifices the average person is supposed to accept on the grounds that its good for business: outsourcing, mergers, union busting, tax cuts on investment income, tax payer funded corporate subsidies - things which directly support the upper class while hurting everyone else.  Notice that no business suggests cutting off stock holders or paying all executives a no more than what the average employee makes as a method of "remaining competitive in the global marketplace".
Giving all the money to the king does not create more jobs.  If that newly generated wealth were spread around evenly, people could work less hours for the same pay.  If people with jobs worked less hours, then to maintain productivity, companies would need to hire more people.  Instant job creation, nobody has to spend anything, everybody wins.  The super wealthy fail to get super-duper wealthy, but that's really ok, because once you have 10 million dollars, another billion or two does not appreciably increase quality of life anyway. 


The idea of the free market taking the place of government in terms of making the economic and production decisions of a society is that it naturally matches the desires of the people, and that a more accurate and fair valuation of the value of goods and services will be settled upon by the "invisible hand" of many peoples individual, independent, and self-interested negotiations.
In theory, this is better than democracy, with its potential to become a "tyranny of the masses"
This is summed up with the phrase "vote with your dollar".
Another way to say that would be "money is power".
And unlike the democratic principal of one person / one vote, the more money you have, the more influence you have over the direction the invisible hand takes.
And this takes us again back to the aristocracy - rule by a wealthy and powerful elite - the opposite of democracy, and the opposite of what any of us outside that elite actually wants.



Yet another common idea is that rational self-interest will tend to increase productivity, as people search for ways to be more efficient or ways to get investment returns, which ultimately make society work like a machine and benefits everyone.

Tax rates should be low (or non-existent) because people will work harder if they can keep what they earn, and it shouldn't be progressive because then the wealthy will stop working altogether.  People can be as selfish as they like - in fact, can be encouraged to be selfish - because in the long run the effect they have on the economy will improve it in general.  Wealth will be created, re-invested, and that will help to create jobs.

In the real world:

-people already work far harder than there is any real need to.  Productivity per worker has increased by the hundreds over the past century with the advent of assembly lines, gas and electric powered machines, robots and computers.  Yet we still work 40 or more hours per week.  Instead of using that efficiency to allow for more leisure time (which would actually increase human happiness) it has gone to generating ever more wealth (which, as has been established, has gone primarily not to the workers themselves, but to the upper class who don't actually work)

-The only people who high top tax brackets might encourage to work less are the very people who do the least work.  One of the primary definitions of rich is "anyone who makes enough income from investments that they do not need to work".  Collecting stock dividends, capital gains, interest, or rent, is not working, and it is not contributing to society.  It is leaching from it.

-Investors can not take credit for economic production.
It's as if one person hoards all the hammers in town, and rents them out to people, then wants credit for the houses other people built with them. If they weren't hoarding the hammers, the hammers would still exist. If they were distributed equitably, no one would need to rent them; therefor building would be cheaper, and more would get built.
In this way the fact that someone is hoarding and charging interest actually depresses economic activity, because those hoarding the cash skim a little off the top of every financial transaction thereby increasing its cost.

Just like we tend to assume freedom and democracy go hand in hand when in fact they are in some ways at odds, capitalism and the free market are generally assumed to be interchangeable as well.
It ain't necessarily so.

A free market - ideally - works much like, well, a market...

[I stopped writing here. I'm posting it as is, as where it was headed happens to be the focus of my next series of posts.]

In progress...

So, my regular readers (I found out recently that I actually have regular readers!) may have noticed I have repeatedly promised an indepth essay on capitalism, I have said at least once that it would be my next post, and I keep posting other stuff.

Well, it really is in progress.  I've written a lot of it.  But there is a lot more to go, and I decided not to start posting the finished ones until the entire thing is finished.

In the meantime - since I am saving each section in my drafts folder - I discovered a whole bunch of stuff I wrote, sometimes years ago, and for reasons I can't even guess at, I never posted. 

I'm going to start posting those, while I work on my biggest writing project to date.


Oh, and by the way - if you read 5 Years Later and Not A Great Start to the New Year, and you were wondering if I was still in a bad place... noooo.  I am not.  Not even a little.  A very very good place right now. 
I don't want to get into it too much here - its very exciting, its very mutual, but its also very new and we all know my patterns.  I can't be objective. 
As far as I can tell thus far, there is real potential, and regardless of how it turns out I am having a hell of a fun time in the moment.  If you remember, way way back, New Year's (2009); I honestly did not think it would be possible - I mean, literally, physically possible - to top that experience.  Well, it turns out it is.

Wearing the Skirt

Been thinking a bit recently about gender.

Thanks, primarily, of all things, to being more active on Facebook than I've ever been.

Which exposed me to:

http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm

(A ruler can only lead with the consent of at least most of the people. Women make up slightly more than half of the population. Sure, today institutions are set up that hold the status quo, but how did it get this way in the first place? This is a pretty plausible theory of how and it puts a lot of other stuff into a different perspective too.)

and this

http://www.buzzfeed.com/tabathaleggett/lego-just-got-told-off-by-a-7-year-old-girl

(I'm afraid the larger issue is that we all assume the standard lego person is male. The standard lego person looks like this:

which has no features which indicate gender.
Kind of like when cartoons give a female animal character long hair or eye lashes, lipstick, or (human type) breasts - even if she isn't a mammal - because if a cartoon animal just looks like an animal "obviously" it must be male(??)
It goes way deeper than corporations and marketing. We have all internalized it. Even the girl who wrote the letter.)

and then this



www.buzzfeed.com/marietelling/this-powerful-video-shows-men-what-it-feels-like-to-be-subje

(Overall, this was great. I love that it was made, and I hope some of the guys who treat women so disrespectfully see it, and it gets through... There is one problem I have with this video though - the last scene perpetuates a belief, shared by almost everyone, which is based more on misogyny than fact.
The guy really was "asking for it" when he yelled back at the gang members. Not because of how he was dressed or any signals he gave off, but because he YELLED BACK AT GANG MEMBERS!...
every male above about the age of 13 who lives in an area with street crime knows that doing that will get the shit beat out of you.  Because the reality is that men are the victims of violent crime by strangers over 1/3 more often (down from twice as often a couple decades ago). What any male with even an ounce of street smarts does when a group of 4 dangerous looking teens starts harassing him verbally is ignore it, let it go, and continue with his life. Sometimes women yell or insult them back - and the reason they think this is ok is because most of the time they can get away with it - almost all men, even the low life scum who look for excuses to attack strangers, have internalized the (sexist) rule of "never hit a woman".
But then, in the few instances where it does escalate to violence - and despite the fact that it escalates to violence more often with men - we take those examples and pretend it proves that women are disproportionately victims. It isn't because the statistics actually support it. Its because our misogynist society starts out with the premise that women are victims as a given, and then looks for the evidence to support it.)

followed by this

http://imgur.com/a/RmAjE

(It may be true, as far as it goes - but I can think of more than a couple examples where the FriendZoner does choose to go out with the guy who WOULD take advantage of her when she's drunk, or who WON'T listen to her when she is upset. As though she is only attracted to people she wouldn't actually be friends with. Not saying it is universal, but it seems to be pretty common. She might even be even be attracted to The Nice Guy - if only he acted like more of a jerk. That doesn't make her an evil bitch. But it does maybe make her judgement a little suspect.)

and then, finally this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/magazine/does-a-more-equal-marriage-mean-less-sex.html

(I can say, for me personally, I feel no pressure to fit a masculine role, but I have experienced what it talks about first hand - it could easily have been about my marriage. And it was mostly her; she wanted equality and friendship in principal, but was attracted to the jerk who didn't respect women. It looks a lot to me like what I was talking about earlier about the Nice Guy not being sexually attractive by virtue of being a nice guy - that makes him seem like a brother, which is anti-sexy... If it is because of societal expectations and gender roles, then why do lesbian couples experience the exact same patterns?)

all of which, of course, I had comments on, usually lengthy (compared to a typical online comment) and most of which drew responses from others, which in turn got me thinking even more.

I feel like there is a bit of a common theme running beneath the surface, one which is touched on, or at least alluded to, by things I've written before

 (like  Sexual Dimorphism, and Caveman Love,  
FemDom vs. Feminism: Power doesn't come from penetration,
The Oldest Profession,   and 
What does our gut reaction to the word "rape" say about our subconscious beliefs about women's agency?  )

but is never really spelled out explicitly, mainly because even I take the world as it is for granted, and even though I actually have thought about this in the same terms before, I didn't actually remember in the moments I was writing any of those.

Its nothing particularly revolutionary - in fact, it seems it should be obvious, and I'm sure many others have thought of, and have written about the same thing, but it still seems to escape our daily consciousness, even people whose primary focus in life it these sort of issues.

I had been trying to pin down what exactly it is that I don't like about the word feminism, why I prefer "egalitarianism", for several months now.  It isn't just that all people should be treated fairly and with respect - I think it's totally valid that any group which has disproportionate challenges in society get more focus in order to change that.  And its not just that using the root "fem" to apply to females implies that all women are (or should be) "feminine", which is a social construct to which not all females conform (so does feminism not aim to help them?).

The last of the essays I read finally helped solidify what it actually is...

Back in the 1800s and early 1900s, the focus was on allowing women to participate in democracy.  Around the time of world war II (due to necessity) women entered the work force in large numbers and after, due partly to that, partly to politics, and partly to technology, women were more and more free to be something other than a house wife, even if they got married.  In the 50s and 60s there was a struggle to change American culture to allow women to wear pants - and while that success has become so common place that its a complete non-issue today, the phrase taken from that transition still has the same meaning today - if a woman "wears the pants" in the relationship, it means she is the head of the household.

We've come a really really long way in allowing a woman complete freedom to choosing any role in life that she is capable of and interested in, even though we aren't quite all there yet - there are still some roles in the military that are closed off by gender, regardless of ability, and we still have yet to have a single female president - but those last few are within sight of changing.

But what was neglected all along, because of the focus on women specifically, was, well...    men, and their roles. 

I don't mean that in a "it's so unfair" kind of way. 
The vast majority of women are heterosexual, and the vast majority have at least one serious intimate relationship at some point in life.  So the social roles expected of men are directly relevant to women.  For one thing, the things that women traditionally did still need to get done.  Allowing women to enter what was once men's sphere, while not allowing men to enter women's, leads directly to the modern challenges of women who want to have both a career and a family.

See, while it has become acceptable for women to - both literally and figuratively - wear pants, it never became acceptable for men to wear the skirt. 

Again, both literally and figuratively.

A woman wearing pants is not a transvestite, no one assumes she is gay on that basis alone (never mind that the majority of male cross dressers are straight anyway, I'm just talking about public perception), and it doesn't even make her not "feminine".  A average man wearing a skirt (not a kilt, an actual skirt), who isn't dressing up as a female as a sex fetish, joke, or political statement, simply isn't done.  Anywhere.  Ever.

In the figurative sense it is slowly changing to at least a small degree.  There are male school teachers, flight attendants, receptionists, and nurses, and none of those are seen as particularly shocking.  There is even such a thing as a stay-at-home dad, though its extremely rare (~3% of married couples - and this includes involuntarily unemployed fathers), and depending on the specific American sub-culture, still frequently (usually?) stigmatized.

I can imagine attempted explanations for this going along the lines of male machismo, or that patriarchy controlled the terms of change as women were allowed political and economic power, but those explanations wouldn't really explain why men would want to deprive themselves of choice, and besides, they are a bit circular.  They tend to assume that half the population of the world has no influence on culture - even after political and economic power were won / granted.

I would expect some people's responses to point to the theoretical "matriarchal" societies prehistoric societies - unfortunately, as nice as that myth is, there isn't any actual evidence to support it having ever been true, anywhere: https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/eller-myth.html  and  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy )

I remember reading an article about the difficulties of modern educated Russian women in finding husbands. 
Manufacturing and other traditionally-male semi-skilled labor jobs - jobs which once provided a comfortable and respectable life - were in decline, leaving a lot of men struggling to adapt.  Meanwhile, more women graduated universities than men, and began taking higher level professional jobs.

The trouble finding husbands wasn't due to a deficit of smart, kind, hard-working men.  It was that the women, even though they had enough income to support themselves and a family, were unwilling to partner with someone who earned less than them.
Surveys found that the average single man was willing to marry a woman with more education or more income (as well as one with less) than himself, but this was not reciprocal.

It was women's choices, preferences, biases, that was controlling the situation.

My friend who shared that last link above (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/magazine/does-a-more-equal-marriage-mean-less-sex.html)

suggested that the reason women insist on their partner's being traditionally "masculine" and dominant (in sexual relations, if nowhere else) is because of their internalized sexism.

I could see that.  It certainly fits with the conclusions I came to in my "perceptions of rape and feminism" blog post. 

That explanation definately would make sense: men have had about about half a century to get used to the idea of strong independent women, several generations have grown up taking female police officers and business leaders and politicians for granted - men my age or younger don't actually remember the time when women were barred from traditionally male roles.  However the stay-at-home-dad, the sensitive nurturing husband, the sexually submissive boyfriend, these things are relatively new.  Perhaps it will just take more transition time for women to adapt to egalitarianism, to start seeing "feminine" men as being sexy, the way men have accepted "masculine" women can be sexy.

That explanation is appealing, but it begs the question of why similar patterns seem to emerge in the generally egalitarian gay female relationships, but not in the generally not egalitarian gay male relationships. It also doesn't explain satisfactorily why so many straight women accept, or prefer, egalitarianism in every aspect of a relationship, except for sexually, where she enjoys it more if the male takes charge.

The alternative is that this may be rooted in biology.  That could make sense too: the creep who sees every attractive female primarily as a potential sex partner, who doesn't want to take "no" for an answer, is likely to get more lifetime sex partners than the respectful guy who sees women as people first and foremost, and prefers his partner to be his friend and equal - if only because of the numbers; the bad boy is constantly trying to get some, while the nice guy is waiting for someone to give him a sign that she's interested.  Pre-birth control it means jerks are going to have more children.  Assuming that some degree of personality traits are genetic, from the stand point of a female who (subconsciously) wants to maximize not just the number of offspring, but of grand- and great-grand-children, then it makes sense to have sons who will have lots of kids with lots of different partners, and so it makes sense to find a partner who will pass on some disrespectful womanizing genes.  She would still want a relationship with a guy who actually cares about her, who will take good care of the family, but the jerk would be sexy - after all, humanity also evolved hundreds of thousands of years before paternity tests.

This explanation is much less encouraging - it implies that this phenomenon will be a hell of a lot harder to change overtime, maybe even that there may be relatively little we can do about it.  It could mean we may never expect to eliminate sexual harassment or date rape, since the dynamic set up by women being turned on by "alpha males" actively encourages both.  It would mean nice guys would always continue to finish last, sleazy pick-up-artists would always be successful, stay-at-home-dads will never become common. 

But not necessarily.  The human brain is pretty complex, and culture has managed to have us go against instinct before (most notably in the suppression of violence).

Either way, in order to address it, we have to understand it.  And before we can understand it, we have to become aware (and/or admit) that it even exists in the first place.

So. 
Tell me, my heterosexual female readership:

Am I totally off-base on this? 
I could be totally wrong. 
Correct me if I am. 
I am very open to being proved wrong. 
I would love it if I was wrong. 

All of my personal experience, not to mention the statistics, tell me I'm not, but I'm still open to new information.

Are there actually lots and lots of exceptions, and I just don't know about it?

Do you, personally, find it sexier when your partner takes charge in the bedroom?

Have you ever turned down a male friend who was interested in you, even though you liked him and he was attractive because you "see him like a brother" or you "know him too well" or "you just don't see him that way? 
If so, why are trusting and being comfortable with a person anti-sexy traits? 
If you would want your partner to be your friend, why would you not consider a close friend as a candidate for partner?

Have you ever not said what you wanted, or not made the first move, because you wanted the guy to be the one to initiate?

Have you ever had a guy be uncomfortably sexually aggressive, perhaps even to a point that made you dislike him as a person, but still found yourself turned on by the situation?

Regardless of if you would actually want it in the real world, have you ever had a fantasy of being forced, or does the idea seem at all sexy, or if you ever actually have been, was it, on any level, sexy or enjoyable?

Do you prefer to be submissive, (even if only in terms of sex)?

Do you tend to think of intercourse as him fucking you, (as opposed to you fucking him)?

Do you sympathize with the women from the article?

How about the examples in my blog post on the topic? 

It certainly resonated with my own personal experience (of course, a couple of the anecdotes were drawn from my personal experience), but I have a fairly small sample size.

Do you prefer that your partner be physically taller than you?

Has the guy been the one to first express romantic interest in more than half of your relationships and/or dates?

You don't have to tell me, or answer out loud, I'm just asking you to question yourself, to be aware of the answers. 

If the answer to, not necessarily all, but even just any one of them is yes, why do you think that is? 
Is it something you've learned, something you've internalized from cultural expectations, or do you suspect its something deeper, more primal than that?

If the answer to any of them is yes, how do you reconcile that with your values and principals around feminism and equality and power?

I could see if it was just any one individual, a person can have any particular preference - "that is what I believe in principal, this just happens to be what I personally like, and my personal tastes have no political meaning". That seems to be the most common self-justification, the most common way to reconcile principal and practice, politics and desire.  On the surface it seems like a perfectly reasonable answer, and it allows a person to not have to think about uncomfortable questions.
But if its universal, or an overwhelming trend, if even just more than 50% of straight women answer "yes" to any of the above questions, then there are obviously sociopolitical implications. 
Or, at least, it seems obvious to me - yet it seems like nobody notices.
 

I come across sexually assertive women, anti-sexism activists, queer women who challenge traditional concepts of gender, all wanting to be dominated sexually.
In a different context these same women will object to, for example, sexual harassment, but somehow see no connection between the two.  Men who harass are like spam or telemarketers or junk mail - all it takes is one positive response in 10,000 to make the strategy successful, but if the positive response rate was absolute zero, they wouldn't waste their time.  And it shouldn't be surprising that some women respond positively to what others call harassment, if in other contexts a power differential is seen as desirable.

As I pointed out in the rape and feminism blog post, if we want to reduce date rape, it is absolutely vital that women not ever say "no" when they really mean "yes" - and surveys find that the majority of young, sexually active women, by their own admission, have done exactly that at some point in their lives (61%).  When I first read the statistic, I assumed it was due to cultural expectations, a way to avoid 'slut shaming' - "There's bound to be talk tomorrow" ... "At least I'm gonna say that I tried" - but after reading the NY Times article that inspired what I'm writing now, I wonder if there's more to it after all.

"Ninety percent of these women said that fear of appearing promiscuous was an important reason for their behavior.  Many said that they wanted their dates to wait, or “talk me into it.”  And some said that they told their dates no because they “wanted him to be more physically aggressive." [emphasis mine]

So far the push for equality has been focused on the tangible for women - legal status, employment, dress; and the mental/emotional for men - how they are supposed to think about women.

We've pretty much ignored the physical world of men - there is no law protecting men who choose to wear a skirt to work - while the mental/emotional for women has been pretty much ignored too.

There are no college or corporate educational videos, no pamphlets or handouts, no protest rallies or petitions, that address how women view men or sexuality.  We tell men not to look at women as sexual objects, and leave it at that, as though it were a given that we don't need to tell women not to want to be looked at as sexual objects - even though there is a lot of evidence that says they many (most?) do.  The former will never succeed without the latter, because the message men get from women in their personal lives will always outweigh the message they get from activists or the human resources department.

So.

Whoever reads this:

speak up! comment.  I want to hear different ideas and viewpoints and opinions and theories and personal experiences and thoughts and feelings.

I know people stumble across this blog somehow or other - I can see the internal statistics.  Some of you even stay on the page long enough to read.

You can even comment anonymously if you want.

Could you have a passionate and fulfilling sex life with a man who, figuratively speaking, wears the skirt in the relationship?

Why or why not?

Is it possible that the current dynamic will ever change, and, if so, how might that happen?

Google Bus

In order to protest income inequality, instead of attacking the corporations who pay minimum wage or outsource their labor, despite huge profits and huge executive compensation, we attack a corporation that actually pays well - and goes beyond good pay to provide (among other things) an alternative to car commuting.

Which means the goal isn't to actually ensure everyone has a living wage and can afford decent housing, its just to drag everyone else down to the lowest common denominator.
Actually, its not even that, since its the buses that have drawn anger, representing reasonably paid people moving into poor neighborhoods. Our solution to inequality and poverty is... segregation!

Really?


When middle class whites moved out of urban areas, it was called "white flight", and activists objected, because it made life harder for poor residents by turning them into ghettos. Now middle class whites are moving back, and even though you can't evict someone just to get higher rent in a rent controlled city, we call it "gentrification" and claim it is making life harder for the poor residents.

Now, I understand it is easier and more gratifying to pick an enemy to hate, and to throw stuff and be destructive than it is to think critically about complex issues - but is it too much to ask to go after WalMart and McDonalds and all the other low wage and outsourcing companies?






When I have pointed all this out to people, they mostly agree that it isn't productive, but say it points to a larger issue regarding gentrification's affect on housing.I 100% agree with the notion that having a place to exist should be a basic human right. I have a major problem with the idea that one person can "own" the land that another person lives on. (More on that in upcoming posts)

However, living in the SF Bay Area is most certainly not a basic human right.
Not all 7 billion humans in the world can live in the Bay Area.

High eviction rates didn't start because of tech companies. They started in 2008 with the foreclosure crises.
High rents didn't start with tech companies. Rent has been higher than average here for at least a good hundred years.
High rents are because everyone wants to live here - we have good weather and good culture - but there is a finite amount of space.

Increasing housing is like increasing traffic lanes to deal with traffic, the more you build, the more people drive. It is like buying a bigger belt to deal with obesity.
You are at best temporarily solving a symptom, while the "solution" itself will ultimately only encourage an increase the size of the original problem.
Along the way you either increase urban density (which has a direct correlation to crime rates) or you increase suburban sprawl (with its environmental consequences) and either way you increase traffic, parking, and pollution.

If a person has trouble affording rent here, there are lots of options:

1) Live with roommates (that's a popular one), or in an RV park (I used to), or do work-trade for rent (that's what I do now), or live in a communal house.

2) Apply for public assistance.

3) Live anywhere in the entire country other than Honolulu HI, New York City NY, or the SF Bay Area CA. Literally anywhere else. That leaves about 20,000 options.

It almost seems that the idea is people should be able to live where ever they want, even in places they can't afford (and we aren't talking about being forced out of an existing home, because we have rent control here) - except the entire objection is middle class people choosing to move somewhere less expensive. In other words, they should not be allowed to live where ever they want. Only poor people should. That seems a very odd and arbitrary way to try to even the score. I can think of a whole lot of much better ways.


Other people have said the issue is private use of public infrastructure.
How about millions of people driving private cars on public roads?
That solves the problem of transportation for yourself, while leaving everyone else behind.

How is it Google's responsibility to provide transportation for all people?

How would it benefit the people of Oakland if all Google employees drove their own personal cars to work instead, increasing the already excessive congestion on our highways?

Motivated

Motivated by the discovery that I have a readership of at least one, in conjunction with being caught up on all the work I can get done (until the water pump is delivered), I am going to (finally!) get started on at least one of the two essays that have been waiting inside my brain

Not a great start to the new year / new life

Lets see...

After almost 2 months of trying to sell my RV trailer with no success, I finally found not one, but at least 2 serious buyers who had the cash and wanted to buy within the week.
Then I got about 7 calls and emails of other people interested in seeing it (after I listed it for $500 more than the first two were expecting), and I was considering if I should try to get the best price or just get it sold and over with.

And so, of course, that's when it gets stolen.

Its 35ft long, 15ft tall, 8ft wide, and 7500lbs.  It requires a 3/4-ton truck and a class IV hitch at a minimum to move.  It had a solid hitch lock on it.
Someone, some how, hooked it up in the middle of the night and took off.  Several witnesses (people interested in buying, and the police, who were about to ticket it for being in one place too long) saw it one afternoon, I went to move it the next morning, gone.





My building's janitor died suddenly and unexpectedly.  He had some ongoing health problems, but they seemed mostly controlled.  There may have been some drug use other than the prescribed kind, its not that clear.
It sucks, because, as he did clean ups for the building and I did repairs, we ended up working together fairly often, and I got to know him better than anyone of my other neighbors.  He was a good guy.  I last talked to him a day or two before he passed out on the street and was hospitalized.  I haven't known many people personally who have died.  A neighbor who I barely spoke to once, my grandmother who I met a couple times and talked to on the phone sometimes.  The closest to me was my brother.  When that happened I was living in a different state, and I hadn't interacted with him for at least a year, and only sporadically for a few years before then.  Of course I knew him much better, was closer to him, but in one sense the distance meant it didn't feel as real and immediate as this time, when it was someone I had seen and spoken to just days before.

That is sad and unfortunate in its own right of course. On top of that, it means I am now responsible for the stuff he used to do.  And it turns out he was going above and beyond, cleaning up after some extremely lazy and irresponsible neighbors.  Several households here apparently can't be bothered to carry their own trash all the way down one or two flights of stairs to put it in the dumpster.  When our janitor died, bags of garbage almost immediately started piling up on the stairs and landings and balconies behind the building.
Followed closely, of course, by the more civilized tenants calling me to complain about the garbage.
The culture of poverty is very disheartening.



There was a tense and uncomfortable interaction with my recent girlfriend, who I am still friends with, still work with, and who didn't want to break up.  I was trying to avoid hurting her, but the way the timing worked out, the attempt itself caused some hurt.  Having been on both sides of that now, its hard to say which feels worse - being the one who is left, or the one who does the leaving.  They both suck.  In different ways, but both a lot.  I really really hate hurting or disappointing people.  Especially people I care about.



Of course, as I mentioned in my last post, I ended a brief fling.  Or rather, I should say, she ended it.  So that hurt a bit.  Not terribly, but the timing wasn't great.  The worst of it lasted about a day and a half, maybe 2 days.  Then I reconnected with two other women I was beginning to get to know before I got distracted by her, and that helped me regain some perspective and clear my mind, and more importantly clear my heart.




Then I started a huge work project with my recent-ex / current friend.  It involved moving a large amount of concrete up a steep incline, about 4 stories worth of steep driveways and rock stairs and dirt paths, to where we will build a giant chicken coop and fully enclosed run.  1000lbs worth.  My back was sore for days afterward, so much it was hard to get up out of a chair or walk around. 
Ok, ok - all the rest of these have been emotional hurt, and this was just physical.
But it added to the stress non-the-less.




I failed my advancement test to move to a higher rank in the Coast Guard for a 2nd time.
From those who I've talked to, most fail it a few times.  Its kind of a stupid test - lots of esoteric numbers to memorize that you would just look up in a reference manual in real life, and very little practical stuff on how to actually run and maintain the systems.  In fact, the entire thing is being completely re-done.  Sometime in the next year.  So, probably after I finally pass the current one.  Oh well.



I haven't been working nearly as much as I'd like to.  This year the slow economy finally caught up to my business.  I haven't had to dip into savings, but I keep looking at my retirement fund each month, and it is just flat-lining.  Each month I am more and more behind on my long-term goals.  I am already behind, because I didn't even start trying to save until I was 30 years old.  And I really like to at least partially retire early, while I still have the health and strength to fully enjoy it and appreciate it.  I could be volunteering and taking classes and writing and who knows, maybe even traveling the world by bike!  But 40 grand is not going to last the rest of my life...
In my reluctance to move any money from savings to pay for daily life, I actually bounced a check!  Haven't done that in many many many years. 
Selling the RV would have been really nice.
At least it was insured, so maybe I'll recover something...



And now the most recent addition to this string of unfortunate events:



The woman I recently stopped dating has for some reason gotten the idea that every number she receives from a blocked or unknown number is actually me, calling to harass her, or, I don't know, beg her back, or something, I really don't know.
She doesn't just suspect this, she "KNOWS" it.  She sent me an angry email to leave her alone, and she said not to bother to deny I'm calling over and over, because she "knows" its really me, and nothing I say will make any difference.

What makes this not just paranoid, but a little insane, is that she said that the person calling ("me") is leaving messages.  Which means all she would need to do to find out who is actually calling is just listen to one of the messages!!!!  That would answer it, with actual absolute certainty.  But she thinks she doesn't have to listen to it, because her intuition tells her that its me.

This would be why I always argue against intuition so strongly. 
The strength of the feeling behind it does not make it any more likely to actually be correct. 

Here is someone who has faith in her intuition that I would call and harass her for weeks after we stopped talking no less strong than other people have faith in God, when in fact I haven't called her ever.  Even when we were still dating!  Her phone has a broken speaker, so we always connected by chat or text.  She stopped talking to me during a chat mid-conversation, and I gave up.  I moved on, I scheduled dates with other people (people who I have a much higher OKCupid match % with anyway!  In fact, my number 1 and 2 highest matches in my area.  So its not been all bad news recently), I was living my own life, totally unaware that somewhere else in the world someone was experiencing an imaginary version of me tormenting her.

I don't know exactly why this bothers me so much.

Maybe because I told her so much about myself, my thoughts and feelings and fears and dreams, because I was totally honest and held nothing back, and this is apparently the impression she got from all that: that I am a likely stalker.

Why should I care what this one random person who I will never have to interact with ever again thinks?

I know, intellectually, that this has nothing to do with me.  It has to do with her having had a crappy life where many of the people she was close to, family, long term partner, turned out to not be trustworthy or caring people. Her family was anything but supportive during the transition from child to adult years, one of the times many of us need it the most. 
She was manipulated and deceived in a pretty major way by her partner for years and years.  That's a pretty good reason to become cynical and jaded and paranoid, isn't it? 

If you have never gotten close to anyone who is actually honest and straight-forward and isn't trying to take advantage of you, then of course your intuition is going to be confused by me, its going to be trying to figure out what my angle is. 
Its like Kelly said about Darryl:
"Darryl Philbin is the most complicated man that I have ever met. I mean who says exactly what they're thinking? What kinda game is that?"

But on an emotional level, it still hurts.  Obviously making phone calls is not the biggest deal, but it feels like a smaller version of being falsely accused of something like murder or rape. 
Is this really how I come across? 
Why would anyone think that about me? 

And I feel particularly helpless, because there is no possible way I can defend myself.  If I were to say anything to her, like "just listen to the god-damn message! you will see it isn't me", or offer my phone records, or point out that if I wanted to contact her, I would have just sent a text so that she would actually get it, or point out my last blog post that clearly shows I got that it was over back then and was already in the process of moving on - the very fact that I contacted her to communicate one of those messages, it would be contacting her, and that in itself would reinforce the idea that I am trying to contact her!

Its a classic Catch-22!!!!

It wouldn't be so bad if it was just that someone once thought that.  But its present tense.  It is presumably future tense.  Shes still going to get phone calls from "unknown".  Everyone does.  Maybe it's different people each time, and she is just ignoring all of their messages.  Maybe it's telemarketers.  Maybe she really does have a stalker, she just doesn't know who it is! 
Her ex is a drug addict who she is still in contact with, who she had been giving money to even after they broke up, until just recently.  Seems like a pretty likely candidate. And as long as the calls don't stop, she will presumably continue to assume (or rather, "know") that its me. 

Even if she were to eventually discover that future calls weren't me, I have little doubt it wouldn't shake her faith that the past calls really were.  That's how the human mind works - we hate for our versions of reality to be wrong so strongly that we will bend information in whatever way is necessary to fit the pre-written story.


This is perhaps why normal people are guarded around new people they meet that they don't know that well yet.  You never know when a seemingly normal, intelligent person will turn out to actually be mildly insane.

I should have known better.  There were some red-flags that reminded me of my ex-wife, and while she never did this specific thing, it was the sort she would do.  She was frequently convinced that her intuition of my thoughts, feelings, and motives were more accurate and genuine than me actually stating what they were, and she would then respond to her wrong assumptions while ignoring anything I said. 
But of course, I wasn't lying, and I was self-aware, and she was just wrong.  And it caused a lot of (totally unnecessary!) conflict.  A whole lot.  She had the same tendency to assume the worst possible motives for other peoples actions (not just mine).  She had the same extreme difficulty in letting her guard down around others, because she was never really sure anyone was trustworthy.

I think that maybe the biggest part of why this is affecting me so much.  Because it reminds me of my failed marriage.  Because I feel like I didn't learn as much from it as I thought I did.

And because I fear that maybe it says something about me if I am specifically attracted to people who are emotionally unhealthy.  I don't know if that is really true, but there is definitely a part of me that wants to reach out and help people I feel close to.  Its a sort of protective instinct, I think, or just a desire to be helpful, maybe to be needed, I really don't know.  I have the patience and the understanding of how the mind works.  I know I can actually help people get over mental blocks, because I have done it successfully in the past.  Its just that there is one factor that I have no control over.  And it happens to be the biggest one.  The other person has to want to change.  And most people don't.  If they did, most people would have already, on their own, or at least started to. 
You don't go into a relationship thinking "this is a problem, but its one that can be fixed".  Not unless they are saying they know its a problem, and they want to work on it.  Maybe not even then.

But come on.  You can't take a sample size of 2 and call it a pattern.  Yes, there was an element of this in a love interest from very long ago - but that person was actually very receptive to working through her past trauma and learning to trust people, and I like to think I may have actually helped in that process.  And there was no such element at all in my fling with Valerie.  If she had any emotional hang-ups, I never knew about them.  We just got excited about each other, had lots of fun, and realized we weren't compatible as partners.  We tried being friends, but she kept giving me these romantic looks, and she admitted years later it was hard for her to transition to friends after what we had experienced together.  She was healthy.  I fell for her.  So I'm not specifically attracted to people who aren't.

Maybe it bothers me because I didn't see it coming.  At all.  Like, I saw signs that she probably would never be able to completely trust another person, that she thought she knew my internal state better than me.  That she broke it off didn't surprise me.  The fact that she would think I would keep bothering her wasn't even a total shock.

But the part where she is convinced even if I just say "I haven't called you", the part where she is so sure that she doesn't even listen to the message, that caught me completely by surprise.  Refusing to listen means that she WANTS to believe its me.  She doesn't want to be proven wrong.  For some reason, a reason I can't even begin to guess at, her version of reality demands that I be someone completely different than I am.  How would it shake her foundational understanding of reality to find out that I am actually off living my own life, not thinking about her?  Why is that something a person would be desperate to not be proven wrong about?


I always assume the best of everyone.
I always take people at their word, take what they say at face value.
Living here, in this building in East Oakland, I'm beginning to learn that people really do lie.  A lot.  I'm learning to be skeptical of people's words.  I don't like learning that.  I'd rather live my life in blissful ignorance.  I want to believe that other people are sincere.  I want to believe that other people are trying to be good people, that they are trying to understand the world, and that they are doing the best they can given limitations of intelligence and knowledge.  I want to believe that, outside of pick-up artists, salesmen, con-artists, pimps, drug dealers, hypnotists, and politicians, that people are not manipulative.  Real, ordinary people, are not manipulative.  People say what they mean and mean what they say.  Don't they?  Why wouldn't they?  It makes the world a better place.  And people are sane.  Aside from the nutcases and the coo-coo-clock people, the ranting homeless and the institutionalized, people try to see the world as it really is, they don't just see what fits the story they make up inside their heads.  Right?  The guy who does the blog/podcast at YouAreNotSoSmart.com says that this is exactly what basically everybody does.  The only difference between you and I and the guy who thinks he is Jesus is that our stories fit reality a little closer.  But when presented with new information that conflicts with our stories, we reject it, or find a way to rationalize it.  Everyone does that.  That's all she is doing.  Its not about me.  Its that, just like my story says nobody is manipulative or dishonest, her story says everybody is.  And meeting me, getting to know me, I don't fit that story.  So she had to invent a way to make me fit her story.
That was apparently much easier to do when she didn't have to actually interact with me.

So I guess that's a positive way to look at it.

And that's where I am going to end this post.  Because I insist that everything I look at have a positive spin.
All of these things, the whole series of less than wonderful things to happen this month, someday I will look back and they will all be past tense.  They are all temporary.
Much worse things could happen.  Much worse things have happened, and are happening to people all the time.
It is just wearing me down that there are so many in such a small span of time.  It's cortisol that makes me feel this way.  Its stress.
I need sex and cuddling and a few good nights sleep (the first two will help with the third) and to spend some time in a less toxic environment and some more friends (so that at any given moment there is someone to talk to) and some rest.  I need some time to pass.  Eventually I'll get all of those things, and life will go back to its default state of basically good all the time.

5 years later

Four months since I have written anything at all here.

I am really letting my two or three readers down! I'm sorry. Well, not sorry enough to necessarily do better, but enough to write this, right now, even though I'm not really feeling inspired.

My next real post will be on the difference between capitalism and the free market, how they are actually opposed, how government favors the former, and how it could (and why it should) be doing the opposite. Actually, it might even be a series of separate posts.
I already have basically everything I want down in my head, but it still may be a few months or a year before I get around to it. But I have always eventually written all the things I said I would so far, haven't I? So, unless I randomly die before then, it will really happen.


A part of why I stopped writing was the time and thought and energy that went into a major life transition.



I finally came to terms with the fact that the relationship I was in wasn't making me happy, and we broke up.
I was trying to help her find a place to live, when I happened to come across an ad for a building maintenance manager, doing the exact same sort of work I've been doing in my own business for the past 8 years, in exchange for subsidized rent.

First time in my adult life I haven't lived in an RV.
What with the economy, everyone who had an RV for vacations is trying to sell, and the market is much lower than when I bought. Looks like I'll be lucky to get half what I paid, even though Aileen negotiated to well below market rate when we bought, and I have upgraded appliances and added solar since then.

My new place is back in Oakland, closer to where the people are. Also, I have exclusive access to the finished basement, which I turned into my own personal gym.

This building was, less than a year ago, the neighborhood hangout for homeless and drug addicts, but new owners took over, hired a security company, did some much over due maintenance, and effectively changed the culture before I ever found the place. But it's still East Oakland, which is obvious the moment you step outside the front door.

5 minutes by bike from the BikeStation, so no more 15 mile commute by bike or skates once a week. I miss that.

Winter time is always slow for my business, but this year the slow down started sooner than usual. No longer saving, focused on breaking even.



I started dating again.

The title of this post refers to this: biodieselhauling.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-year-later.html

Re-reading it - no, I didn't not follow through with that. Not even close. Looking back, its funny to me that I really believed that was realistic.
I still feel the same way, but I've given in to experiencing whatever life has to offer along the way.

I found several people who looked interesting on the interwebs, and sent messages.
And got no response.
And was discouraged, because I wasn't just sending mass emails to lots of women, I was sending detailed personal messages to specific people because I thought we had stuff in common and would get along. If I like them, chances are they might like me too.
Maybe they are just overwhelmed with spam. Maybe they are out of the country, and not checking messages. Or maybe I am just uglier and stupider than I am aware, and nobody wants to date me because I suck.
Actually, thats not entirely true - I had ongoing conversations with two women, and even made plans to meet. One told me the day before that she decided she wasn't ready to date after all, and canceled. Then the other told me she got back together with her boyfriend.
Maybe those were both true, and not just excuses, but it sure didn't make me feel any less discouraged.
Was this so hard 5 years ago?

Well, all of a sudden, weeks, sometimes months, after I first contact, someone finally gets back to me. Not just once or twice, but 5 separate people. "I'm sorry for the long delay, I've just been busy, but you seem really interesting, and I'd love to meet up in real life"
And I end up on 4 dates on 4 consecutive nights, all with different people.

This was scary. Especially since more than one went well, and left me wanting to know her better. I can barely handle dating one person. How can I date several?

It was moot, because one had more free time than the rest, and we went out several times before I had a chance to schedule a follow up with anyone else. She is smart and shy and she challenged me, which I love, and something seemed to connect. In the middle of a discussion on politics, there would be a sudden romantic moment, a pause, a look, a feeling. 
There was the usual pattern of physical intimacy on the third date (for some reason, it has always been first date, 3rd date, or never. Never 2nd or 4th. I don't know why. I don't plan it that way.)
I was telling her I never initiate that stuff with someone new, because of patriarchy and gender roles and all that, that I always wait for the woman to make the first move, and then she kissed me ;)
I fell hard. Like I did with Valerie. Not counting my ex-wife (which was in a different way, it was more gradual, we were friends first), it was only the 2nd time in my adult life that I really completely fell.

It was interesting to watch from the inside - normally I have love-blindness, and I can't see any flaws or compatibility problems with my interest.  This time I could very clearly see red flags, I was totally aware of the obvious issues, and I almost willfully ignored them. Seeing it clearly made literally no difference. All the reading on love, on cognitive bias, on psychology, literally no difference. It was just as strong. I believed my own excuses, my own rationalizations, even though I knew I was doing it as it was happening.
And I know - and am ok with - that I will do the same next time.

I'm not fully over it. I am still depressed, have no motivation to leave the house or talk to anyone or do anything or even eat. I spent much of yesterday napping.  Fortunately, recognizing this part, knowing it's temporary, that does help. Its like being on a bad drug trip when you have been enough times before. You don't want to feel that way anymore, but you know that a) there is nothing you can do about it, and b) it will go away on its own, all you have to do is wait it out.
So I'm waiting.

She really did have some great things about her though. And we shared a decent amount of fun in a short time. Maybe, with some buffer time in between, we can become friends.

I'm still in contact with the other interesting women I had first dates with, both of them are open to more dates with me, and I will try not to get overly excited too quickly when that happens.  And I'll fail. But that will be ok. Sooner or later I'll get it right, the pieces will fall into place, it will be mutual, and it will have been a great way to begin something special and lasting.

I started out saying I didn't have anything in particular to say, and here we are, 20 paragraphs later.