Journal of Metaphysical Bitcoin Research, Volume 1, Issue 1

I thought I should write a post explaining why Bitcoin is so appealing those who get it, or my opinion anyway of what the essence is of this almost religious feeling. I believe bitcoin is a metaphysical level-up from anything having to do with wealth that came before. If this distinction is lost on you, bitcoin is just another investment to you like penny stock #234,234 or a new kind of tulip, but if you do get it, oh boy is this a whole other ballgame! For the first time, humans can store wealth as a pure abstraction. Bitcoin is nothing less than the link between platonic heaven and finance, access to which is a divine superpower.

Platonic heaven contains all possible ideas including all cryptocurrencies. Ideas are cheap and don't accomplish any of this on their own. Maybe someone had a vague idea of "digital cash" before, but it couldn't be implemented properly and certainly not be reliably transacted with, so there was no real link between ideas and money, no solid reliable gateway from one realm to the other. In order to understand how different and fundamentally poorer the world was before bitcoin, we need to consider the best one could do in that direction.

When I was a kid, we thought it would be grand to have a Swiss bank account that the authorities couldn't touch. Even if that had been successful, little did I know that something (then) unimaginably better would come along which makes bank accounts sound like a joke. And of course, a bank balance is merely a debt to you. Better than debt is cash in hand, but that isn't platonic either and at the mercy of governments. We did have something better than fiat too, but commodities such as gold or art are mere physical possessions that can be physically seized, plus they aren't very liquid when you want to transact with their value.

The closest you came to having value in abstract form before bitcoin was intellectual property, if you managed to write a good book or something. Ideas could in a sense be traded, but it was awfully complicated and depended on copyright laws and enforcement by brute force. So you had a Rube Goldberg machine that some people could use to "mine" and resell abstract value, rather than a sure link between ideas and finance. Espionage might also qualify, and expertise. You could sell certain kinds of secrets, but again, it was an extremely hazardous or exclusive business.

I should also mention social status. By belonging to the right group, you can have favors done to you. A gift economy works sort of like a blockchain where wealth is stored in the idea that you deserve it. But again, the link is extremely fuzzy compared to the hard mathematics and self-enforcing consensus of bitcoin.

It took the invention of Nakamoto consensus and the miracle that it caught on as a trusted asset to establish the link I am talking about. So here we are, with a whole other metaphysical level of wealth that you can obtain, hold and transact with as if it were physical possessions, only better and safer. There are also shitcoins, but they only derive some fleeting value from your ability to scam people into thinking they are not superfluous, so pay them no heed other than ways to get more bitcoin.

In slightly less lofty terms, the power of bitcoin lies in its permissionlessness, which is really the same thing as pure abstraction, abstracted from anything but pure freedom. I need nobody's permission to make a new private key which controls an address that nobody needs permission to send to. How different this is from anything that came before is mind-boggling, but perhaps a good majority of people are so accustomed to asking permission for everything they do that they don't even consider this possibility.

Sex law commentary, § 291

I realize that my activism until now, which has mainly consisted of shouting hatred at sex laws and verdicts, has been too unspecific. While the feminist sex laws deserve all the condemnation they can get, it does little good unless we have an alternative ready to be used instead. I will therefore undertake a complete critique of the chapter on sex crimes in the Norwegian penal code, and present a male sexualist alternative as I see it, which shall constitute our political platform. I invite all my readers to discuss what reasonable sex laws should look like, with one section per post to keep it manageable, so we can arrive at a version to get behind officially as male sexualists and ideally all MRAs should support. While I will be dealing with the Norwegian penal code, I will present my own translations so we can all be clear on the content, and the result should be applicable to all countries.

The Norwegian sex laws are chapter 26 of the penal code, which is divided into 30 sections numbered from § 291 to § 320, often with multiple subsections. There being so many statutes should already tell you something is seriously wrong. Many or most of these we probably want to discard altogether, but let's analyze them one by one to be sure. Those who feel we need to do away with ALL the sex laws, even the very concept of a sex law, can adopt René Guyon's manifesto from 1951. Which I am not unopposed to, because everything that really deserves to be covered would then be punishable by other existing laws, for example as assault instead of the aggravated kind we call rape, but it is probably more realistic to have a formal and not too extreme alternative to the current sex laws, for the same reasons mentioned in my intro here.

I will start with the rape law, § 291, which of course is the most important one and the one which has been most egregiously reformed by feminists in recent years, from classic rape to the universal excuse for women to regret sex that it is today (there is also an absolute rape age law now that we will get to later, in addition to an age of consent that I suspect we will have some disagreements with). By the time we get done with this series I am sure it have been reformed again to explicitly include simple lack of consent as an independent criterion for all women (which is the way it is already practiced anyway), but for now the rape law says this:

Voldtekt

Med fengsel inntil 10 år straffes den som

a) skaffer seg seksuell omgang ved vold eller truende atferd,

b) har seksuell omgang med noen som er bevisstløs eller av andre grunner ute av stand til å motsette seg handlingen, eller

c) ved vold eller truende atferd får noen til å ha seksuell omgang med en annen, eller til å utføre handlinger som svarer til seksuell omgang med seg selv.

Rape

Up to 10 years in prison is the punishment for someone who

a) obtains sexual relations by violence or threatening conduct,

b) has sexual relations with someone who is unconscious or for other reasons unable to resist the act, or

c) by violence or threatening conduct gets someone to have sexual relations with someone else, or to carry out acts which correspond to sexual relations with themselves.

Commentary:

First it is necessary to define the meaning of "seksuell omgang/sexual relations." As it stands, the word basically means any kind of sexual contact as aside from simple touching. This is insanely broad for a rape law, so I want to restrict it to intercourse and remove the masturbation. Of course we will get to other laws which may reasonably criminalize lesser kinds of forced sexual contact later on, but it doesn't belong in the rape law. In order for a rape to occur, there must be vaginal penetration by a penis. If somebody wants to include anal penetration, then I am OK with that too, with the alternative being to have a separate law for that which differs in name only (for example, "forcible sodomy"), but I am not terribly attached to that idea even though it strikes me as more reasonable from a pedantic point of view. So let us specify that one necessary element of rape -- what the law shall call intercourse -- is vaginal or anal penetration.

Now to the means by which that sexual intercourse is accomplished in order for a rape to occur, and this is the biggest crux of all of feminism and men's rights activism and sexual politics in the modern world. The most radical feminist position is that lack of consent be enough, or even lack of enthusiastic consent. Norwegian law does not go that far (yet), but it goes very much too far, enabling literally all kinds of coerced sex to be called rape, no matter how trivial the coercion. I can't emphasize enough that we need to raise the threshold of coercion back up to the level of serious violence or threats. The single most important issue in all of men's rights activism is to revert "truende atferd/threatening conduct" to something like the old "ved å fremkalle frykt for noens live eller helse/by causing fear of someone's life or health" which was in the definition up to the year 2000, the corruption of which was what really radicalized me into an MRA. The new subsection c, unconsciousness, also has no place here. If consciousness is forced by violence then it already follows from subsection a, or else it has no place in rape law (but may be appropriate for lesser offenses that we shall get to later), where it indeed was absent until the devastating feminist reform in 2000.

My draft proposal for a reasonable rape law is:

Voldtekt

Med fengsel inntil 10 år straffes den som


a) skaffer seg samleie ved vold eller å fremkalle frykt for noens liv eller helse, eller


b) skaffer noen andre samleie ved vold eller å fremkalle frykt for noens live eller helse.

Rape

Up to 10 years in prison is the punishment for someone who

a) obtains sexual intercourse by violence or causing fear of someone's life or health, or

b) obtains sexual intercourse for someone else by violence or causing serious fear of life or health.

There also needs to be a marriage exemption and of course no primary perpetrator can be female (unless they are trans), so cis women can only commit b.

If anyone has better ideas, just propose them in the comments and I will take everything into account before we arrive at our manifesto. To me it is astonishing that most men are not upset by the evolution of feminist rape law. To them, most of the time, these are just words in books they don't read. My special sensitivity to laws before they affect me personally explains how I could be extremely radicalized by something they don't even notice, which is why it is so hard to get a Men's Movement going.