The Blog From Hell

The United States declaration of independence begins by informing the British Crown of the most fundamental reason why they sought to break away from monarchic rule: that all men are created equal before God. Over the years this would come to be extended to include Women and finally (and sadly only in the last 50 years) black people. 

This is progressiveness at it's core, the fact that over time it was recognized more and more that all people are born equal, regardless of which God (if any) they believe in. In 1948 in the aftermath of World War 2 more than 100 nations began a process that culminated on the 7th December of that year in the publication of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A set of basic rights and freedoms which, it was agreed, all people had. Not granted by a government, not earned through effort – had simply by virtue of being human. Hillary Clinton in her speech to the United Nations on this past Human Rights Day spent several minutes hammering on the fact that these rights (including dignity, life and various civil freedoms) are not granted by governments and cannot be removed by them and the core of that document is that every government agreed to be a watchdog, agreed that where another government undermined these rights they would work towards re-establishing them – even to the point of military intervention.

In theory these things are libertarian ideals come to life. All libertarians claim to love freedom, claim to be opposed to oppression and the involvement of governments in the personal lives of people. Unfortunately our actions speak louder than our words and this is the most scathing inditement on right libertarians of all – their history shows the exact opposite. 

Capitalist or right libertarianism can in all honesty be called American Libertarianism it was founded in the USA primarily by Ayn Rand's objectivism, which itself is built upon the philosophies of Nietzsche (this is clear throughout a reading of her books and she herself stated it outright several times). But that itself immediately falsifies much of what right Libertarians claim – since Nietzsche utterly opposes the idea that people are born equal. Indeed his philosophy is built on the idea that some people are over-men, the greater pinnacles of humanity and naturally deserves to be more privileged and indeed more powerful and that the weaker subhumans don't deserve any true recognition at all.

While in America this inspired objectivism it's rather more effective inspiration was too a young artist called Adolf Hitler and it would come to be the basis of Nazism. Indeed Hitler believed that the Aryan race was the Ubermensch – above all others, the natural rulers and the only ones who had any rights at all (there's a lot more to Nietzsche's ideas than this and some of it is actually good but this part was horrible – and it's the only part that inspired both Nazism and Objectivism).

So right libertarians fundamentally do not believe in the equality of people – and if you don't believe in equal rights, then you have no reason to believe in equality in any other regard. In fact history bears this out. Right libertarians fought against the abolition of slavery in the USA. Claiming to support freedom, claiming to oppose slavery – yet they supported it when it was actively practiced. Their belief in the sacredness of property extended quite naturally (for them) to human beings as property. Considering how we frequently hear their present-day counterparts argue against any and all public property in the sincere belief that only private property can have any value (or as liberals see it: be exploited for the benefit of the few over the many) – it's not so surprising that the non-Ubermensch people's (in their view) fitted in the same category: it's best to own and farm them.

It didn't end there. Right libertarians and Left Libertarians have in common a professed claim to believe in social liberty. That rights like freedom of speech, personal views on morality, freedom of religion and the like are the most important things in society to protect. Indeed right libertarians claim their entire philosophy is about protecting those freedoms. 

But this has never been a priority for them. Throughout their existence in the only country where they have a measurable impact on politics they have trampled on and reduced these rights, while actively opposing measures to secure them. The libertarian party actively campaigned against the civil rights movement in the USA. Murray Rothbard (considered one of the great right libertarians of our time) wrote in 1994 that every libertarian (in his American view only right libertarians exist) should vote republican.

The thing is, right libertarians will tell you that they support the democrats on social issues but the republicans on economic issues. If freedom was indeed their highest priority then they would vote for the party where the social issues aligned with their values, but since it isn't and never really was they have consistently voted for (and had a massive influence on) the party that aligned with their economic ideals while actively undermining the social liberty ideals they claim to support. 

They have consistently chosen economic policy over human rights, greed over freedom. The only freedom they care about is the freedom to grab what they want, and deny it to others. 

There is another level, slightly less insidious but equally as false. Right libertarians in their claimed believes will usually declare that capitalism has consistently uplifted the poor. Ivo Vegter (probably the loudest right libertarian voice on the African continent) states openly that while the gap between rich and poor may have grown the level of poverty decreased and places the credit for this squarely on the shoulders of capitalism. Talking of how unregulated capitalism created this improvement in one sentence and then decrying the fact that unregulated capitalism doesn't exist in the next … with no apparent sense of irony.

Firstly the facts do not bear this out. IRS statistics indicate that under the most libertarian policies in America the share of total GDP earned by the top 1% doubled, while the share earned by the bottom 50% was cut virtually in half. Middle class salaries stagnated on paper, but when you factor in that working hours for the middle class is no roughly 60% more than it was 50 years ago, that works out to a massive decline (they are paid the same for a lot more work, meaning less per hour worked).

That's just the start however. The markets he cites where this amazing event is claimed to have happened all have this in common: in every single one of them there was a significant population of people who had no property rights at all, and thus their land and labor could be exploited with ease. In America they were slaves. In Europe they were the colonies – as soon as colonialization ended and the exploitation shifted to the voters (rather than people far away with no say in the government they lived under) these countries rapidly became socialist. People who had a say in the system, who had rights, refused to live in these ultra-capitalist societies, the only time they worked was when the suffering was exported to people who were denied the very rights libertarians claim to own. 

Even today this persists, corporations continue to pursue higher profits by relying on laborers who lack property rights and basic civil rights. Since they have no rights, they can be exploited in slavery conditions. The only difference is, now they rely on other governments to maintain that for them while professing to love freedom back home. So Chinese workers toil under conditions that are in fact much worse than slavery, so Nike can sell their shoes at the exact same premium they charged when they had local US workers – but with 20 times the markup.

The only people who benefit are the shareholders of Nike and the Chinese government. 

Capitalism has never worked in a society where all people had equal rights and liberty. The suggestion that capitalism rewards all who work hard and uplifts society as a whole is simply not true – it creates wealth for those with rights, by taking it from those without. Regulations on capitalism is meant to prevent this – but because nobody can regulate other countries it simply lead to capitalism outsourcing it's workforce. Creating unemployment back home, and suffering abroad. 

Right libertarians' answer to this ? Deregulate it locally. I almost want to support that, as European history shows the moment you bring the suffering home – onto people who can vote for the people who make the rules, they make sure those rules protect them. 

Left libertarians have a proud history of recognizing the equal liberty of all people going back several hundred years. At no point in history has left libertarians supported any kind of exploitation, any lack of rights for anybody, or any other form of inequality. Extending equality of people not just into law but into economics is the heart of left libertarianism and why I support it. Make no mistake – right libertarians believe themselves to be greater-than-thou, and thus deserving of not only ruling over others but exploiting and appropriating the fruits of their labors. 

This sense of self-aggrandizement shines through when they say things like "I worked hard to get where I am". Of course you did, we all do. The fact that you had massive privilege as a white male to help you had no role at all, right ? Those who lacked those privileges and worked hard without getting where you are ? Oh right, you declare they are just lazy, you cannot believe that working even harder may fail to pay off in a system designed to keep them down. Then they point to a few people from such poor backgrounds who did become rich – but miss out that this one in a million stories. A few people win the lottery as well, that doesn't mean encouraging people to play lotto is sound economic policy and frankly the odds of getting rich that way is marginally higher than of getting rich by working hard in China ( or for that matter in Thokoza).

So right libertarians will oppose any protection of rights that do no apply to the rich, any protection of societies most vulnerable – because it removes their ability to exploit that vulnerability, and their claims as to why are simply false. Right libertarians are vocally against minimum wage laws – declaring they reduce employment below where the market would have it by artificially inflating the price. But when South Africa introduced a minimum wage law for domestic workers a few years ago that minimum wage was less than the urban average pay for domestic workers already set by the market, all it did was force the minority who were paying well below market rates to at least pay a fair wage. Incidentally the number of domestic workers employed in South Africa today are still exactly the same as it was before the law was passed: roughly one per middle-class household.

In none of the previous two posts did I launch so much of an attack on right libertarians while saying so little about left libertarians and it's because these facts are so scathing and so utterly destroy their rhetoric. Suffice to say that in each of the cited cases above – left libertarians were fighting on the opposite side. It was left libertarians who gave their lives on May 5th 1895 to secure the 40-hour work-week, an act we still commemorate yearly on worker's day. Left libertarians were among the abholitionists who ended slavery in Europe well before it ended in the USA. Left libertarians have fought hard against oppression and censorship, have been a voice for the voiceless and fought for the freedom and equality of all people. Protection not just from the evils of governments at their worst, but from exploitation by theft and greed as well, in the genuine believe that the only authority with any legitimacy is the authority of government-by-consent. 

As we speak left libertarian values (even if only rarely called so) is guiding the occupy-wall-street movement. The reason there were no early soundbites or action plans were simple: they worked by consent, it takes time to get consent, but as consent is reached – plans can be made that all of society benefits from.

A cardinal difference between communism and capitalism can be found in their definitions of efficiency. One could summarize it thusly:

• Capitalism deems it inefficient if those who are more productive do not gain a larger share of wealth.
• Communism deems it inefficient if a nation produces enough for all it's citizens to have their basic needs met but this does not happen because a few have a disproportionately large share of that production.

There's a bit of a fundamental goal difference prevalent in those definitions. Communism believes the economy should serve the people and the people one another. Capitalism believes nothing and nobody should serve anybody else (nor any tangible purpose)  it should just exist. 

Usually when left and right libertarians debate there's a lot of circular arguing without any real progress – fundamentally because so many core definitions are at odds in their views – the above example is a good one.  In this series of posts I'll be looking at some of these definitional differences and how they lead to the difference in the views of left and right libertarians, and why I side with the left.

Property is theft

Contrary to popular opinion this quote is not communist or Marxist in origin but came from Proudhom in the paper that first gave us the word "libertarian". Right libertarianism wouldn't arise until several centuries later, primarily in the USA and mostly under the influence of Rand. To left libertarians this line promulgates the deep paradox inherent in modern property systems – all that is owned today is only owned because it was stolen. Right libertarians have a different view – that property was created, by setlers working the land and such.  

For this reason many left libertarians declare that only land "in use" is ownable and only as long as it remains so – when it is no longer used it should be accessible to the next potential user rather than laying in waste. Left libertarians decry the inefficiency of a society where so many children sleep on pavements besides buildings that have been standing empty for years.  Right libertarians write long articles about how this entire line of thinking is nothing more than an excuse to steal the hard-earned property of others. My personal opinion is that it would be better for social stability over-all to recognize private property when it refers to single dwellings but differentiate in the case of mass-dwellings.

So who is right ?

The answer comes from a rather odd next question: is right of conquest a valid right of property (it was held so in every culture in the world until very recently after all) ? 

If you say "yes":

Well then the take-over of unused land by the destitute is a legitimate form of conquest, at least as legitimate in practical terms as any other. 

If you say "no":

Well then the current "owners" of the land have no legitimate claim to it. 

I should back all this up. This is where right libertarians are simply and basically lying about the facts of history. Property was never, ever created by setllers working the land. Trace back all the property in the world from current owner to first title deed and you'll find that before that deed was issued it was obtained by conquest: that is it was taken by force from the previous owner. In many cases those previous owners did not have deeds or paperwork, they were often collectivist societies. These traces are hard to do in Europe since in some cases you're tracing back to the ancient Roman conquests, but in the USA and the entire developing world it's quite easy: the land that people "own" was stolen by violent force from it's previous owners within the last three centuries.  This is why the ANC has a land-reform program – and it's out of trying to preserve the economy that they choose to do it on a voluntary-seller basis, they are giving the land back to the descendents of those it was stolen from.  That works in the rural areas, it doesn't work so well in major urban centers – even if those urban centers were built on such land.

The tricky bit is proving who did own the land before.  Right libertarians avoid the question by stating that property was "created" when the land was (recently) worked, if you carefully limit your definition of "property" to the modern title-deeds that almost works but if you have any kind of a respect for justice and indeed the property rights held so sacred by right libertarians you must accept the premise that people who have lived on a piece of land for many generations (perhaps thousands of years) are the only legitimate owners of that land you could recognize. 

So when left libertarians decry the fact that 5% of the world population own 95% of the wealth a big part of why we decry it is because that wealth is generated using land of which the ownership is morally incredibly dubious if not outright illegitimate. When we declare it should be more evenly distributed this is not "mooching" as Rand would put it but a demand for justice. The land was stolen, and then sold on. In any other aspect of human life buying stolen property remains a crime and the ownership remains illegitimate no matter how many times it was sold – if found it is still returned to the true owner. Land should be no different. The USA belongs to Native Americans, South Africa belongs to it's various tribes (not just black but also San and Khoi-Khoin), the fact that these people did not have systems of land ownership when the west got here does not in any way, shape or form justify the suggestion that those who implemented such systems could therefore appropriate the land right out from under them. 

The only land in this country legitimately owned by white people in fact is a particular section of Kwa-Zulu Natal because that was not taken from the Zulu people by force but bought in a mutually agreed contract by the voortrekker's for labour. The violence and warfare that happened after the fact are beside the point – here alone in all of Africa did white people who wanted to live on land where black people had lived for thousands of years recognize their living there as a legitimate property right and tried to BUY the land rather than simply take it by force.

Essentially I'm afraid left libertarians have the right coming and going. The right has to recognize right-of-conquest as valid to claim any legitimacy in the current ownership of land, and then it logically follows that the poor have every right to obtain (or rather: recover) land and property through the same means.  Alternatively if they somehow try to deny it – they must then accept that current ownership is illegitimate and we should enter a long period of mandated land redistribution to return the land to those who own it by rights.

Journalists have named it the Arab spring, a spate of uprisings in the middle east that saw one dictator after another get ousted after decades of what seemed to be unassailable power. For decades Western Governments did business with these dictators (especially oil business) condemning the nature of their rule but never moving against them – because they claimed any attempt to do so, or impose sanctions (…as if we'll ever see real sanctions against an oil producer) would only harm their beleaguered citizens further. Ultimately those citizens got fed up. Too much money in the pockets of the elites while their citizens got hungrier and poorer. Finally a generation grew up that was ready to risk their lives,  take to the streets, and oust their oppressive former leaders. 

That was, the Arab spring in a nutshel – it's not quite over yet (the latest casualty – Gadaffi still hasn't officially relinquished power) and it's likely to keep on for a little longer. From the start it was clear that other dictators were afraid of this spreading into their countries. China made defensive moves, and there is much speculation that Kim Yong Ill's recent visits to China and Russia was really about securing allies after Gadaffi's fall – built on a fear of a similar public insurrection in North Korea.

What nobody seems willing to suggest is that this could also spread to Western Nations. The (and indeed the more Westernized African nations like South Africa) imagine themselves immune – after all, we're not dictatorships we are free democracies. I beg to differ. The London riots despite all the claims by politicians and popular media to the contrary was not just criminality. It was the beginning of a similar spark of revolt I believe.

The idea that having a democracy makes you immune from such uprisings is just wrong. It's based on the idea that if people have a peaceful way to oust bad governments (through the vote, court systems etc.) they wouldn't risk doing so in unlawful ways. There are three major flaws in this reasoning however.

The first is that democracies are always free. At the risk of getting myself Godwinned I must point out that Hitler originally came to power through an election. You can elect a dictator who is then very hard to get rid of again. Many other dictators around the world throughout history originally came to power in a free election. Robert Mugabe is a more recent example.

And you don't have to be called a dictator to be one. When there is only one way an election can go – that is a dictatorship, and when all the election will do is shuffle a bit between two parties that are both sold out to special interests then all you have is a structurally fluid dictatorship.

There are very few free democracies left in the world and America, Australia, the United Kingdom and South Africa are not among them.  They do have various degrees of individual freedom but in many cases this has been twisted to make the dictators and their wealthy cronies simply more powerful. Instead of those freedoms being used against cronyism, it is used to protect cronies.

South African's love to complain about our government and blame it on the ANC, declaring how things are falling apart but there is nothing special about us. We call it Tenderpreneurs, American's call it Lobbyists, the results are the same. The rich gets richer with the help of goverment corruption and the poor get poorer.

To claim capitalism is working you must prove that the poor actually gets richer – those who argue this generally show long timelines and try to prove that the poorest in society today lives better than they did 50 and 100 years ago. That is not a very difficult thing to prove – technology advanced, science advanced these things raise quality of life even for the poorest of the poor, but there is nothing either of those statements that depends on capitalism and no proof that capitalism helped this process. Even if it did, you are not proving that it will continue to do so today. More importantly is to see what happened to the quality of life of people today compared to ten and twenty years ago. That shows a marked decline worldwide.

As the age of corporatism reached it's greatest scale, the poor got more poor, and now with the coffers of the economy plundered they are stealing the only thing those poor had left – the social safety nets put in place by our grandfathers. Their welfare checks, their public education, their pensions, their medical assistance and all the other things that potentially offers and escape from poverty is being ripped out from under them by governments who can almost legitimately claim that they cannot afford them anymore. Nowhere is those governments suggesting paying back the money that people already paid into these funds and from which they will now never benefit again. This leaves the middle-class robbed and the poor with even less recourse to ever be less poor.

Many captialists defenders imagine otherwise but the reality is that big gaps between rich and poor breeds contempt, protest and ultimately violent revolution. If we don't learn that from history we are doomed to repeat it. As we strip away these safety nets, the poor is feeling the pinch, their youth lose their last prospects and lash out. The London riots were immature. Stealing a TV from your neighbour doesn't help -but they were not simply "lawlessness by lesser people" as was suggested and implied. They were protest by inexpereinced protesters (after all it's been a long time since Westerners had practice). But as one protester said: "Two months ago we marched on a police station with a memorandum. 20 thousand people marched, peacefully protesting police behavior and we didn't even make the local paper. We loot a few shops for 2 days and we have international media attention".

Does that excuse violence ? Not at all, but it does explain it. Western governments are now in real trouble – they have allowed their cronies to plunder the system until there is nothing less (some economists predict American inflation rates will hit 30% within two years), so they actually cannot afford to maintain the safety nets that worked for decades. That provided a means of self-upliftment and a way out – and kept the poor at least hopeful that some of them may grow to better lives, gave them a reason to be peaceful. Now they take those safety nets away, to the glee of their cronies who get to offer their for-profit versions (annuities for pension plans, medical insurance instead of medicaid) to the middle class for even more profit and couldn't care less that the poor could never afford it, while the middle class as they switch to these things get robbed. For years they paid into these schemes and now they never get to be paid out.

In 1992 Brazil tried to do the same and ended the government pension plan (this was a democratically elected government long after the dictator years). Protests broke out with everyone from young teenagers to the elderly in the streets, risking arrests, but standing by their point – this was the money we had put away for our old age in schemes you demanded we pay into, you cannot end those schemes without giving it back. 

The protesters won. The experiment failed and the pension plans were reinstated. Why do we think that America, England and South Africa are immune ? Why do American's think they are ? Why does Cameron think that he can stop what happened in London with propaganda ? 

These nations have the same situation now that Brazil was in in 1992, but it's aggravated by the fact that it's not just the middle-class who paid in that are losing out, they aren't just taking the pension payments away. They are destroying all the safety nets at once, robbing the middle class of their money and the poor of their hope. There can be only one outcome: violent revolution.

I hate the idea of that, but it's an inevitable consequence of these actions. It may not be too late to prevent it yet. A change of course may yet be able to. I doubt one will happen though. The denial of the democratic dictators is too strong, like their unelected middle eastern compatriots they will pretend all is well until they protests become revolutions and then claim to be winning and crushing those revolutions every day until the revolutionaries are standing on the rubble of their mansions. 

Anybody who thinks that what happened to Gadaffi cannot happen to Cameron needs to read some history books, it can and most likely will happen. The trends begun under Reagan are reaching their inevitable conclusion. We can still change course but the time left to do so is very short. 

We can listen to those protesters while they are still looters in a few neighbourhoods, or we can keep pushing until the White House is burning. Never for one moment imagine it cannot happen. America was born from a violent revolution against an unpopular British government who impoverished it's citizens remember. 

The truth is, even if Milton was right about everything and you suddenly figure it out now… he was wrong about one thing. There isn't a population in the world that is equalized enough to do capitalism his way without being instantly at war with the poor.

Right, so if the title wasn't obvious enough – I'm taking a diversion from the foss-archeology series to talk about something topical – notably the current brouhaha caused by Rebecca Watson and that video. Now for those who aren't aware of it, here is the what happened. Miss Watson was speaking at a student conference as a prominent feminist voice. After the conference and subsequent festivities she was headed toward her hotel room when she found herself alone in the elevator with a young man. The young man told her that he'd enjoyed her talk, found her interesting, and asked if she'd like to come to his room for coffee.

Miss Watson declined the invitation and he respectfully accepted her decision. At no point did he act the least bit aggressively. At no point was he pushy. At no point did he suggest that he would not accept whatever she chose to answer with grace and respect. Which he did, even though he did not get the answer he had obviously hoped for. What is more, he didn't push any further after that no. They got to their floors and went their own ways. 

We know the full details because there is a video of it, Miss Watson posted it on her blog and then decried it as a sexist move to proposition her in an elevator, declaring it creepy. It blew up into the major feminist argument of the day. An example of how women are threatened and viewed as sex-toys by men how men have all the power and how evil we all are.

Richard Dawkin's made a now infamous comment about it decrying the silliness of it all – and now they all hate him. Well I think I agree with him – what's more he did not go far enough. I will get to his argument in a moment, but first I want to state my own view. Now that I despise discrimination in all it's forms is something I deem beyond dispute – I have written extensively on the topic many times, most recently here. Well here's the reality – the sexist discrimination in this event was entirely on the part of Miss Watson.

She says she felt she was in a threatening situation. Really ? Because she was alone in an elevator with a person who just quite coincidentally happened to have a penis ? That is the ultimate sexism – yes some people rape, yes more of them are men than women – but to just automatically assume anybody who was born male would seek to act on sexual desire by force is nothing but outright gender discrimination. It's assuming behavior on the part of a person purely on the basis of that person's gender. 

Her reaction there was nothing short of unmitigated and absolutely inexcusable sexism. The man in fact had not exerted any power in the situation at all – in fact she had all the power. He indicated his desire (and whether he did so politely or not is really quite beside the point) – and then left the decision entirely in her hands. She could choose. If she shared his desire she could say yes, if she didn't she could say no.

By her reasoning all flirtation is sexual harassment (I bet a lot of women who enjoy flirting would hate it if they weren't allowed to). Or perhaps only women should ever proposition somebody (since many feminists have fought hard to have it be acceptable for women to do so) ? Is that not sexist ? She had the power to say yes or no. He did not in any way seek to force the decision upon her, he merely indicated to her his desire and let her decide. Nothing was to happen unless it was a mutual desire and since it wasn't, indeed nothing did happen.

She was not threatened, she was not being a victim of somebody abusing his power – she was the one who had the power and her judgement of the situation was utterly ruined by her sexist view of all men as violent predators – even when an individual man had done absolutely nothing to deserve that assessment.

I don't even think there was any sexual objectification here – the man had heard her talk and claims to have respected her views. Finding somebody attractive does not imply that you don't value them in other regards. Surely Caryn would be offended by the suggestion that because she thinks I'm sexy she cannot also enjoy conversations with me about intellectual matters and respect me as a professional and as a person ? I certainly respect her intellect and her personality and think she is a wonderful person – I also find her very attractive, and none of these things are mutually exclusive.

Nothing he had done suggested that he only thought of her sexually – and even if he had – since this is not a work situation, since he has no influence on her future and didn't even suggest a relationship, would that be so bad ? He was interested in a one-night-stand if and ONLY if she shared his interest. If they had both shared it, then it was perhaps objectifying but it would not be in the least harmful to anybody – in fact it would have been gratifying to them both. Since the interest was one-sided, it had no impact whatsoever -except to give her something to shout about and get more famous for.

Which brings us to Dawkins's view, her anti-male sexism is bad enough but it's not the worst of it. She and her supporters have declared this a perfect example of "potential sexual assault". I have to side with Dawkins here – this world is full of people who suffer under very real discrimination, including institutionalized sexual discrimination in countries where women get the death penalty for adultery, where female circumcision is promoted,. where women have to wear veils and get no decision-making whatsoever. And the real victims of sex-crimes be they men, women or children. Calling "would you like some coffee ?" potential sexual assault massively demeans the plight of all the victims of real sex-crimes and is insulting to those who suffer under real discrimination.

Yes, it's insulting to those people who suffer under the very real effects of humanities worst discriminatory practices to suggest that what Miss Watson experienced was remotely comparable, in particular it's the worst kind of demeaning to those who have experienced the horror that is real rape or sexual assault to call that little event "potential sexual assault".

That is why I call her not only a sexist but  a traitor to the very cause she claims to be a voice for as well. Shame on you.

As I make no secret off (to the point of having written an article on the topic for a major national publication), I've been in the situation of being a victim of domestic-abuse. I am not a victim now, I am a survivor and I refused to let what happen there ruin my life, and I also neither emotionally nor rationally consider there to be any truth to the suggestion that all women would do what that particular woman had done to me. 

It is therefore quite personally insulting to hear somebody declare that being propositioned politely was comparable to what it's like to go through real abuse, assault or rape – even if I've experienced only one of out three I'm quite sure it's the least horrific of them so I can only sympathize deeply with those who have experienced the others. Miss Watson is not among them, but is trying to associate her non-event with their plight for her own gain – exploiting them further and the only justification she can offer for this association is the sexist and outright wrong mistrust of all men.

Well I say it again Miss Watson: Shame on you.