This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Some people enjoy being killed and eaten. They even record a video telling everyone they were fulfilling their biggest dream. Their partner still goes to prison for murder and cannibalism.
Anyway, there's no central definition of rape anymore, so we have to examine each one separately.
You invite the dude upstairs for a coffee; the vibe is off, but he won't leave and makes advances to you, you are a bit too tipsy and tired to argue, so you have sex with him to get him to leave. The "new" forced central example, and the one I have the biggest doubts about. I would appreciate if anyone knows women that are explicitly into that.
A handsome, high-status acquaintance safely overpowers you or blackmails you into sex. A very non-central example, probably the most commonly fetishized one, as already discussed by other commenters.
An ugly, low-status stranger safely overpowers you or blackmails you into degrading, no-kinks-barred sex. All I can say is, more women watch kink.com porn than you think.
An ugly, low-status stranger beats you up or threatens you with bodily harm to coerce you into relatively vanilla sex. The "old" central example. People already wrote about /r/rapekink, but I remember another story I read on Reddit, probably on /r/tifu or something.
The guy's girlfriend had a rape kink and it was an itch that he couldn't scratch no matter how hard he tried. Rough sex? No. CNC? No. 24/7 CNC? Still she kept complaining that it didn't really tickle her fetish because she could tell it was him and it was 100% safe sex, she wanted something that was indistinguishable from "the real thing". So he waited until she had to fly to a different town on a business trip, bought a disguise, secretly flew there as well, ambushed her in a park and had surprise sex with her before revealing his identity. Well, that was when she realized she didn't really have a rape fetish.
The moral of the story is: while there's at least two people in the world that into any kink you might think of, people routinely lie to each other and to themselves.
I will push against the lack of is-ought distinction here. I am entirely in support of radical bodily autonomy, if a sane and informed person wishes to be killed and eaten, I won't stop them, or seek to punish anyone who, uh, lends them a hand or a mouth. Emphasis on sane, of course, but people can be weird enough to have all their cognition and still want absurd and harmful things, but as long as it's done to them and they can't be talked out of it while retaining capacity, I wish society would let them.
Why?
If your belief is that people should be trusted to make their own decisions, well, people are wrong all the time, and suicide is irreversible. It is quite common for people to make decisions they'll regret later, and putting guardrails around certain large decisions (not making them impossible, mind, just preventing people from getting away with them without careful planning) protects people.
For the same reason babies can't be trusted to not eat toys, toddlers can't be trusted to be alone around fire or bodies of water, and children can't be trusted to make large medical decisions on their own, adults generally can't be trusted to fully understand what it means to be killed and eaten. The few who can be trusted to actually understand what that decision means, are also perfectly capable of orchestrating and getting away with it, so a strict law banning that decision is really more of a filter banning it for the less intelligent and conscientious.
If your belief is more general--that people have a right to their own preferences--then I submit to you that people are frequently wrong about their own preferences. Preferences are built atop more basic preferences, and most people are not great builders.
I am firmly for people being in as close to total control of their bodies, in life and manner of death, as feasible.
I disagree strongly. I understand perfectly well what it means to be killed and eaten, and have no desire to undergo that fate. So do most people. But if someone, however rare, is otherwise a sane and functioning member of society and harbors a desire to be cannibalized, then I support their right to do as they will with the most inalienable of properties, themselves.
I'm an advocate for the availability of MAID (though implementation details can vary) and I see nothing wrong with the occasional art piece where someone lets others dine on bits of themselves while alive (memory brings up someone using the fat removed during liposuction to fry food). Where's the stretch when I already consider those acceptable? Personally, if I was dead beyond hope of recovery (and wasn't set for cryogenic preservation), I couldn't care less what's done with my corpse.
A fair point, but I'm a stickler for principle here. I'd rather have a formal system where people are exhaustively examined and certified as being "sane and intelligent enough to make stupid decisions" and then let them do as they will. I'd hope that's the default assumption for most people, we already let people drink more than is good for them or eat themselves into obesity, and while attempts to regulate that or reduce negative externalities by things like banning drunk driving exist, most people are against societal meddling as invasive as outright prohibition or somehow making fatness illegal.
A society that only lets people make "good" decisions is a tyrannical one as far as I'm concerned.
I don't want to nitpick every way someone can off themselves. I'd rather have a means for people to prove that they're competent to kill themselves, and then let them choose how to dispose of the body (or the means of death) as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else.
Inconsistent preferences != wrong preferences!
We all have conflicting preferences. My desire to have a burger conflicts with my desire to lose weight. Someone's desire to have a good family life conflicts with their desire to be a billionaire.
There are often temporary conditions that can make people do things that cause a combination of permanent harm while being something they wouldn't want on reflection. But if someone who isn't otherwise mentally ill wants to be eaten, is able to articulate their preferences and reason about them, and can't be convinced to do otherwise over a decent length of time, I'm not standing in their way (unless legally and regulatorily obligated, which I am).
There are other points I could bring up, but I think this is the crux of our disagreement. I also want to both eat burgers and lose weight. I want to lose weight for all sorts of reasons (live longer, feel better, be healthier, look better, make more money) and have basically one reason to eat a burger--it tastes good. Any healthy person should be able to weigh these preferences and make a decision to diet. The fact that I don't do that means something is wrong with me, according to my own (and in my opinion any reasonable) set of values. A healthy society should also be able to weigh these preferences and come to the same conclusion.
There are second order effects that make universal government-mandated diet programs a bad idea, but I think it would be fine for the government to force me on a diet if I weighed, say, 450 pounds. At that point I've demonstrated an inability to abide by my own long-term preferences to any degree. If you take me, with my current values, and put me in a vacuum, I'd probably even agree ahead of time to abide by the diet because I recognize it's a good idea, even if in the moment I'd try to fight it.
Maybe you could go anarcho-capitalist with this and let people decide ahead of time which social contract they want to follow and how restrictive it will be. Some people can live in the forced-diet country and some can live in the eat-all-you-want country. But in my opinion this doesn't take things nearly far enough. If you take the veil of ignorance to its logical conclusion, there are people who now in this life have incorrect preferences. I think mentally healthy people, behind the veil of ignorance, would commit to protecting each other from these harmful preferences. It's reasonable to agree to some social compact along the lines of "we'll both do what's necessary to protect each other from class V obesity."
The preference to eat isn't wrong necessarily, but it is actually wrong to place it above the preference to live longer, and it's something I and most people do all the time, because we aren't perfect. If your model of people and human rights doesn't account for imperfection (or sin as I wrote elsewhere) then your ideal government will lead to a lot of suffering as people are enabled to pursue their worst impulses.
In short, there are two ways (relevant to this discussion) that preferences can be incorrect, and they bleed together. The first is that your priorities are wrong. This usually has to do with time preference--you logically know you shouldn't eat the burger, but dieting is long-term and the burger is right there. The second has to do with knowledge--maybe you simply don't fully understand what it means to die 10 years early, or how great being skinny feels. Either way, I'd say just about everyone has wrong preferences and that when they're wrong enough the government should step in and intervene.
When and where to intervene is another question. I'm fine with MAID, particularly for those already dying anyways, but I worry about the cultural effects of government (so society)-endorsed suicide. Same with cannibalism, if you make it legal sometimes, the taboo starts to unravel. I think culture warms up to cannibalism generally and people suffer unnecessarily. So on the object level, I'd still prefer cannibalism be illegal. If people really want to do it they can skirt around the relevant laws in secret, without the government stamp of approval. But I don't think that's where our disagreement really lies, and I could probably be persuaded otherwise about cultural dynamics.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You're going to have trouble reconciling that with any reasonable definition of sanity. Most that I've seen try either give up on the concept of mental illness altogether or cop out to i-know-it-when-i-see-it.
Quite a few things that are common in the human condition are past the verge of what counts as sanity for me. That being said, while I agree that the majority of people who wish to be killed and eaten are mentally ill, in a manner that might be amenable to treatment, I think there are a non-zero number who have no other mental illnesses, ignoring "wants to be eaten" by itself.
For the latter, well, it's their body and their choice, advocating for radical bodily autonomy requires me to bite that bullet.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's reasonable. I just wanted to generalize the issue, to show that rape wasn't unique in this regard.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link