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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30043 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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I think the overwhelming majority of people are unlikely to even want to engage in bestiality in the first place, and by my lights, the practise itself does little harm to anyone or anything I care about.

Thus I don't particularly care about the creation of new people who engage in bestiality, since I deem anyone almost anyone who does finds it attractive abnormal in the first place!

I care about abnormal people and believe practicing bestiality harms them. I also think the marginally abnormal person here is not really all that abnormal; we're not just talking about 70 IQ Afghani shepherds, but also terminally online autists (especially furries) who could easily live perfectly normal lives if not memed into identifying as otherkin and othersexual. If you do not care about these people, or believe bestiality does not harm them, then that should be the focus of our discussion since it is our object-level disagreement.

It isn't particularly possible to eliminate and (in my opinion) not desirable to eliminate, hence my claim that it should be de-criminalized. I'm not demanding wider society accept it or endorse it. Plenty of things are legal yet frowned upon, and I have no stake in the matter that makes me want more.

Plenty of things are both easy to conceal and illegal, even absent the existence of a panopticon. It's pretty easy to keep children permanently chained up in your basement and do all manner of unholy things to them without anyone ever knowing. Making such behavior illegal still has many obvious positive effects:

  1. Clumsy and stupid offenders still often get caught no matter how easy it is to conceal.
  2. The behavior becomes more difficult, more dangerous, more expensive, and more time-consuming, because it must be hidden.
  3. The behavior becomes less socially possible--inviting someone to join you in that behavior becomes easily 10,000x more dangerous.
  4. This applies even more at the extremes, where powerful and influential people cannot publicly practice or create videos of such behavior without incurring large costs. If you believe that culture exists, this matters a lot.
  5. Judicial precedent matters and generally covers all similar cases until a law is passed to more explicitly cover them. Even if a behavior is by nature perfectly secret, there may be adjacent behaviors which are not secret and are partially covered by the same law.
  6. I could go on and on about the cultural effects of this, which I consider more important than any other factors, but suffice it to say that law and legal incentives are strong forces pushing on culture.

Our options are not just to either legalize it or ban it and build a suitable panopticon; even lazy enforcement using existing resources probably gets us 80% of the benefit of full enforcement.

The majority of Rationalists aren't polyamorous, even if polys are over represented therein.

The more Rationalist you are the more likely you are to be poly, to the point I'd consider being poly to be a characteristic of Rationalism, much like upper arm strength is a characteristic of being male.

To me, the overall Western attitude towards polyamory is perfectly acceptable, modest to strong societal disapproval yet no meaningful legal consequences when it's not outright non-consensual cheating in a marriage.

Cheating has no legal consequence at all in probably 99% of marriages in the States. Would you prefer it did? If not, why mention it? (I would prefer the government give adulterers a slap on the wrist, at least).

In other words, I'm not asking people who disapprove of bestiality to like or endorse it, merely to tolerate it without judicial punishment.

Wow, this argument sure sounds familiar. I wonder if anyone's ever said this in the past, and if so, how it went for those asked to tolerate it without celebrating it?

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