Given functional birth control and non-fucked family structure, incest is fine and natural and probably a good experience to have.
Pedophilia is a legitimate sexual orientation, even if it expressing it IRL is bad (which it is not). Child porn should not be suppressed (tho some of it is documentation of crime and should be investigated).
Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.
Child sexual consent hits the same issues as child acting or any other thing that parents can allow, and should not be treated differently from those issues.
Self identity is a problem.
EDIT: most of the deaths in the holocaust were caused by the allies bombing railroads that supplied food to the camps.
Less controversial in LW, but still bad to say outside:
Race, class and subculture are the most useful pieces of information when judging a person.
I run out of ideas.
EDIT: in case it’s not clear, I take all these ideas seriously. I would actually appreciate a discussion on these topics with LW.
EDIT: this was productive! I’ve seriously updated one way or the other on many of these ideas. Thanks for pointing out truths and holes everyone! :)
As long as you hold onto the basic idea that extermination was the goal, and they were accidentally assisted by the destruction of infrastructure (which also was instrumental in preventing the rest of them from being killed), is that really downplaying the atrocities?
That said, I don’t know if that claim is really true.
Assuming by highest likelihood that you’re German, my reading of the relevant section of the criminal code suggest that it’s OK for you to debate in Internet fora:
(3) Whosoever publicly or in a meeting approves of, denies or downplays an act committed under the rule of National Socialism of the kind indicated insection 6 (1) of the Code of International Criminal Law, in a manner capable of disturbing the public peace shall be liable to imprisonment of not more than five years or a fine.
(4) Whosoever publicly or in a meeting disturbs the public peace in a manner that violates the dignity of the victims by approving of, glorifying, or justifying National Socialist rule of arbitrary force shall be liable to imprisonment of not more than three years or a fine.
Unless it can be argued that you’d be “disturbing the public peace”. But as I understand it, in Germany (and France) it’s legal to visit Stormfront, you just cannot promote it.
I don’t see a problem, unless he claims they wouldn’t have killed them eventually if they had won. The claim is “allies helped the nazis do this faster” not “allies did this and nazis did not”, but I don’t know anything about how law works so I’m probably wrong.
most of the deaths in the holocaust were caused by the allies bombing railroads that supplied food to the camps
And the shortage of food in Germany, and everything else that provided a disincentive to feed the people that the party line proclaimed to be innnately hostile and seditious.
When you’re literally last on the priority list (well, maybe above Soviet POVs in 1941), every economic difficulty will “cause” you to starve while you could’ve easily endured it in a society that had a more balanced if utterly cynical opinion of you.
(I find the other things you mentioned to be broadly correct, but not without caveats; moreover, if one goes about it naively without minding such caveats, one would likely do much greater harm to most involved than the current self-deception does.)
The worst crimes of the holocaust were a conspiracy within the Nazi government. The Nuremburg trials had testimony from an investigator who was attempting to prove his supicions of these practices, and ultimately prosecute the offenders who were killing the Jews. It is likely that only a few hundred Germans were directly involved.
The Nazi government was built upon projecting genetic kinship onto the state itself, and while it didn’t want any Jews in Germany, they weren’t actively seeking the elimination of the Jewish race. In fact, the ‘final solution’ was not the first solution—they attempted deportation several times.
I’ve come to be of the opinion that the Nazi goverment—while certainly not being the sort of state I’d advocate—really weren’t all that bad. Given the feminist/pro-immigration state that’s growing in Canada, I might actually prefer it.
Sorry, but no deal. Trying to withhold value judgment when talking about highly unpopular social systems is one thing. Such a reversal of the approved opinion after a cursory look, however, is downright stupid, and beneath you. I’ve had sex with a guy several times; do you really think that me being executed for it if someone knew and disliked me enough to report me to officials IS LESS AWFUL than the evils of feminism and immigration? I bet not. Would you like Canada to invade the U.S. and install an incredibly brutal occupation regime by claiming it’s a necessary pre-emptive strike to save the world from American tyranny (even if said tyranny was a real danger)? I bet not.
Next time please evaluate MORE facts from the historical period in question before drawing tenous comparisons and making judgments like these.
(Oh, and is that still a conspiracy when it has the deliberate backing of the lawful head of state, AND that head of state is legally an absolute dictator who left no constitutional provision in place on which he could be judged for those atrocities? I’m pretty shit at law, but, logically, if the Fuhrer wouldn’t mind the atrocities, and the Nazi legal thought made the Fuhrer’s authority utterly untouchable—see e.g. Carl Schmidt’s opinion on sovereignity—then the investigator only had international law to fall back on, which the Nazi system would deny to be a source of authority in this case.)
The worst crimes of the holocaust were a conspiracy within the Nazi government.
This is not true. The Holocaust was ordered by the popular leader of the German government; they were executed by a very large number of people, probably >90% of whom actively cooperated and almost none of whom tried to stop the Holocaust. (see e.g. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men) German society as a whole knew that their government was attempting genocide; see e.g. What We Knew for supporting details, or Wikipedia for a summary.
(It is at least not totally impossible that the gas chambers were unknown to the broader German public. But the idea that gas chambers are representative of the Holocaust is a historical myth; most victims of the Holocaust were not killed by gas.)
The Nuremburg trials had testimony from an investigator who was attempting to prove his suspicions of these practices, and ultimately prosecute the offenders who were killing the Jews.
This is wrong. (This is kinda a refrain; your Nazi apologia is lacking in sources or historical accuracy.) I assume you’re referring to Georg Konrad Morgen; if so, he did prosecute the people killing the Jews, but not for the genocide; he said, correctly, that the Final Solution was ‘technically legal’. His prosecutions instead focused on the ordinary crimes (e.g. corruption).
It is likely that only a few hundred Germans were directly involved.
Again, this is just flat out wrong, in a way that shows that you have no idea what you’re talking about. Auschwitz alone had ~7,000 camp guards during the war; there were around 55,000 concentration camp guards total. Again, I suggest that you read Ordinary Men, about the ~500 men of Reserve Police Battalion, who killed an estimated ~38,000 Jews. (There were about 17,500+ members of the Reserve Police Battalions, plus another 3,000+ members of the Einsatzgruppen.) There also numerous other SS/Ghestapo/Wehrmacht personnel directly involved beyond the three specific groups I’ve named.
Child sexual consent hits the same issues as child acting or any other thing that parents can allow
(Warning: Judging moral claims with System-1 is unreliable.) Thinking that as a kid I could have been allowed to have sex, have had people annoying me with undesired propositions (even after they knew my age), and have had people trying to manipulate me into sex, makes me at most kind of uneasy. Thinking that my parents could have had any kind of say over it gave me a panic attack.
Wow, when I read “should not be treated differently from those issues”, I assumed the intention was likely to be “child acting, indoctrination, etc., should be considered abuse and not tolerated by society”, a position I would tentatively support (tentatively due to lack of expertise).
Incidentally, I found many of the other claims to be at least plausible and discussion-worthy, if not probably true (and certainly not things that people should be afraid to say).
How I remember feeling about sex as a kid (“A thing that some strange adults do for some reason, like partying all night long or cheering for football players. Irrelevant until further notice. What’s for dinner?”)
How I remember feeling about people who propositioned me online because I had a female username and they didn’t know my age (mildly annoyed at the waste of time, mildly icked at those whose propositions were particularly direct, mildly exasperated at the number of people who looked for cybersex in unrelated chatrooms)
How I remember feeling and now feel about attempts to manipulate me into saying sexual things (confused and slightly icked by those I can’t detect, amused and condescending and mildly exasperated by those I can)
How I feel about my parents controlling what I do (bad)
Child acting:
“You could have been a child actor”: Yeah, sure. I didn’t want to, but the idea is kinda neat. Actors are cool.
“You could have been pressured by directors into acting when you were a kid”: Not cool! Pressure is bad! Pressuring people into jobs is evil and bad and greedy! I would have felt very bad, so I’m glad that didn’t happen.
“You could have wanted to be a child actor, and your parents could have prevented you”: It’s bad and sad to clip the wings off angels. It looks like a mistake decent but overprotective people would make, not evil people who wanted me to suffer, though.
“Your parents could have forced you to act as a child”: What horrible evil people. Why are kids not protected against that?
Religious indoctrination: I don’t seem to have a strong emotional reaction. Child preachers and the like are sad. Parents who are forbidden to give religious education to their children are also sad.
I don’t necessarily endorse any of these reactions.
. Given functional birth control and non-fucked family structure, incest is fine and natural and probably a good experience to have.
The “incest isn’t wrong” position isn’t novel. The “everyone would be better off if they did” is novel, and I confess I don’t understand it at all. Not everyone is attracted to close family members.
. Pedophilia is a legitimate sexual orientation, even if it expressing it IRL is bad. Child porn should not be suppressed (tho some of it is documentation of crime and should be investigated).
I agree with the first half, but would have phrased the second half as “the ban on computer-generated child pornography should be reversed and indeed subsidized to crowd out pornography using real children”.
Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.
Really? What about for people who don’t have access to emergency birth control? Or who were unlucky enough to be raped by someone with an STD? Or who live in a society that murders women who get raped as adulterers? Or just in a society that tends to divide women into “good girls” and “sluts”? (Maybe you meant society’s self-fulfilling prophecy in the latter two examples, but it’s not the woman’s self-fulfilling prophecy.)
*Yes, I know men get raped too. That’s pretty clearly not the context when people bring this argument up, however.
Race, class and subculture are the most useful pieces of information when judging a person.
Judging them for what? Doesn’t work for suitability as an underwear model, for example.
Not everyone is attracted to close family members.
And not everyone is attracted to everyone else, but I see no reason not to be close with your family in this way.
I agree with the first half, but would have phrased the second half as “the ban on computer-generated child pornography should be reversed and indeed subsidized to crowd out pornography using real children”.
Why so conservative? How is child porn different from child acting? Assuming consent and all that.
Really? What about for people who don’t have access to emergency birth control? Or who were unlucky enough to be raped by someone with an STD? Or who live in a society that murders women who get raped as adulterers? Or just in a society that tends to divide women into “good girls” and “sluts”? (Maybe you meant society’s self-fulfilling prophecy in the latter two examples, but it’s not the woman’s self-fulfilling prophecy.)
Yes, in third world countries, butthurt is not the primary damage caused by rape. I mean in cases without lasting physical effects. Maybe I should have been more clear?
Judging them for what?
pretty much anything besides being an underwear model. Likelyhood to start a fight. Expected value as an employee in most jobs. Intellectual capacity.
Come to think of it, the correlates of race are mostly covered by class and subculture.
I am specifically referring to female rape, because only females are encouraged to consider rape as a devastating or life-wrecking occurrence.
For some, the prevalent notion of “rape is something that doesn’t happen to men” seems to make the feelings of shame after being raped even worse. Female rape is commonly considered horrific and something where the victim needs support; male rape isn’t always even acknowledged as something that exists.
“That was hard for me to take,” Owiny tells me today. “There are certain things you just don’t believe can happen to a man, you get me? But I know now that sexual violence against men is a huge problem. Everybody has heard the women’s stories. But nobody has heard the men’s.” [...]
It reminds me of a scene described by Eunice Owiny: “There is a married couple,” she said. “The man has been raped, the woman has been raped. Disclosure is easy for the woman. She gets the medical treatment, she gets the attention, she’s supported by so many organisations. But the man is inside, dying.”
“In a nutshell, that’s exactly what happens,” Dolan agrees. “Part of the activism around women’s rights is: ‘Let’s prove that women are as good as men.’ But the other side is you should look at the fact that men can be weak and vulnerable.”
Margot Wallström, the UN special representative of the secretary-general for sexual violence in conflict, insists in a statement that the UNHCR extends its services to refugees of both genders. But she concedes that the “great stigma” men face suggests that the real number of survivors is higher than that reported. Wallström says the focus remains on women because they are “overwhelmingly” the victims. Nevertheless, she adds, “we do know of many cases of men and boys being raped.”
(Things are probably somewhat better in the Western world, but it’s the Western organizations that are helping perpetuate the “men aren’t raped” idea, so not necessarily that much better.)
only females are encouraged to consider rape as a devastating or life-wrecking occurrence.
Wait… what?
I may not be tracking, here. Are you suggesting that as a class, men who are raped aren’t as emotionally affected as women who are raped? Or that if they are, it’s for some reason other than social encouragement? Something else?
I was suggesting that men don’t have the constant bombardment of “if you got raped, you should feel bad”. There is some of that, but not as much and somewhat balanced by other parts of male culture like being looked down on for being emotionally affected by things: “man up and move on” and such.
On second thought, I don’t know why I even wrote that, and it detracts form the rest, so I’ll remove it.
Hang on a minute. This a prime hypothesis testing space! If you really think that anti-rape messaging makes post-rape experience worse, it surely follows that it must be worse for women than for men, this messaging being mostly aimed at women. So you can quite conveniently check your theory by comparing the incidence of ptsd, depression, etc in male and female rape survivors.
No need to keep this as a controversial suspicion or instinct, you’d be armed with real knowledge! Knowledge you can report back to us, and anyone else you may have discussed this issue with. Indeed I think you could cultivate a useful reputation for open mindedness and rationality if you went back to any place you’d seen this attitude expressed before, and shared your findings -positive or negative- with them.
Hang on a minute. This a prime hypothesis testing space! If you really think that anti-rape messaging makes post-rape experience worse, it surely follows that it must be worse for women than for men, this messaging being mostly aimed at women. So you can quite conveniently check your theory by comparing the incidence of ptsd, depression, etc in male and female rape survivors.
Not necessarily. If male rape is not acknowledged at all, it can be much harder to talk about it and heal.
Well, right, I understood that much. But you seemed to be arguing that such bombardment is causal to women feeling bad about being raped… that is, if it weren’t for that bombardment, they wouldn’t feel bad. So it seems to follow that you would expect men not to feel bad about being raped, since they don’t receive that bombardment.
That’s what confused me… your whole argument seems to hang together only if I assume that men in fact don’t feel bad when they’ve been raped (which sure isn’t my experience, not that I’m any sort of expert) so I was trying to confirm whether you were in fact assuming that.
such bombardment is causal to women feeling bad about being raped
Only partially. Obviously bad shit makes you feel bad, whether or not you have memes about it, but the hypothesis is that bad shit plus being encouraged to feel bad about it makes it worse.
So it seems to follow that you would expect men not to feel bad about being raped, since they don’t receive that bombardment.
men don’t recieve as much “you should feel bad and let it define your life” but as another user pointed out, it is also not socially acceptable to have been raped, so there is no chance to talk about it and heal.
your whole argument seems to hang together only if I assume that men in fact don’t feel bad when they’ve been raped (which sure isn’t my experience, not that I’m any sort of expert) so I was trying to confirm whether you were in fact assuming that.
Well I didn’t intend that particular assumption, or at least I don’t anymore. A better comparison to investigate would be how people react to being beaten or robbed.
Lower than it was when I posted it, but it seems plausible enough to be worth discussing.
I would now dispute the use of ‘most’.
what evidence
observations of cultural memes, seeing how people talk about it with victims, seeing how role models talk about it, and observations of people dealing with similar but unrelated pressures.
All of this is very easily screened off by closer evidence, I would like to see some more solid studies or more stories at least.
And not everyone is attracted to everyone else, but I see no reason not to be close with your family in this way.
I still don’t get it, and am genuinely trying to figure out what the inferential gap is. It sort of sounds like you’re saying sex produces the warm fuzzies of closer social bonding regardless of whether the participants are attracted to each other.
If that is what you are saying, then that sounds like the typical mind fallacy at work. I, for one, would not get warm fuzzies from sex with someone unattractive whether they are related to me or not.
If that’s not what you are saying, please clarify.
It sort of sounds like you’re saying sex produces the warm fuzzies of closer social bonding regardless of whether the participants are attracted to each other.
Nope. I just mean mean it’s totally OK to be attracted and so on. It’s less radical than you seem to think.
My original response didn’t disagree with that. I wasn’t objecting to the “incest is fine” part. I was specifically challenging ’...and is probably a good experience to have” as being an overgeneralization that is untrue for many, and probably, most people.
How is it different than saying “Sex is fine, and is probably a good experience to have” in response to puritanical notions about celibacy? Nowhere does it say it should be mandatory or that you absolutely have to have sex with anyone who asks.
“Sex (insert qualifiers of your choosing) is immoral” is a normative claim. ”Many people are not attracted to family members, and sex with an unattractive partner does not provide warm fuzzies” is an empirical claim.
“Sex is probably a good experience to have” is challenging the validity of the moral claim. ”Sex with people you aren’t attracted to is probably a good experience to have”… do I really need to provide further refutation once it’s stated like that?
Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.
“Life After Rape” is a good (aside from “there is no sex in rape” being false in an important sense) elaboration on (one construal of) this.
An analogous idea, that other people on this thread have come close to but not exactly said, is ‘spreading the meme of democracy to non-democratic societies causes needless suffering by making people feel oppressed, when their extrapolated volition if you hadn’t done so wouldn’t have come to care in the same way.’
The rape she describes sounds uncannily like a sleep paralysis attack—compare it with accounts of rape by demons and aliens. By which I don’t mean to belittle the experience—SP can be traumatic and horrible. I had some bad attacks as a teenager, the worst one complete with auditory hallucinations.
(It goes without saying that it is not impossible that her stealthy and competent rapist was physically real.)
Given functional birth control and non-fucked family structure, incest is fine and natural and probably a good experience to have.
Birth-control isn’t natural, so how can incest using it be?
I’d expect that it would generally be awkward, but it’s fine beyond that.
Pedophilia is a legitimate sexual orientation, even if it expressing it IRL is bad.
I agree with the first half whole-heartedly. I’m not convinced that expressing it in real life is bad.
Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.
I never thought of that, but it doesn’t seem that unlikely. The obvious way to check would be to find out how rape victims deal with it in cultures with different views on how they would deal with it.
Birth-control isn’t natural, so how can incest using it be?
Maybe natural isn’t the right word. I mean it’s not some immoral abomination, it’s probably the same moral status as masturbation.
I’d expect that it would generally be awkward, but it’s fine beyond that.
I can imagine an alternative moral history where it is normal, and not awkward at all. It doesn’t seem like a moral disaster, so I can only conclude that it must be OK.
I’m not convinced that expressing it in real life is bad.
I’m not entirely either, but I forgot to dispute the whole “consent” thing, which would have to go away to make it ok IRL.
I never thought of that, but it doesn’t seem that unlikely. The obvious way to check would be to find out how rape victims deal with it in cultures with different views on how they would deal with it
My reasoning here is that when people get brutally beaten or otherwise humiliated where there’s social pressure to “man up and get over it”, they don’t turn into a bawwfest basket case the way some rape victims do, where there is social pressure to be a bawwfest basket case. I have not personally been raped, and have seen no studies, so there isn’t much evidence, but this seems most plausible.
EDIT: Also, the fact that it’s taboo to say this is evidence that it’s true.
I have not personally been raped, and have seen no studies, so there isn’t much evidence, but this seems most plausible.
Have you personally met many people who were raped? Come to that, have you met many people who were brutally beaten?
I haven’t met many, but I’ve known emotionally traumatized people in both categories, and I’ve known people in both categories who seemed to shrug it off.
Incidentally, if I’ve mischaracterized what you meant by “bawwfest” by reframing it as emotional trauma, let me know. I don’t really know what you mean by the term, over and above the intention to be dismissive of its referent.
Maybe natural isn’t the right word. I mean it’s not some immoral abomination
I’d say that natural things are vastly more likely to be immoral abominations on the basis that artificial things are created by people who have a moral compass and try to avoid immoral abominations, whereas natural things are created by Azathoth with the single goal of genetic fitness no matter how unspeakably cruel it is.
I’m not entirely either, but I forgot to dispute the whole “consent” thing
I find it odd that consent wouldn’t be assumed. You never hear people say that extramarital sex is bad on the assumption that they’re talking about rape.
I’d say that natural things are vastly more likely to be immoral abominations on the basis that artificial things are created by people who have a moral compass and try to avoid immoral abominations, whereas natural things are created by Azathoth with the single goal of genetic fitness no matter how unspeakably cruel it is.
Yes that’s why natural isn’t the right word. What I meant by natural was “morally natural”, but it was the wrong word to use.
I find it odd that consent wouldn’t be assumed. You never hear people say that extramarital sex is bad on the assumption that they’re talking about rape.
I was assuming consent in the sense that all parties are OK with it, but most people think sexual consent is impossible for children, so in that sense, consent can’t be assumed.
I really should change it, tho. That version of consent is too full of holes and violations.
I have not personally been raped, and have seen no studies, so there isn’t much evidence, but this seems most plausible.
EDIT: Also, the fact that it’s taboo to say this is evidence that it’s true.
Many things sound plausible to us when we construct narratives, but they are not necessarily true. And the fact of something being ‘taboo’ to say is weak evidence at best for its truth value. You seem to be giving a whole lot of credence to your alternate theory without doing much investigation or looking up studies.
The only way I can think of for it to be bad is for it to cause problems after the child has matured. I find this very unlikely. An experience can’t become traumatic after-the-fact. At worst they’d feel a little squicky thinking about it later on.
I’m not entirely certain, but I’ve never had a very good reason to try and find out. Still, I would like it if someone could send a link to something where they actually asked people who had sex as kids how it affects them now.
Also, I would expect that, if anything, raping a kid wouldn’t be as bad as raping an adult. If they’re not sexually mature, I’d expect them to not be built to dislike it as much. Again, I would like to see something where they ask victims and find out if this is the case.
Edit: Nvm, there’s a reason we generally think these threads are a bad idea.
Short answer: if a child thinks they’re consenting, they’re likely enough to be wrong (with great enough consequences) that the expected value is negative. Much more importantly: if an adult thinks a child is consenting, the adult is likely to be wrong (they’ll have a hard time between telling the difference between actual consent and consent that is feigned out of fear).
Is consent hypothetically possible? Yes. But you’re running on corrupted hardware and the expected value will usually be negative.
Do you mean changing their mind later? In that case, like I said, I find it hard to believe that they can be traumatized after-the-fact. It’s not impossible, but I find it very unlikely.
(they’ll have a hard time between telling the difference between actual consent and consent that is feigned out of fear).
If the other party can scare them into doing that, they can just scare them into saying they haven’t had sex in the first place.
At some point, it will become useful to stop using the word “consent” in this discussion, as I don’t think the word has the same referent every time it gets used. In particular, I don’t think there’s general agreement on how much knowledge is implied when we say a system consents to an action, and the different assumptions about that lead to different conclusions.
It isn’t equivalent. Grooming isn’t simply being nice and complimenting and trying to get close. It’s also about isolating the target and eliminating their ability to perceive their escape options.
Then can (and are way too likely) to fail at being informed when consenting.
If they’re not informed, that would be rape by deception. I would say that that should be illegal at any age, although I would imagine it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as being forced.
What exactly do they need to be informed about? They can get diseases from it, I guess. I’m pretty sure putting someone in danger like that without warning them would be illegal without anything specific about pedophilia.
Also you’re probably talking about hebephilia.
That too. There should be a term for pedophelia and hebephilia. Especially considering that pedophelia is commonly used to mean those two and ephebophilia.
Out of curiosity, what do you mean here by “self identity”? I originally parsed it as “membership in identity groups” per Keep Your Identity Small, but on rereading I notice that it might also make sense as something along the lines of “having ego boundaries”.
I mean both, incidentally. Identity in the Paul Graham sense is the mindkiller.
In the ego sense, I mean that we should seek to cast off identification with our work, so that work becomes about the work not about signaling or growing your reputation. Also, this means not being constrained to try to defend your past actions. This is quite hard, but is made somewhat easier on the internet, especially in paces where anonymous posting is allowed. Being unattached like this also enables you to try new creative things with much lower social cost of failure. This is one of the big theories for why 4chan is so successful as a cultural center when compared with, say, facebook.
EDIT: I also hold that identity is probably a problem in the philosophical sense where you might be considering joining consciousness with someone (or many someones) else.
(The obviousness-in-retrospect of this argument, stated so straightforwardly, combined with the fact that I almost never hear it stated so straightforwardly and never thought of it myself, makes me update towards culture being able to non-obviously derange debates like this to a really high degree. Far mode isn’t naturally about truth.)
… though it’s worth keeping in mind that “the details of how gender works are made up” is still true to a pretty large extent (≥ the extent to which cross-cultural variation in gender exists); it’s just that, like all culture, they’re made up in a way generated/constrained by primate behavior, which has a lot of sex-dependence.
Yes, that’s obviously true. What social-contested behaviors of men and women can be resolved only by reference to that fact?
The feminist argument need not reject that most behaviors of men and women are different—that’s plainly true. (Men pee standing up, women ovulate). The issue is what proportion of behaviors important in modern society are sexually determined. If the answer is anything but all of them, then the argument that gender != sex is well founded.
On the other hand, are they reliably reproduced across wide genetic distances? Some species differentiate relatively little in just a few specific scenarios like behaviors related to reproduction (wolverines; for a more marked example, many fireflies). Some differ pretty much not at all (many sharks). Some are strongly differentiated from our own expressions of that difference (seahorses). Some have both high behavioral dimorphism and great deal of divergence from our own culturally-typical notions about that (spotted hyenas).
Basically, it’s not a very informative statement unto itself, when so many ideas about the specifics of ways in which gender and sex differ are coded to our own cultural ideas of how that works in humans.
Totally agreed, it just informs our prior about the existence of some sort of significant gender difference in humans.
Some species differentiate relatively little in just a few specific scenarios like behaviors related to reproduction (wolverines; for a more marked example, many fireflies).
Can you say more? (didn’t find anything with extremely casual searching)
In the case of wolverines, their lifestyles and behavioral regimens are not greatly-divergent except insofar as females dig nesting burrows and other behaviors directly relevant to giving birth. Otherwise, you’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart; low sexual dimorphism, low behavioral dimorphism by sex; the only really obvious thing is that wolverines try to avoid overlapping their ranges with members of the same sex.
Fireflies, similarly, don’t seem to be very distinct by sex until it’s time for a mating display; then they have ways of signalling it, but their lifestyles and behavioral cues, let alone anatomy, don’t differ much.
Basically, how much of a difference sex and gender make seems to be variable. Are there differences in size? Decoration? Behavior? Lifestyle? Energy expenditure on various aspects of those things? You can’t predict the answers to those questions from the commonly-held idea of “males have cheap, plentiful gametes; females have few, expensive gametes” (which doesn’t even reliably hold for all species, in addition to neglecting other salient factors like birthing method, social structure and other things that shape this without being directly determined by how they accomplish sex).
Incidentally, humans in our ancestral state (including modern subsistence foragers) tend to have very low body fat, which is the single biggest contributor to secondary-sexual dimorphism being so prominent in much of humanity today (nutrition and fat stores are probably why menarche occurs so early these days for many, and one factor contributing to comparatively high fertility). The popular perceptions of human sexual dimorphism may be distorted by this relatively recent context shift.
It seems obvious on the face of it to me, and, I suspect it did to you, before you let someone try to get clever about it.
What it does leave out, though, and where some—if not cleverness, mental flexibility—is required, is that those are just boxes, and not all individuals fall neatly into the boxes. That, too, is not simply memetic.
Yes. Especially considering how often paedophilia is used as an excuse by various governments and organizations to commit their own arguably much worse atrocities.
Race, class and subculture are the most useful pieces of information when judging a person.
If you mean “the most useful pieces of information you could possibly have” that sounds obviously wrong (I mean, if I had to choose whether to hire someone for some job, and I could either know their race, class and subculture or how good they would be at that job, why shouldn’t I choose the latter?), and if you mean “the most useful pieces of information when judging a person you know nothing else about” that’s true but tautological, so what do you actually mean? I guess something like ‘among some set X of possible pieces of information you could know about someone, race, class and subculture are the most useful’, but it’s not clear at all to me what set X would be.
FWIW, I understood this to mean that they are the highest ROI pieces of information… that is, their value compared to the effort to obtain them is high, relative to other information (like how good someone would be at this job). I think that’s false, also, but it seems coherent enough.
Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.
One possibility to be considered while evaluating where the emotional impact of rape comes from is that women’s emotional responses evolved in an environment where emergency birth control was not an available option. That would lead to traumatic responses even in first world countries where women are not ostracized for being ‘damaged goods’ on account of being raped.
One argument for castrating rapists is that rape is (among other things) a reproductive strategy, and there may be a genetic predilection to pursue it. As such, eliminating rapists from the gene pool will reduce the efficacy of that reproductive strategy, and thus over generations eliminate the genetic predilection and therefore reduce rape — even if it doesn’t work at all as a deterrent.
Of course, this also forms an argument for mandatory abortion in case of rape. Which is not somewhere I’d like to go. In both cases (castration and mandatory abortion) we have violation of bodily integrity, which has historically been a bit of a Schelling point for the legitimate reach of law, since the abolition of juridical torture.
Aside from any other issues, I doubt this would be very effective due to the wide grey area involving things like date rape or even just pressuring someone for sex.
Um… there are other arguments against the castration strategy. What if this is not a strictly heritable trait? What if the trait is implemented as something of an if… then.. scenario. (Very simplistic case: If I am unable to attract mates through the acceptable means for X years despite trying as well as I know how to, and I find a person in situation Y, then I implement this particular reproductive strategy)? It’s certainly very complex, and castration seems quite drastic. I have no way of doing the cost/benefit analysis, but I have a strong negative reaction against castration as a preventive mechanism, or even as punishment. It’s too much like killing one person and making another one in his place.
Perhaps there is some degree of potential harm to women at which castration of a potential rapist becomes a good idea. I don’t know. But seeing as how we’re in no situation to judge the answers to the relevant questions right now, I’m glad this is not something our judicial system currently implements.
If there is genetic variability in tendency to commit rape, then I desire to believe that there is genetic variability in tendency to commit rape. If there is not genetic variability in tendency to commit rape, then I desire not to believe that there is genetic variability in tendency to commit rape. Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
If there is genetic variability in tendency to commit rape, then insofar as rape is an effective reproductive strategy (that is, that rape leads to impregnation and the bearing of children), the genetic tendency to commit rape will be propagated in future generations; and insofar as rape is an ineffective reproductive strategy (that is, rape leads to castration and the bearing of no children), the genetic tendency to commit rape will not be propagated in future generations.
If there is genetic variability in tendency to commit rape, do you want your great-great-grandchildren to live in a world where the genetic tendency to commit rape has been propagated, or one in which it has not been propagated?
(My argument here does not hinge on castration as a mechanism of preventing future rapes. It hinges on eliminating rapist genes from the gene pool.)
If there is genetic variability in tendency to commit rape, do you want your great-great-grandchildren to live in a world where the genetic tendency to commit rape has been propagated, or one in which it has not been propagated?
The latter. Nor do I have any problems with admitting a possible genetic variability in said tendencies.
However, if rape is a reasonably effective reproductive strategy, any agent who cares about reproductive success can rationally come understand that it is so, and implement that strategy. In this scenario, the genes that cause the propagation of the tendency are the ones involved in coming to correct beliefs about the world, forward planning and execution of such plans.
Do I want those genes eliminated? No.
Hence the cost/benefit analysis for any mechanism proposed for eliminating a behavioural pattern from the gene pool. Yes, it is a good thing to eliminate rapist genes from the gene pool. But what costs are we willing to bear to achieve that good?
Of course, when performing such a cost/benefit analysis, it’s important to take into account the alternative options.
E.g., if we alter our environment such that rape is a less effective reproductive strategy than non-rape, then the genes involved in coming to correct beliefs about the world and acting on the basis of those beliefs would no longer correlate with rape, but the genes involved in committing rape whether it’s an effective reproductive strategy or not would continue to do so.
Here’s some nice controversial things for you:
Given functional birth control and non-fucked family structure, incest is fine and natural and probably a good experience to have.
Pedophilia is a legitimate sexual orientation, even if it expressing it IRL is bad (which it is not). Child porn should not be suppressed (tho some of it is documentation of crime and should be investigated).
Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.
Child sexual consent hits the same issues as child acting or any other thing that parents can allow, and should not be treated differently from those issues.
Self identity is a problem.
EDIT: most of the deaths in the holocaust were caused by the allies bombing railroads that supplied food to the camps.
Less controversial in LW, but still bad to say outside:
Race, class and subculture are the most useful pieces of information when judging a person.
I run out of ideas.
EDIT: in case it’s not clear, I take all these ideas seriously. I would actually appreciate a discussion on these topics with LW.
EDIT: this was productive! I’ve seriously updated one way or the other on many of these ideas. Thanks for pointing out truths and holes everyone! :)
I think It would be technically illegal for me to participate or update away from my default position in such a hypothetical debate.
I agree that this doesn’t say good things about where you live.
As long as you hold onto the basic idea that extermination was the goal, and they were accidentally assisted by the destruction of infrastructure (which also was instrumental in preventing the rest of them from being killed), is that really downplaying the atrocities?
That said, I don’t know if that claim is really true.
Assuming by highest likelihood that you’re German, my reading of the relevant section of the criminal code suggest that it’s OK for you to debate in Internet fora:
Unless it can be argued that you’d be “disturbing the public peace”. But as I understand it, in Germany (and France) it’s legal to visit Stormfront, you just cannot promote it.
disturbing the peace is a catchall for “the authorities decided they don’t like what you’re doing” FYI. Long legal tradition and all that.
I don’t see a problem, unless he claims they wouldn’t have killed them eventually if they had won. The claim is “allies helped the nazis do this faster” not “allies did this and nazis did not”, but I don’t know anything about how law works so I’m probably wrong.
And the shortage of food in Germany, and everything else that provided a disincentive to feed the people that the party line proclaimed to be innnately hostile and seditious.
When you’re literally last on the priority list (well, maybe above Soviet POVs in 1941), every economic difficulty will “cause” you to starve while you could’ve easily endured it in a society that had a more balanced if utterly cynical opinion of you.
(I find the other things you mentioned to be broadly correct, but not without caveats; moreover, if one goes about it naively without minding such caveats, one would likely do much greater harm to most involved than the current self-deception does.)
The worst crimes of the holocaust were a conspiracy within the Nazi government. The Nuremburg trials had testimony from an investigator who was attempting to prove his supicions of these practices, and ultimately prosecute the offenders who were killing the Jews. It is likely that only a few hundred Germans were directly involved.
The Nazi government was built upon projecting genetic kinship onto the state itself, and while it didn’t want any Jews in Germany, they weren’t actively seeking the elimination of the Jewish race. In fact, the ‘final solution’ was not the first solution—they attempted deportation several times.
I’ve come to be of the opinion that the Nazi goverment—while certainly not being the sort of state I’d advocate—really weren’t all that bad. Given the feminist/pro-immigration state that’s growing in Canada, I might actually prefer it.
Sorry, but no deal. Trying to withhold value judgment when talking about highly unpopular social systems is one thing. Such a reversal of the approved opinion after a cursory look, however, is downright stupid, and beneath you. I’ve had sex with a guy several times; do you really think that me being executed for it if someone knew and disliked me enough to report me to officials IS LESS AWFUL than the evils of feminism and immigration? I bet not. Would you like Canada to invade the U.S. and install an incredibly brutal occupation regime by claiming it’s a necessary pre-emptive strike to save the world from American tyranny (even if said tyranny was a real danger)? I bet not.
Next time please evaluate MORE facts from the historical period in question before drawing tenous comparisons and making judgments like these.
(Oh, and is that still a conspiracy when it has the deliberate backing of the lawful head of state, AND that head of state is legally an absolute dictator who left no constitutional provision in place on which he could be judged for those atrocities? I’m pretty shit at law, but, logically, if the Fuhrer wouldn’t mind the atrocities, and the Nazi legal thought made the Fuhrer’s authority utterly untouchable—see e.g. Carl Schmidt’s opinion on sovereignity—then the investigator only had international law to fall back on, which the Nazi system would deny to be a source of authority in this case.)
Literally every sentence you wrote is wrong.
This is not true. The Holocaust was ordered by the popular leader of the German government; they were executed by a very large number of people, probably >90% of whom actively cooperated and almost none of whom tried to stop the Holocaust. (see e.g. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men) German society as a whole knew that their government was attempting genocide; see e.g. What We Knew for supporting details, or Wikipedia for a summary.
(It is at least not totally impossible that the gas chambers were unknown to the broader German public. But the idea that gas chambers are representative of the Holocaust is a historical myth; most victims of the Holocaust were not killed by gas.)
This is wrong. (This is kinda a refrain; your Nazi apologia is lacking in sources or historical accuracy.) I assume you’re referring to Georg Konrad Morgen; if so, he did prosecute the people killing the Jews, but not for the genocide; he said, correctly, that the Final Solution was ‘technically legal’. His prosecutions instead focused on the ordinary crimes (e.g. corruption).
Again, this is just flat out wrong, in a way that shows that you have no idea what you’re talking about. Auschwitz alone had ~7,000 camp guards during the war; there were around 55,000 concentration camp guards total. Again, I suggest that you read Ordinary Men, about the ~500 men of Reserve Police Battalion, who killed an estimated ~38,000 Jews. (There were about 17,500+ members of the Reserve Police Battalions, plus another 3,000+ members of the Einsatzgruppen.) There also numerous other SS/Ghestapo/Wehrmacht personnel directly involved beyond the three specific groups I’ve named.
(Warning: Judging moral claims with System-1 is unreliable.) Thinking that as a kid I could have been allowed to have sex, have had people annoying me with undesired propositions (even after they knew my age), and have had people trying to manipulate me into sex, makes me at most kind of uneasy. Thinking that my parents could have had any kind of say over it gave me a panic attack.
Wow, when I read “should not be treated differently from those issues”, I assumed the intention was likely to be “child acting, indoctrination, etc., should be considered abuse and not tolerated by society”, a position I would tentatively support (tentatively due to lack of expertise).
Incidentally, I found many of the other claims to be at least plausible and discussion-worthy, if not probably true (and certainly not things that people should be afraid to say).
Is that partially from cultural assumptions about children having sex?
What reaction to you get to child acting, religious indoctrination, and such?
Nah, don’t think so. Identifiable sources:
How I remember feeling about sex as a kid (“A thing that some strange adults do for some reason, like partying all night long or cheering for football players. Irrelevant until further notice. What’s for dinner?”)
How I remember feeling about people who propositioned me online because I had a female username and they didn’t know my age (mildly annoyed at the waste of time, mildly icked at those whose propositions were particularly direct, mildly exasperated at the number of people who looked for cybersex in unrelated chatrooms)
How I remember feeling and now feel about attempts to manipulate me into saying sexual things (confused and slightly icked by those I can’t detect, amused and condescending and mildly exasperated by those I can)
How I feel about my parents controlling what I do (bad)
Child acting:
“You could have been a child actor”: Yeah, sure. I didn’t want to, but the idea is kinda neat. Actors are cool.
“You could have been pressured by directors into acting when you were a kid”: Not cool! Pressure is bad! Pressuring people into jobs is evil and bad and greedy! I would have felt very bad, so I’m glad that didn’t happen.
“You could have wanted to be a child actor, and your parents could have prevented you”: It’s bad and sad to clip the wings off angels. It looks like a mistake decent but overprotective people would make, not evil people who wanted me to suffer, though.
“Your parents could have forced you to act as a child”: What horrible evil people. Why are kids not protected against that?
Religious indoctrination: I don’t seem to have a strong emotional reaction. Child preachers and the like are sad. Parents who are forbidden to give religious education to their children are also sad.
I don’t necessarily endorse any of these reactions.
The “incest isn’t wrong” position isn’t novel. The “everyone would be better off if they did” is novel, and I confess I don’t understand it at all. Not everyone is attracted to close family members.
I agree with the first half, but would have phrased the second half as “the ban on computer-generated child pornography should be reversed and indeed subsidized to crowd out pornography using real children”.
Really? What about for people who don’t have access to emergency birth control? Or who were unlucky enough to be raped by someone with an STD? Or who live in a society that murders women who get raped as adulterers? Or just in a society that tends to divide women into “good girls” and “sluts”? (Maybe you meant society’s self-fulfilling prophecy in the latter two examples, but it’s not the woman’s self-fulfilling prophecy.)
*Yes, I know men get raped too. That’s pretty clearly not the context when people bring this argument up, however.
Judging them for what? Doesn’t work for suitability as an underwear model, for example.
And not everyone is attracted to everyone else, but I see no reason not to be close with your family in this way.
Why so conservative? How is child porn different from child acting? Assuming consent and all that.
Yes, in third world countries, butthurt is not the primary damage caused by rape. I mean in cases without lasting physical effects. Maybe I should have been more clear?
pretty much anything besides being an underwear model. Likelyhood to start a fight. Expected value as an employee in most jobs. Intellectual capacity.
Come to think of it, the correlates of race are mostly covered by class and subculture.
For some, the prevalent notion of “rape is something that doesn’t happen to men” seems to make the feelings of shame after being raped even worse. Female rape is commonly considered horrific and something where the victim needs support; male rape isn’t always even acknowledged as something that exists.
See e.g. The Rape of Men.
(Things are probably somewhat better in the Western world, but it’s the Western organizations that are helping perpetuate the “men aren’t raped” idea, so not necessarily that much better.)
Wait… what?
I may not be tracking, here. Are you suggesting that as a class, men who are raped aren’t as emotionally affected as women who are raped? Or that if they are, it’s for some reason other than social encouragement? Something else?
I was suggesting that men don’t have the constant bombardment of “if you got raped, you should feel bad”. There is some of that, but not as much and somewhat balanced by other parts of male culture like being looked down on for being emotionally affected by things: “man up and move on” and such.
On second thought, I don’t know why I even wrote that, and it detracts form the rest, so I’ll remove it.
Hang on a minute. This a prime hypothesis testing space! If you really think that anti-rape messaging makes post-rape experience worse, it surely follows that it must be worse for women than for men, this messaging being mostly aimed at women. So you can quite conveniently check your theory by comparing the incidence of ptsd, depression, etc in male and female rape survivors.
No need to keep this as a controversial suspicion or instinct, you’d be armed with real knowledge! Knowledge you can report back to us, and anyone else you may have discussed this issue with. Indeed I think you could cultivate a useful reputation for open mindedness and rationality if you went back to any place you’d seen this attitude expressed before, and shared your findings -positive or negative- with them.
There are a lot of confounding factors hereabouts.
Yea, and doing a proper double blind test would pretty much be the least likely thing ever to pass any ethics committee.
Not necessarily. If male rape is not acknowledged at all, it can be much harder to talk about it and heal.
Well, yes, that”s the point. To figure out whether this comes out positive or negative.
Well, right, I understood that much. But you seemed to be arguing that such bombardment is causal to women feeling bad about being raped… that is, if it weren’t for that bombardment, they wouldn’t feel bad. So it seems to follow that you would expect men not to feel bad about being raped, since they don’t receive that bombardment.
That’s what confused me… your whole argument seems to hang together only if I assume that men in fact don’t feel bad when they’ve been raped (which sure isn’t my experience, not that I’m any sort of expert) so I was trying to confirm whether you were in fact assuming that.
Only partially. Obviously bad shit makes you feel bad, whether or not you have memes about it, but the hypothesis is that bad shit plus being encouraged to feel bad about it makes it worse.
men don’t recieve as much “you should feel bad and let it define your life” but as another user pointed out, it is also not socially acceptable to have been raped, so there is no chance to talk about it and heal.
Well I didn’t intend that particular assumption, or at least I don’t anymore. A better comparison to investigate would be how people react to being beaten or robbed.
Expressing a controversial opinion doesn’t condone being immature or disrespectful.
Beyond that, I have two questions for you:
1) How much confidence do you place in your statement on the impact of female rape in first-world countries?
2) If the answer to (1) is greater than “very little”, on what sort of direct or indirect knowledge of the phenomenon do you base this confidence?
U mad?
More seriously, you’re right, I could have used a better word.
Which statement?
Lower than it was when I posted it, but it seems plausible enough to be worth discussing.
I would now dispute the use of ‘most’.
observations of cultural memes, seeing how people talk about it with victims, seeing how role models talk about it, and observations of people dealing with similar but unrelated pressures.
All of this is very easily screened off by closer evidence, I would like to see some more solid studies or more stories at least.
I still don’t get it, and am genuinely trying to figure out what the inferential gap is. It sort of sounds like you’re saying sex produces the warm fuzzies of closer social bonding regardless of whether the participants are attracted to each other.
If that is what you are saying, then that sounds like the typical mind fallacy at work. I, for one, would not get warm fuzzies from sex with someone unattractive whether they are related to me or not.
If that’s not what you are saying, please clarify.
Nope. I just mean mean it’s totally OK to be attracted and so on. It’s less radical than you seem to think.
My original response didn’t disagree with that. I wasn’t objecting to the “incest is fine” part. I was specifically challenging ’...and is probably a good experience to have” as being an overgeneralization that is untrue for many, and probably, most people.
How is it different than saying “Sex is fine, and is probably a good experience to have” in response to puritanical notions about celibacy? Nowhere does it say it should be mandatory or that you absolutely have to have sex with anyone who asks.
“Sex (insert qualifiers of your choosing) is immoral” is a normative claim.
”Many people are not attracted to family members, and sex with an unattractive partner does not provide warm fuzzies” is an empirical claim.
“Sex is probably a good experience to have” is challenging the validity of the moral claim.
”Sex with people you aren’t attracted to is probably a good experience to have”… do I really need to provide further refutation once it’s stated like that?
No, that more the domain of prisons.
“Life After Rape” is a good (aside from “there is no sex in rape” being false in an important sense) elaboration on (one construal of) this.
An analogous idea, that other people on this thread have come close to but not exactly said, is ‘spreading the meme of democracy to non-democratic societies causes needless suffering by making people feel oppressed, when their extrapolated volition if you hadn’t done so wouldn’t have come to care in the same way.’
The rape she describes sounds uncannily like a sleep paralysis attack—compare it with accounts of rape by demons and aliens. By which I don’t mean to belittle the experience—SP can be traumatic and horrible. I had some bad attacks as a teenager, the worst one complete with auditory hallucinations.
(It goes without saying that it is not impossible that her stealthy and competent rapist was physically real.)
Birth-control isn’t natural, so how can incest using it be?
I’d expect that it would generally be awkward, but it’s fine beyond that.
I agree with the first half whole-heartedly. I’m not convinced that expressing it in real life is bad.
I never thought of that, but it doesn’t seem that unlikely. The obvious way to check would be to find out how rape victims deal with it in cultures with different views on how they would deal with it.
Maybe natural isn’t the right word. I mean it’s not some immoral abomination, it’s probably the same moral status as masturbation.
I can imagine an alternative moral history where it is normal, and not awkward at all. It doesn’t seem like a moral disaster, so I can only conclude that it must be OK.
I’m not entirely either, but I forgot to dispute the whole “consent” thing, which would have to go away to make it ok IRL.
My reasoning here is that when people get brutally beaten or otherwise humiliated where there’s social pressure to “man up and get over it”, they don’t turn into a bawwfest basket case the way some rape victims do, where there is social pressure to be a bawwfest basket case. I have not personally been raped, and have seen no studies, so there isn’t much evidence, but this seems most plausible.
EDIT: Also, the fact that it’s taboo to say this is evidence that it’s true.
Have you personally met many people who were raped?
Come to that, have you met many people who were brutally beaten?
I haven’t met many, but I’ve known emotionally traumatized people in both categories, and I’ve known people in both categories who seemed to shrug it off.
Incidentally, if I’ve mischaracterized what you meant by “bawwfest” by reframing it as emotional trauma, let me know. I don’t really know what you mean by the term, over and above the intention to be dismissive of its referent.
I’d say that natural things are vastly more likely to be immoral abominations on the basis that artificial things are created by people who have a moral compass and try to avoid immoral abominations, whereas natural things are created by Azathoth with the single goal of genetic fitness no matter how unspeakably cruel it is.
I find it odd that consent wouldn’t be assumed. You never hear people say that extramarital sex is bad on the assumption that they’re talking about rape.
Yes that’s why natural isn’t the right word. What I meant by natural was “morally natural”, but it was the wrong word to use.
I was assuming consent in the sense that all parties are OK with it, but most people think sexual consent is impossible for children, so in that sense, consent can’t be assumed.
I really should change it, tho. That version of consent is too full of holes and violations.
Many things sound plausible to us when we construct narratives, but they are not necessarily true. And the fact of something being ‘taboo’ to say is weak evidence at best for its truth value. You seem to be giving a whole lot of credence to your alternate theory without doing much investigation or looking up studies.
Why?
The only way I can think of for it to be bad is for it to cause problems after the child has matured. I find this very unlikely. An experience can’t become traumatic after-the-fact. At worst they’d feel a little squicky thinking about it later on.
I’m not entirely certain, but I’ve never had a very good reason to try and find out. Still, I would like it if someone could send a link to something where they actually asked people who had sex as kids how it affects them now.
Also, I would expect that, if anything, raping a kid wouldn’t be as bad as raping an adult. If they’re not sexually mature, I’d expect them to not be built to dislike it as much. Again, I would like to see something where they ask victims and find out if this is the case.
You underestimate the effects of an entire cultural narrative repeatedly telling them that it’s something to be traumatized by.
So the suffering of an immature person is not a problem?
What if it was a traumatic experience to begin with?
Children can get PTSD.
(I don’t think I will be able to maintain an intelligent discussion on this topic, so I am unlikely to reply again.)
I meant consensual sex. Do I really need to specify?
Edit: Nvm, there’s a reason we generally think these threads are a bad idea.
Short answer: if a child thinks they’re consenting, they’re likely enough to be wrong (with great enough consequences) that the expected value is negative. Much more importantly: if an adult thinks a child is consenting, the adult is likely to be wrong (they’ll have a hard time between telling the difference between actual consent and consent that is feigned out of fear).
Is consent hypothetically possible? Yes. But you’re running on corrupted hardware and the expected value will usually be negative.
How can they be wrong about consenting?
Do you mean changing their mind later? In that case, like I said, I find it hard to believe that they can be traumatized after-the-fact. It’s not impossible, but I find it very unlikely.
If the other party can scare them into doing that, they can just scare them into saying they haven’t had sex in the first place.
Manipulation. Children are prone to manipulation by figures they trust. So they have belief-in-consent, not actual consent.
From the abstract of this paper:
At some point, it will become useful to stop using the word “consent” in this discussion, as I don’t think the word has the same referent every time it gets used. In particular, I don’t think there’s general agreement on how much knowledge is implied when we say a system consents to an action, and the different assumptions about that lead to different conclusions.
It isn’t equivalent. Grooming isn’t simply being nice and complimenting and trying to get close. It’s also about isolating the target and eliminating their ability to perceive their escape options.
That’s not okay, to put it mildly.
.
Variants of “I didn’t really say ‘no’, so I guess I kinda consented”.
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If they’re not informed, that would be rape by deception. I would say that that should be illegal at any age, although I would imagine it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as being forced.
What exactly do they need to be informed about? They can get diseases from it, I guess. I’m pretty sure putting someone in danger like that without warning them would be illegal without anything specific about pedophilia.
That too. There should be a term for pedophelia and hebephilia. Especially considering that pedophelia is commonly used to mean those two and ephebophilia.
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Inform them of what? How bad can the consequences of them not being informed of it possibly be?
Out of curiosity, what do you mean here by “self identity”? I originally parsed it as “membership in identity groups” per Keep Your Identity Small, but on rereading I notice that it might also make sense as something along the lines of “having ego boundaries”.
I mean both, incidentally. Identity in the Paul Graham sense is the mindkiller.
In the ego sense, I mean that we should seek to cast off identification with our work, so that work becomes about the work not about signaling or growing your reputation. Also, this means not being constrained to try to defend your past actions. This is quite hard, but is made somewhat easier on the internet, especially in paces where anonymous posting is allowed. Being unattached like this also enables you to try new creative things with much lower social cost of failure. This is one of the big theories for why 4chan is so successful as a cultural center when compared with, say, facebook.
EDIT: I also hold that identity is probably a problem in the philosophical sense where you might be considering joining consciousness with someone (or many someones) else.
Please, that statement becomes more controversial if you negate it.
Yeah but they have to be true.
And that’s still quite controversial in the mainstream.
I don’t want to start a flame war, but would like to mention that I find this highly unlikely, at least for reasonable definitions of “made up”.
It doesn’t have to be a flame war.
By “made up” In the context of gender, I mean it’s a cultural norm that only has a very small basis in nature.
In the context of sexual orientation, I take the nature component to be larger, but still mostly cultural.
I’m open to new opinions on this, I’m mostly agnostic on these, but take them seriously.
“Many (and probably most) animals also have gender in the sense that individuals with penises behave in certain ways, and individuals with ovaries behave in other ways, despite not having memes.” It would be surprising if H. sapiens were very different.
(The obviousness-in-retrospect of this argument, stated so straightforwardly, combined with the fact that I almost never hear it stated so straightforwardly and never thought of it myself, makes me update towards culture being able to non-obviously derange debates like this to a really high degree. Far mode isn’t naturally about truth.)
Well that changes things.
And yes that is disturbing.
… though it’s worth keeping in mind that “the details of how gender works are made up” is still true to a pretty large extent (≥ the extent to which cross-cultural variation in gender exists); it’s just that, like all culture, they’re made up in a way generated/constrained by primate behavior, which has a lot of sex-dependence.
yes. I still think gender is a stupid idea and has large components of made-upness.
Ten times agreed.
Yes, that’s obviously true. What social-contested behaviors of men and women can be resolved only by reference to that fact?
The feminist argument need not reject that most behaviors of men and women are different—that’s plainly true. (Men pee standing up, women ovulate). The issue is what proportion of behaviors important in modern society are sexually determined. If the answer is anything but all of them, then the argument that gender != sex is well founded.
It hurts me that I’ve never heard or thought of this point before, given the obviousness-in-retrospect. What other obvious mistakes am I making?
On the other hand, are they reliably reproduced across wide genetic distances? Some species differentiate relatively little in just a few specific scenarios like behaviors related to reproduction (wolverines; for a more marked example, many fireflies). Some differ pretty much not at all (many sharks). Some are strongly differentiated from our own expressions of that difference (seahorses). Some have both high behavioral dimorphism and great deal of divergence from our own culturally-typical notions about that (spotted hyenas).
Basically, it’s not a very informative statement unto itself, when so many ideas about the specifics of ways in which gender and sex differ are coded to our own cultural ideas of how that works in humans.
Totally agreed, it just informs our prior about the existence of some sort of significant gender difference in humans.
Can you say more? (didn’t find anything with extremely casual searching)
In the case of wolverines, their lifestyles and behavioral regimens are not greatly-divergent except insofar as females dig nesting burrows and other behaviors directly relevant to giving birth. Otherwise, you’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart; low sexual dimorphism, low behavioral dimorphism by sex; the only really obvious thing is that wolverines try to avoid overlapping their ranges with members of the same sex.
Fireflies, similarly, don’t seem to be very distinct by sex until it’s time for a mating display; then they have ways of signalling it, but their lifestyles and behavioral cues, let alone anatomy, don’t differ much.
Basically, how much of a difference sex and gender make seems to be variable. Are there differences in size? Decoration? Behavior? Lifestyle? Energy expenditure on various aspects of those things? You can’t predict the answers to those questions from the commonly-held idea of “males have cheap, plentiful gametes; females have few, expensive gametes” (which doesn’t even reliably hold for all species, in addition to neglecting other salient factors like birthing method, social structure and other things that shape this without being directly determined by how they accomplish sex).
Incidentally, humans in our ancestral state (including modern subsistence foragers) tend to have very low body fat, which is the single biggest contributor to secondary-sexual dimorphism being so prominent in much of humanity today (nutrition and fat stores are probably why menarche occurs so early these days for many, and one factor contributing to comparatively high fertility). The popular perceptions of human sexual dimorphism may be distorted by this relatively recent context shift.
It seems obvious on the face of it to me, and, I suspect it did to you, before you let someone try to get clever about it.
What it does leave out, though, and where some—if not cleverness, mental flexibility—is required, is that those are just boxes, and not all individuals fall neatly into the boxes. That, too, is not simply memetic.
Also, animals can have memes. See the recent article about baboons—http://lesswrong.com/lw/99t/can_the_chain_still_hold_you/
Really, why?
Hmmm, I begin to wonder if my assumptions about the typical person’s attitude towards incest and pedophilia are based on some black magic a la: http://eugenicist.tumblr.com/post/11786816885/public-opinion-versus-public-opinion
I’m certain there is data about the differences in responses to a poll if it is conducted by a real person vs. by a robot.
Yes. Especially considering how often paedophilia is used as an excuse by various governments and organizations to commit their own arguably much worse atrocities.
If you mean “the most useful pieces of information you could possibly have” that sounds obviously wrong (I mean, if I had to choose whether to hire someone for some job, and I could either know their race, class and subculture or how good they would be at that job, why shouldn’t I choose the latter?), and if you mean “the most useful pieces of information when judging a person you know nothing else about” that’s true but tautological, so what do you actually mean? I guess something like ‘among some set X of possible pieces of information you could know about someone, race, class and subculture are the most useful’, but it’s not clear at all to me what set X would be.
FWIW, I understood this to mean that they are the highest ROI pieces of information… that is, their value compared to the effort to obtain them is high, relative to other information (like how good someone would be at this job).
I think that’s false, also, but it seems coherent enough.
I don’t have contact with past me, so I can’t help you interpret that statement. TheOtherDave seems to have a reasonable interpretation.
One possibility to be considered while evaluating where the emotional impact of rape comes from is that women’s emotional responses evolved in an environment where emergency birth control was not an available option. That would lead to traumatic responses even in first world countries where women are not ostracized for being ‘damaged goods’ on account of being raped.
One argument for castrating rapists is that rape is (among other things) a reproductive strategy, and there may be a genetic predilection to pursue it. As such, eliminating rapists from the gene pool will reduce the efficacy of that reproductive strategy, and thus over generations eliminate the genetic predilection and therefore reduce rape — even if it doesn’t work at all as a deterrent.
Of course, this also forms an argument for mandatory abortion in case of rape. Which is not somewhere I’d like to go. In both cases (castration and mandatory abortion) we have violation of bodily integrity, which has historically been a bit of a Schelling point for the legitimate reach of law, since the abolition of juridical torture.
Aside from any other issues, I doubt this would be very effective due to the wide grey area involving things like date rape or even just pressuring someone for sex.
Um… there are other arguments against the castration strategy. What if this is not a strictly heritable trait? What if the trait is implemented as something of an if… then.. scenario. (Very simplistic case: If I am unable to attract mates through the acceptable means for X years despite trying as well as I know how to, and I find a person in situation Y, then I implement this particular reproductive strategy)? It’s certainly very complex, and castration seems quite drastic. I have no way of doing the cost/benefit analysis, but I have a strong negative reaction against castration as a preventive mechanism, or even as punishment. It’s too much like killing one person and making another one in his place.
Perhaps there is some degree of potential harm to women at which castration of a potential rapist becomes a good idea. I don’t know. But seeing as how we’re in no situation to judge the answers to the relevant questions right now, I’m glad this is not something our judicial system currently implements.
If there is genetic variability in tendency to commit rape, then I desire to believe that there is genetic variability in tendency to commit rape. If there is not genetic variability in tendency to commit rape, then I desire not to believe that there is genetic variability in tendency to commit rape. Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
If there is genetic variability in tendency to commit rape, then insofar as rape is an effective reproductive strategy (that is, that rape leads to impregnation and the bearing of children), the genetic tendency to commit rape will be propagated in future generations; and insofar as rape is an ineffective reproductive strategy (that is, rape leads to castration and the bearing of no children), the genetic tendency to commit rape will not be propagated in future generations.
If there is genetic variability in tendency to commit rape, do you want your great-great-grandchildren to live in a world where the genetic tendency to commit rape has been propagated, or one in which it has not been propagated?
(My argument here does not hinge on castration as a mechanism of preventing future rapes. It hinges on eliminating rapist genes from the gene pool.)
The latter. Nor do I have any problems with admitting a possible genetic variability in said tendencies.
However, if rape is a reasonably effective reproductive strategy, any agent who cares about reproductive success can rationally come understand that it is so, and implement that strategy. In this scenario, the genes that cause the propagation of the tendency are the ones involved in coming to correct beliefs about the world, forward planning and execution of such plans.
Do I want those genes eliminated? No.
Hence the cost/benefit analysis for any mechanism proposed for eliminating a behavioural pattern from the gene pool. Yes, it is a good thing to eliminate rapist genes from the gene pool. But what costs are we willing to bear to achieve that good?
Of course, when performing such a cost/benefit analysis, it’s important to take into account the alternative options.
E.g., if we alter our environment such that rape is a less effective reproductive strategy than non-rape, then the genes involved in coming to correct beliefs about the world and acting on the basis of those beliefs would no longer correlate with rape, but the genes involved in committing rape whether it’s an effective reproductive strategy or not would continue to do so.
Agreed. And I guess that brings us back to the ideas in fubarobfusco’s first post in this thread. :)
Eww! This seems very subjective and, I suspect, rarely perceived to be desirable.