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7-11 was a Part Time JOB!
I don’t think Epstein was a spy for any government. What kind of idiotic spy leaves thousands of emails as written proofs of crimes? I get it that he’d use gmail to seem inconspicuous, but you can easily delete your own emails. You rarely hear of spies, because they’re very good at covering their tracks.
I think he was just a degenerate rich guy hanging out with other degenerate rich guys.
Children should be treated as human beings and deserve autonomy.
“I don’t like how it looks”, “it scares me” or “it’s annoying” aren’t a good enough reasons to kill an animal. No, not even that one.
Because with time, this light is also putting an end to not just itself but every other form of life around it.
Whether the positives outweigh the negatives doesn’t really matter when there’s nobody left around. Once we get to the point where the climate disaster is bad enough and irreversible (it might have happened already), it doesn’t even matter if humanity suddenly falls back into the middle ages and gets primitive enough to not do any harm anymore: certain processes won’t just suddenly stop.
Somewhere around the majority of people employed in academia are absolutely useless.
I say this as an academic.
I wanted to pursue academia until I met academics. I realized it was all dick measuring contests and covert social signalling. To get ahead you to understand the unspoken and political rules. It was a very disheartening realization. I didn’t have the heart to stomach it so I ended up pursuing a different career path
I wanted to get into academia for the pursuit of knowledge/love of wisdom and all that jazz. But I noticed some of the same stuff as you.
Curiosity and inquiry were not the main priority. There’s a lot of red tape, faux pas, hoops to jump through, and you end up needing to do a lot of kowtowing, self-aggrandizing, and following the established narrative. And if you didn’t intuitively know the social norms of academic culture, you were basically shunned as a hopelessly backwards outsider.
Part of the problem is the commodification of education (specific to the US, I presume). Grant writing and acquiring funding shouldn’t be an exercise in marketing yourself as a product, but it is. Universities shouldn’t be run like a business, faculty shouldn’t be treated like labor, students shouldn’t be treated like customers, and degrees shouldn’t be treated like products, but they are. It’s a serious problem and it degrades the value of education.
Another part is the gatekeeping in the peer-review system. I understand the desire to keep the nonsense out, and there’s a way to do that without filtering out novel ideas and unpopular opinions. People tend to think that’s an anti-science dogwhistle, but that’s not how I mean it. A truly scientific mindset should keep an open mind about things that are unconfirmed, but a lot of scientific journals commit the fallacy of negating the antecedent: “there is not enough evidence to establish this, so it must not be true.” There’s never enough evidence to establish a new hypothesis at first, but that doesn’t mean we should discourage formulating new hypotheses. A lot of scientific breakthroughs were initially viewed as crackpot theories.
I’m not talking about “do essential oils cure meningitis,” I’m talking about “can a Big Crunch result in a cyclical universe?” Or “Can taichi improve health outcomes by exercising the circulatory, respiratory, endocrine, and nervous systems?”
Stuff that there’s already enough scientific groundwork to demonstrate the validity of, but are still likely to get you dismissed as a crackpot if you bring it up in an academic setting.
There’s also a lot of office politics to navigate. Which is easy if you’re from a traditionally disenfranchised minority group. As much as they’ll argue to the contrary, women, LGBTQ+, and people of color are privileged within the ivory tower of academia. I’ve been to honors conferences where I was only one of a few white dudes, and likely the only one who was hetero, and yet I had to sit through a key note speaker about underrepresentation of minorities in academia. I felt like I was being gaslit.
But if you’re a white man and you try to claim something like “ecosystems deserve recognition of intrinsic value just like humans do,” everyone will jump down your throat as if you’re trying to reduce minorities to the ontological position of animals, rather than trying to raise the environment up ontologically to the position of humanity. As if everything is a zero-sum game. They view everything through the paradigm of capitalistic systems, even when trying to deconstruct them through some lofty armchair exercise in mental masturbation.
But if you try discussing the merits of collaboration towards common goals over self-serving competition, they’ll think you’re trying to take something away from minorities. They think everything is some shaded attempt at a dogwhistle, so you either have to walk on eggshells or just stay silent. Unless you’re mindlessly parroting the established narrative.
And if you’re competing for grants or a research position and you want to study the intersections of social ecology, deep ecology, and the land ethic, they’ll easily take the brown woman who wants to study media depictions over you. Even though the field is saturated with papers on how minorities are depicted in the media, yet hardly anyone writes about social ecology. You really have to stick to the favored topics, and if you diverge at all then you’d better have some serious connections or otherwise be well-established in your field already.
And if you raise the slightest structural critique of academia, everyone thinks you’re some anti-intellectual, anti-science, worm-brained right-winger. Even if your critique is that the structures of academia themselves are anti-intellectual and in some cases anti-science.
Oh but you also have to be careful about mentioning intellectualism, or they might think you’re elitist! God forbid an outsider believes intelligence should get you farther in academia than emotional appeals do…
Brave to this comment man. This relates to so much of my own experience and what is so fucked up and self-destructive about academic life these.
God forbid you just want to do good research and teach your students factual knowledge and skills. Now it’s just consumerism qua intellectualism and everyone is copying each other chasing ‘success’.
I remember when I was in grad school a blogger/professor ran some stats on admissions in my field basic on public data and it showed clear and obviously biases and trends in PhD admissions and he was basically ousted from the field. Bea cause it didn’t fit the narrative that somehow PhD admissions was this ‘objective measure’ of quality of a student’s work and potential… when all it was was a measurement how famous your advisors were.
To be honest, I’m surprised it has 7 upvotes and 0 downvotes.
People will gaslight you about your experience not being real, that all your qualms are really just white supremacist dogwhistles or brainwashed into you by manosphere influencers, but ultimately all your problems are imaginary because you’re a privileged white man who’s been handed everything in life and has never had to suffer or struggle to get by in life, and the only reason you haven’t done more with that privilege to simultaneously be successful and liberate everyone beneath you on the oppression scale (without being a white savior, of course) is because you’re a selfish, self-serving, racist, sexist, chauvinist bigot.
The outright dismissal of the challenges you’ve faced with no option for appeal is just an extension of the same “men don’t have feelings” and “be a man, suck it up, pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality that’s so prevalent and harmful in society. But it comes from both sides: the side that actually believes it and wants you to conform to toxic, patriarchal standards of masculinity; and the side that only wants to weaponize that structural misandry against you because “you’re a man so you deserve to be scorned,” and they love an easy target to take out their ire on, because someone who was actually born into wealth, status, and privilege is too difficult to tear down so they go for someone more vulnerable like you and me whose maleness and whiteness is undeniable, but whose (lack of) social status, economic class, and the associated privileges get swept under the rug when you’re reduced to biological factors beyond your control.
But if you raise a concern about how you’re being treated they’ll just accuse you of being a white supremacist or a misogynist because they view life as a zero-sum game, and they believe that in order to lift up and liberate/empower marginalized/disenfranchised minorities, they need to tear down individual white men regardless of their actual position on the food chain (starting with the lowest rungs, though, because low-hanging fruit).
And then they’ll tell you that you have it wrong because “social justice isn’t about that!!!” When yes, it shouldn’t be, and it’s not supposed to be. But in practice, that’s how many people treat it, and your response gets categorically invalidated. It’s like you’re being beaten up for something that someone else did, and if you even so much as put your hands up to defend yourself everyone watching calls you a violent asshole and says “Nobody is hitting you!!! And if they are, you deserve it!”
There is no chance of class solidarity when everyone is so focused on external factors and campism. But you’re not even allowed to respect yourself when someone else wants to treat you like a doormat.
Beautifully said. Felt like I was reading a journal entry.
Part of the problem is the commodification of education (specific to the US, I presume).
I’m from Canada. We commodify education but not nearly as much as the US. We still do have competition for grants of course. Personally I think the issues run deeper than this though.
Felt like I was reading a journal entry.
A journal would never publish the opinions I stated above. Also I was formulating my language more colloquially than I would have if I was trying to publish.
I’m from Canada. We commodify education but not nearly as much as the US.
The anglosphere needs to stop following the US example, because it’s a death spiral…
A journal would never publish the opinions I stated above.
I mean a personal journal entry, though I understand given the context why there’d be confusion there. I was just saying that I relate a lot to what you were saying. Wasn’t meant to be taken literally.
Oh, I see. That makes more sense.
Oh yea they need to focus on stem that does research providing resources for volunteering in labs or what not. the school i used to got o was so stingy about it, most dont get the experience they need before they graduate, a very small subset do
When I was in art school our TA’s were making 20k a year but stilling on 50k - 100k in student debt. They’d all been to bigger, more prestigious art schools, and they were barely getting by. And each of these schools was churning out hundreds or thousands of students every year.
That convinced me to take a different direction in life. Glad I did. I’m still a working artist and make a good living with it as a side hustle, but I’m glad I don’t have to live with the uncertainty.
a lot of your TAs didn’t have that debt. They had trust funds.
I was in grad school and one of the reason I left is I learned I was basically the only person in my program who was paying my own way… and that most of my professors… also came from money. And they were all shocked that I actually lived entirely on my stipend.
And you can find stats on this. The majority of med students, for example, come from upper income homes. Just like the majority of students at elite schools, also do, and the majority of admits to med schools come from better schools…
it was all dick measuring contests and covert social signalling
this exists in most professions.
It is yeah, I just feel like its especially pronounced in academia. It also sucks because, naively, I thought that the pursuit of knowledge was this pure thing untouched by petty human politics, but I was wrong.
It aint just academia.
useless to who? You?
academia is not an enterprise that is about usefulness. one of the reasons it’s collapsing so poory, and education more broadly, is the narrow minded insistence that it must be useful in terms of economic productivity.
it can and does have many uses, the question is to whom and for what, and oftentimes those are politically loaded.
What I mean is that most of these people are self interested fools who are nowhere near as knowledgeable as they believe themselves to be.
Most in that category are also not very good at their jobs, which leads to administrative bloat, torturously ineffective bureaucracy, and teaching positions going to whoever is best at politicking rather than the person who is better at teaching.
I don’t care at all about economic usefulness.
I’m not arrogant enough to assume I know what other people know and don’t know. Every prof I had always had lots of knowledge of things I had no knowledge of. But that’s what it means when everyone is specialized.
Oh yea, i noticed that to in some areas like certain PI are very protective of their reputation even compromising thier professionalism over it, like i had one that is very against giving any “references” to people unless you met his nebelous circumstances. most of its stems of himb eing in his native american heritege. in his mind he thinks people will “Tarnish” him in some way or his research or steal his credit somehow,etc.
alot of these tenures prevent people from applying to faculty positions too, because they will never leave til they die.
dint realize how much fluff pieces a phd produces just to get noticed on thier CV. writing dozens of papers, that likely arnt very good quality has irked people who is into the research field.
I had the opposite experience before I left, but it sure pays like shit. Could be a little university dependent I suppose.
my undergrad experience was awesome, but my grad experience was bad.
really good schools/programs can isolate you from the shitshow and actually are very professional. but they are rare.
it could also have been you meshed with the politics of your school. i very much meshed with the politics of my undergrad dept, but was a pariah in my grad program for those very same politics/values.
Maybe?
I ran a lab at my school for about 10 years so I feel like my take might be a little more holistic. I’m not at all discounting you but the politics of a university are pretty layered.
it’s also the culture. some schools are more inclusive and others are exclusive. my undergrad was a more inclusive place than my grad school. my grad school was like 95% white.
Somewhere around the majority of people
employed in academiaare absolutely useless.I thought this was common knowledge lol
Nudity alone - without the intent to shock or arouse - shouldn’t be taboo, criminal, or censored.
I’m sure I have a bunch, but for the fediverse I think the most controversial is that I think neopronouns are a bad idea. DISCLAIMER I support queer folks, and I also use neopronouns when requested (because there’s zero reason to be a dick about it), but I think everybody would be better off without them.
The entire purpose of pronouns is to offer a quick, generic (i. e. non-individual) way of referring to people or objects without using their names. Using neopronouns which have to be communicated and learned first is the opposite of that. So in my view they’re not really pronouns, just additional names one has to learn for a person.
I think the most sensible way of accommodating all genders is using whatever pronouns are present in the language (usually male and female, or a generic pronoun), plus a non-binary pronoun if needed, like singular they in English.
Being mtf or ftm trans is conforming to gender stereotypes with extra steps. Abolishing gender stereotypes and letting everyone express themselves however they want would be far better for society overall.
I don’t mean that in a negative way and fully support respecting self identification because that has the best outcomes in the real world.
I’ve also thought about that a bit. The way I see it, transgender people definitely are following local cultural terms. Not the ones that they are expected to follow, but still.
What’s considered masculine or feminine isn’t standard across different cultural contexts either. For example, wearing skirts or pink aren’t exclusively feminine. In a western context they currently are, so that’s why western MTFs are currently inclined to wear those.
However, that wasn’t always the case. If the same person had been born a few centuries ago, pink would not have meant the same thing, and they they would have probably felt differently about that color. Also, what westerners would consider a skirt these days, can be a masculine or gender neutral piece of clothing in other cultures. Even today, there are place where mean wear something that westerners would call a skirt.
Not all mtfs wear skirts or conform to gender stereotypes. In my case it’s more about feeling dysphoria with my body/hormones and wanting to change that (and then presenting in a way that looks normal for my gender in the society I happen to be in), but I’m also nonbinary, so there’s that.
Yeah, I just brought up the skirts because they sit in a particularly strange cultural niche. Nail polish, specific hairstyles, and high heels are currently considered feminine, but I couldn’t think of how to use any of them in an interesting example.
Just as you said, people usually want to look normal. In order to do that that, they’ll gravitate towards whatever cultural gender norm they consider most fitting for them. Obviously, there’s variety in this matter, just like there is in everything else. There are always exceptions to whatever generalizations I make.
Non-binary people are an interesting group though. Don’t know any IRL, but I’ve been watching a few YT videos made by them. In this biased sample, they don’t seem to even want to fit any box. Some wear neutral clothes, some prefer bright colors. Seems like a diverse group to me. How about you then?
I fall under the nonbinary umbrella as I used to be genderfluid - my gender would change over time between feminine, agender, and masculine, and now it’s just genderflux as I oscillate between agender (no gender identity) and varying levels of femininity. (I plot it on a scale where G1=fully masculine, G5=agender, and G10=fully feminine. I used to go between G4 and G10 (mostly around G5-7), but recently it’s been more between G5 to G10 (with most of the time between G6-8) - so I’ve gotten more feminine over time.) And this is to do with my internal identity, mostly defined by levels of dysphoria/euphoria and how I feel about my body, not how I present.
I present mostly fairly unambiguously feminine though, maybe slightly tomboyish/gender neutral as I generally wear T shirts and jeans and stuff as opposed to say dresses. I do paint my nails, style my hair, wear makeup
In spite of feeling somewhat masculine to a varying degree, you still present feminine. I guess that’s not how you would prefer to present, now is it? If the people around you had no issues with it, would you go with a more agender or masculine style?
No, I present how I prefer to present. I don’t really know what an agender style would be, and I don’t like wearing masculine styles - since my gender doesn’t really go to that part of the spectrum anymore
Oh, sorry. I got the numbers wrong. You clearly said G6-8, but I just didn’t have my brain switched on. 😃
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I don’t fully understand. Can you give a concrete example? Like you meet someone who seems like a woman to you, they say they’re a man, and you’re like, “no, no, you’re a woman, I reject your self identification of being a man”?
I don’t see you as less of a person, I don’t see you as a bother, I don’t see you as challenging to my views or, a shock at all, really.
I guess the cold hard truth is that I just don’t care.
If you wear your gender as your first, most outstanding personality trait, it doesn’t speak much for the rest of you.
Do I care if you keep it up, don’t stop and tell everyone you know? Have at it.
It’s just not my business. It’s not important in the grand scheme of whether or not you’re an asshole. Your shoe size is more indicative of who you are, to me, anyway.
This sounds similar to the “I just don’t see race” perspective.
Do you also just not see race?
If they’re different, what differentiates these topics in your thinking?
I recognize the concepts of feminine and masculine and the blends of both, but I suppose that just doesn’t tell me a lot about who you are, how you are, what your interests are or your life.
I could ponder stereotypes, get an idea for who you are based on telling me you’re trans, but listen to how that sounds.
Would you want me to have an idea about you from one word, without even knowing you?
Thank you for your reply.
I appreciate that you recognize that masculinity and femininity are concepts, and that these can co-exist and blend within many people’s experiences.
Unfortunately, the “I don’t care” position that you’ve described does still sound to me like the practice of “colorblindess.” For instance, it sounds like you are describing a similar false dichotomy; where you are saying, broadly, that either you “just don’t care” about a person’s experience of their identity features; or that, if you do care about a person’s experience of their identity features, then you would be forced to use that information to “ponder stereotypes.”
What about a third option? Could you see people as individuals rather than stereotypes; while also acknowledging that our experiences are affected by the contexts of our lives; including multiple layers of relationships with ourselves, each other, and broader societal forces?
There might be this third path, like you are saying, but some people still might not care even about that. Like, what if someone just genuinely does not care at all about any of this stuff? Is that wrong? Are we obligated to care?
Huh. I was going to write my own reply but I will defer to your argument, it perfectly encapsulates how I see it too, no notes.
Do you just never use gendered language in real life?
I don’t think about it. I don’t understand the question, honestly. I see people as men or women, short or tall, blue eyed or brown eyed, they come they go. It’s not important to me how they see themselves, it doesn’t interfere with my daily business or interactions with people, I try my best to treat everybody with respect and mind my own business. They can think they’re the Queen of England for all I care.
That’s a fair perspective.
I appreciate your acknowledgement that all people have the right to their own self-determination; and I appreciate your affirmation that all people deserve to be treated with kindness and respect.
I would also ask, though, when you assert your right to your own evaluation of another person, do you also practice awareness that it is fundamentally your interpretation, and that your interpretation may be factually inaccurate?
Do you say, “My experience is that I think that person is a man,” or do you say, “I declare based on my observations that I know that that person is a man” ?
Most of the time, we have no way of knowing what sex organs someone has, regardless of the expression of their outward appearance. It’s true that we may often recognize certain characteristics that lead to familiar assumptions, but in almost all scenarios we are still either making our own guesses about someone else, or we are choosing to believe that they are whoever they say they are.
Also, when considering intersex people and other variations in sexual development, even if we guess correctly about the sex organs or characteristics that someone may have been born with, we may still be wrong about the person’s underlying genetic make up or hormone balances.
I guess I wonder, when you hold your right to determine your own evaluation of another person, is your thinking flexible enough that you can hold your own assumptions lightly?
Sure, but if you’re gonna claim that trans people having either binary gender identity is necessarily conformity to gender stereotypes, then you need to accept that a cis person being either a man or a woman is even more so.
So the thing is, deviating from the norm is always going to be a bigger thing that just going with the flow.
There are masculine women, feminine men, and a wide spectrum in between. Many drag queens are playing the role of exaggerated gender stereotypes without identifying as a woman outside their act. A woman wearing pants was a huge thing in the US in the last century and that was just about not needing to follow gender norms separate from self identification. Cis doesn’t mean actively choosing to conform to gender stereotypes, it just means accepting the label society slapped on the person.
Yeah, and? All that is true of trans people, too.
You don’t actually know that. You can identify as male, female, nonbinary, agender, genderfluid etc. all while conforming or not conforming to male or female gender stereotypes. One is intrinsic, the other extrinsic.
But what does it mean to be male if you reject all social definitions of maleness?
That’s a good question to which no clear general answer can be given. What’s considered male is a huge spectrum of things, both material and immaterial, varying across generations and cultures.
But most importantly, what it means to be male is very different from what it means to be seen as male.
The fact that you have to define yourself as conforming or non-conforming is what’s being griped here.
No you don’t. It’s extrinsic, I literally just said that.
Oh damn, you just reminded me of something way more controversial I forgot about.
I remember when I was younger, maybe about 20 or so, and I was still questioning whether or not I was trans. I was living with an armchair-anarchist at the time, and he frequently lended me controversial leftist literature to “broaden my horizons” and whatever lol
Well, there was one book that stuck with me more than anything else, simply called “Work!” and was all about dismantling the inherent perceptions of capitalist bias in labor. It had a chapter on nearly every aspect of society, and touched on how these things were impacted and molded by the systems around it.
And then I hit the chapter Gender. And I’ll never forgot this passage.
To them, sex change surgery is just yet another industry to be marketed towards the proletariat, another product with which you can fix yourselves. For in a world with such concrete gender norms, capitalism would have you believe that these roles are more natural than your own bodies.
Do they decry other cosmetic surgery as well? I’d argue breast implants are way more harmful to society than sex change operations.
I’m trans. I’m a woman. I don’t have my ears pierced, I rarely wear makeup, I don’t do my nails, I haven’t shaved my legs in coming up on 2 years. I don’t understand femininity, and I perform it to the bare minimum standard, because if I don’t, I face extra exclusion, hostility and questioning.
What I’m trying to get at, is that I don’t really care about “expressing myself”. Abolishing gender stereotypes would absolutely make my life easier, and I guarantee I’m doing more to undo the power they hold over people than you ever will, whilst you sit there and judge trans people for upholding the system that punishes them far more than it will ever punish you.
I don’t understand femininity, and I perform it to the bare minimum standard, because if I don’t, I face extra exclusion, hostility and questioning.
So the exact thing I said, which was observational and not judgemental.
It was absolutely a judgement, because it’s an opinion you shared in a “what’s your controversial opinion” thread. if you didn’t carry judgement within your opinion, you wouldn’t be sharing it here.
I will also highlight that you ignored pretty much the bulk of my post, where I expressly highlight my rejection of stereotypes, and my lack of understanding them, and their implicit lack of relationship with my identity, to focus on a single sentence that provided literally no detail to exclaim the veracity of your claim.
You came in with an opinion that puts the onus for fixing the harm caused by gender stereotypes on trans people, despite trans people being less in a position to challenge that system than you are, whilst being more aggressively punished for challenging it than you are. You ignored the voices of trans people telling you about their experience and relationship, whilst never owning your own responsibility and involvement in the system.
So no, you were not “observing”. You were judging and holding trans people to a higher standard than you hold yourself.
Dude literally is saying that you, as a woman, shouldn’t have to conform to feminine stereotypes that you don’t intrinsically want to conform to.
No, what he’s saying that being trans is “conforming to gender stereotypes” and that if we got rid of stereotypes, trans people would be able to express themselves how they want, without having to be trans.
Which is to say, he’s suggesting that trans women are all trying to be feminine, and if there was a way for men to be feminine without societal push back, trans women wouldn’t need to exist. He doesn’t explicitly state the last bit, but that’s what he really means, and it’s why he considers his position controversial
When I made a post going in to detail about the lack of relevance feminine gender stereotypes have to my day to day life, despite the fact that I’m transgender, he largely ignored it, despite that being the basis of his “opinion”
Sounds like you care more about having the trans label than people actually being free to express themselves.
What I care about is people who aren’t trans, trying to erase trans people, by blaming them for the system that oppresses them, whilst letting themselves off the hook for propping up the same system.
You came in with an opinion that puts the onus for fixing the harm caused by gender stereotypes on trans people
Oh, I see. You think that because I wrote two related sentences and put them next to each other that the only possible reading was that the subject of the first must be the only group that needs to abolish conforming to gender stereotypes.
I meant what I said, they should be abolished and that would require everyone. I’m sure you won’t reconsider your first reading though, since you have clearly dug in your heels on replies to the other poster.
Tell me you never interact with trans people without telling me you never interact with trans people
Plastic straw pollution doesn’t have a measurable impact on the environment.
The entire thing about banning plastic straws comes from some high schooler using back-of-a-napkin math to guess how many straws are in the ocean in what was clearly a successful attempt at starting a science fair project the night before it was due. Some news station picked it up, and then a bunch of science-illiterates ran away with it.
You can’t determine the impact of pollution by count. Straws are tiny and weigh almost nothing. If you skip buying one pair of sneakers in your life, then you’ve successfully reduced your plastic use by almost a lifetime of plastic straws.
Removing plastic straws is probably the single least impactful way to reduce plastic pollution. It’s pure virtue signaling: it’s about presenting an image of being environmentally conscious while doing effectively nothing to help the environment.
Everyone (including kids and teens) should have full bodily autonomy. This includes how they express gender. Parents should not be allowed to circumcise/mutilate their kids’ genitals for reasons that aren’t medically necessary, nor should they be allowed to lay their hands on their kids in a violent way (and yes, that includes “only” spanking). Parents who hit/spank their kids should be charged with assault and child abuse.
Kids and teens having basic rights might not be controversial here, but in the rural area that I’m from, it certainly is.
Following “if it isn’t harmful, it’s not a problem” as a guideline, incest isn’t immoral if it doesn’t involve large power imbalance (e.g.: parent and offspring) and doesn’t produce offspring.
If the relationship, be it purely romantic or otherwise is mutually desired and fully consensual (usual requirements), then I don’t see how it would be different from other non-standard relationships.I hope that’s plenty controversial.
If the two individuals aged for a significant part of their lives together, offsprings are not the only “harm”.
Forming relationships with people that are different (as in, not relatives) helps avoid the bad parts of the family structure (the weird beliefs, opinions, behaviours, etc, that are taught within a family but are not accepted outside of it). Without that, you can end up with something that seems like “cultural inbreeding” where the weirdness persists and grows, until it reaches weird shit.
On a side note
Arguably a similar effect already happens in western countries thanks to xenophobia, and that’s why you have people that care so much about transmitting their DNA and having their own biological kids as if it mattered. This is just the remnants of a deeply racist culture that believes that you need to preserve your family line, and with it, your DNA. If people were mixing more with other cultures and origins, this would seem much more absurd.
Forming relationships with people that are different (as in, not relatives) helps avoid the bad parts of the family structure
That is an argument from utility, which can most certainly be debated. What constitutes “bad”? That is a subjective interpretation.
where the weirdness persists and grows, until it reaches weird shit.
And how do we define “weird shit”? Are “normal” relationships not “weird shit” and don’t they lead to “weird shit”?
their DNA and having their own biological kids as if it mattered.
Well, it matters to them. Therefore, it matters. Doesn’t it? It does to them.
Genuinely just poking at arguments here, I have no decided opinion either way.
It’s more of a question of what is healthy psychologically. Staying to close to one group socially makes a sort of echo chamber, and that’s always a problem.
And that’s what I mean with “weird shit”, things like racism are quite known to be increased in people that are not in contact with people of color for example. Echo chambers are generally bad, and I feel like this would create a very strong one (“us against the world” and whatnot)
DNA doesn’t matter when it comes to kids if you don’t have a background thought that is at least a bit problematic. It’s not about what matters to them only, but also about what is morally wrong. This “DNA is everything” thing is extremely toxic
Staying to close to one group socially makes a sort of echo chamber, and that’s always a problem.
Should we ban homeschooling for this reason?
I mean, homeschooling can definitely cause that kind of issue.
The difference being that there are good sides to it too, while there are no good sides coming from incest, and trying to equate the two seems a bit far fetched and incoherent.
I’m not a bit fan of incest myself but this response doesn’t seem very satisfying. Just saying “there is nothing good about it” just seems very wishy-washy and hand-wavy
What can be good about it that a normal relationship cannot provide?
I can’t imagine a single answer. Thus, “nothing good about it” seems accurate.
I get what you’re going for here. But another caveat to add would be that the people in this sort of relationship shouldn’t have children. They might be able to get away with that for one generation, but if incest runs in the family then it won’t take long for things to start going south
I get what you’re going for here. But another caveat to add would be that the people in this sort of relationship shouldn’t have children.
Which is in my 1st sentence.
Whoops, misread that
Do you think people with autism, downs syndrome, or cognitive impairments should have kids?
I see what you’re trying to do here and I don’t like it
That’s ok. You don’t have to like what other people think. I don’t always like what other people think either. But it’s good to challenge and think through ones positions, I think everyone benefits from that. I think it’s critical, in fact.
(great thread BTW!)
But it’s good to challenge and think through ones positions,
For sure. And you certainly have made me think.
Having thought about it, I think one relevant difference between incest babies and the examples you gave is this.
If you were to prevent someone with a disability potentially passing it onto their kids, then you’d be saying “you should not be having kids at all” which feels like a civil rights violation.
But if you were to prevent someone from having an incest baby you’d be saying “you shouldn’t have kids with this specific person, but you are still free to have children with another person”. This doesn’t hit as hard. It doesn’t feel like you are violating their fundamental rights, just limiting its application in one specific case.
Not the person you asked, but you and everyone reading your comment know that’s not a good faith argument.
The reason incest is frowned upon and often illegal is because of the danger it poses to any potential offspring. Many genetic diseases rely on recessive traits that require both parents to carry the recessive trait in order for it to be exposed. If two biological siblings have a child, that child would therefore have a massive amount of recessive traits exposed since both parents would share a massive amount of DNA
At a population scale, genetic diversity is critical to survival of a population, and a collapse of genetic diversity through too much inbreeding tends to lead to a very unhealthy population that can be easily wiped out through disease. This is much less of a risk with random incest today thanks to how much humans move around these days, but the flip side is that there is some risk of this from so called “super surrogates” who have genetically fathered hundreds or thousands of kids. The likelyhood of these kids meeting and reproducing can be quite high, which can therefore noticably reduce genetic diversity in a population, and ultimately reduce the health of a population
I wouldn’t call the argument a bad faith argument. Perhaps there is a line somewhere, but ultimately, his argument is that “two people who have an increased chance of passing on genetic disorders can’t have children/have a relationship”.
For most people, when asked this question outside of the incest framing, would argue that the state has no role to dictate that line. The slope is too slippery and screams too much like eugenics. It’s only within the social taboo of incest do people think that argument is acceptable.
I wouldn’t call the argument a bad faith argument.
Yeah it was clearly made in good faith, don’t know what this guy is driving at.
His reaction just goes to show you though: this is indeed a controversial topic.
I think it is a very topical argument- mind you I am genuinely not taking a position, I am exploring the logical consequences of the argument. There are pitfalls in the line or reasoning going on the argument that they are making. This is how philosophical discourse works. It’s how arguments and logic works. Being emotional about it is fine, but it’s not conducive to exploring the consequences of the argument.
The reason incest is frowned upon and often illegal is because of the danger it poses to any potential offspring.
The purely hypothetical counter argument here would be that what constitutes a “defect” or “danger” is highly subjective and prone to abuse. Where do we draw the line? Either there is no line and anyone can freely breed offspring, or we are in dangerous territory where we are determining which qualities we as a society deem “unwanted”. What do we mean by “defect”? What do we mean by “unwanted”?
At a population scale, genetic diversity is critical to survival of a population, and a collapse of genetic diversity through too much inbreeding tends to lead to a very unhealthy population
Well that is an argument from utility. Who is to say that people must subject themselves to the “critical survival of a population”? What if people don’t care? If they refused to, what would we do? Force them not to breed, by, say sterilizing them? Surely you see the issue here.
i think autism is alot different from DOWN syndrome. with DOWN there is a genetic/chromosomal abnormality which puts you at a very high risk, and should consult a genetic counselor
The Habsburgs have entered the chat…
That one writer on Community agrees with you lol
Now here’s a man who knows how to marry his cousin!
The US isn’t the great Satan, they are quite contemporary satan. Russia, China and Iran are all imperialist, anti democratic and have even worse human rights violations.
You don’t have to pick a side, these are all asshats, some more than other though.
Suicide should be a human right. You should have to prove that you’re of sound mind and that you’ve considered and tried all other options. But once you’ve proven you’re not manic, psychotic, intoxicated, being coerced, etc and no other option will reasonably bring you peace you should be able to do it and get help making sure you don’t get stuck halfway or receive comfort care only until it’s over. Also every psych unit I’ve worked requires suspension of a DNR which terrifies me for involuntary admits.
- Some people absolutely need to be killed for the greater good of society.
Some people shouldn’t have kids, and some children probably shouldn’t be born.
