Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[discoursedrome]

@rustingbridges wrote

to be fair, our society at present has a deeply confused idea of what marriage is for, and this can be seen as a symptom of that

(I don’t particularly care what marriage is for. Expression of romantic love, or child-having, or some package of legal rights, whichever is fine. I’m just annoyed we can’t pick. Do one thing and do it well, y'kno)

and now for the hot ^{read as: unnecessarily disagreeable} take: in a world where the government (and a large tax base) pays the floor healthcare costs of random persons, it’s totally reasonable for them to be interested in banning things that will increase their costs. If these things have sufficiently few supporters and many detractors, guess which way we’re going to go in a democracy?

There’s definitely a legal argument for banning cousin marriage – @mitigatedchaos also touches on that in their reply here, for instance, and they’re not wrong per se. I’m skeptical that this sort of law does enough good to justify the loss of liberty, given that most people have a natural aversion to the behaviour in question and it’s the sort of thing that mainly becomes a problem when a lot of people do it over time, but certainly the state gets up to worse things for worse reasons.

But that doesn’t make a case that it’s less moral than anything with similarly deleterious effects – even from the most interventionist angle it’s, at best, an argument about picking your battles. My objection is that arguments against incest tend to be built around the idea that it’s a unique moral evil in a way that can’t really be supported by arguments from health or genetics. If people want to make pragmatic cost/benefit arguments that’s worth doing, but they need to get down off their high horse on the topic and onto a smaller horse that’s more within their means.

[bambamramfan]

You spend how many hours talking with rationalists and public policy theorists about the nature of morality, evidence based interventions, and not shaming people for having politically unpopular beliefs.

Then someone brings up a taboo sexual activity, and it’s all “well if they had kids that might be bad so it seems proportionate to say anything romantic or sexual they do should be shamed. I mean just think of the medical bills for their hypothetical kids they never considered having.”

The challenge isn’t getting uninformed people to have good principles, it’s getting even thoughtful people to apply them instead of knee-jerk rationalizations.

[mitigatedchaos]

This depends heavily on one’s opinion of the general population and their susceptibility to complex memes that depend on a careful analysis of information.

If one is optimistic, switching to the “it’s okay not to taboo this kind of incest socially, even if we will argue to them not to have kids” seems reasonable.

If one is pessimistic, then tearing away the current taboo won’t result in proportionate response, but rather no response.

An optimal political response isn’t actually available, and the odds that someone will be foreveralone if they can’t be with their cousin are pretty low, just leaving the taboo for now seems prudent, with the time limit of the next generation of genetic repair/enhancement technology.

Also we’ve had experiments with “societies that allow cousin marriage”, and it doesn’t look good.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

Woman collects dolls: creepy!
Man collects “action figures”: cool nerd boy!

🤔

[mitigatedchaos]

What in the world are you talking about?  Since when would action figures collected by an adult human male be considered “cool”?!

That is low-status behavior for a male!  A girl collecting action figures might be seen as a cool nerd girl, but even then it’s still a bit risky if she wants to expand her dating pool into high-status normies and not come off as a fujoshi.  She’s only protected by the thin veil of women being perceived as harmless, foreign, and low-agency.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

I hate the needless moralism with incest on this site. I don't mean with legit concerns about consent and power dynamics but posts going "COUSIN MARRIAGE IS ICKY!!". I mean, this site is gung ho about animal abuse and killing but suddenly something where absolutely nobody is hurting nothing is considered totally wrong. Sorry, it just irritates me.

sigmaleph answered:

cousin marriage is icky

doesn’t make it wrong, but

[slatestarscratchpad]

I’ve been reading about leptin receptor deficiency recently, which is mostly (only?) observed in children of cousin marriages. Stephen Guyenet describes affected children as follows:

Usually they are of normal birth weight and then they’re very, very hungry from the first weeks and months of life. By age one, they have obesity. By age two, they weigh 55-65 pounds, and their obesity only accelerates from there. While a normal child may be about 25% fat, and a typical child with obesity may be 40% fat, leptin-deficient children are up to 60% fat. Farooqi explains that the primary reason letpin-deficient children develop obesity is that they have “an incredible drive to eat”…leptin-deficient children are nearly always hungry, and they almost always want to eat, even shortly after meals. Their appetite is so exaggerated that it’s almost impossible to put them on a diet: if their food is restricted, they find some way to eat, including retrieving stale morsels from the trash can and gnawing on fish sticks directly from the freezer. This is the desperation of starvation […]

Unlike normal teenagers, those with leptin deficiency don’t have much interest in films, dating, or other teenage pursuits. They want to talk about food, about recipes. “Everything they do, think about, talk about, has to do with food” says Farooqi. This shows that the [leptin system] does much more than simply regulate appetite - it’s so deeply rooted in the brain that it has the ability to hijack a broad swath of brain functions, including emotions and cognition.

Marrying your cousin is like winning access to a whole new, much more interesting tier of genetic diseases.

[ozymandias271]

Cousin marriage, according to wikipedia, has about the same risk of congenital disability as giving birth to a child over age 40. If lots of people marry their cousins, the risk gets worse.

I suspect that even if cousin marriage is legalized and destigmatized most people in the US aren’t going to want to do it, because family really isn’t that important in our culture. So banning cousin marriage implies that one should also ban giving birth over the age of 40. While that might be intractable, banning assistive reproductive technology to mothers over forty (or even forbidding it to be covered by insurance) would be more doable.

[testblogdontupvote]

So, that things about older age being a risk - is it due to changes in uterus or genetic composition of eggs? Because if the latter, then insurance should just cover egg preservation starting right from puberty, and IVF afterwards. Not only would that solve the dilemma of “have children early due to health reasons” vs “have children late for social and personal reasons”, but it would also make voluntary sterilization to avoid unwanted pregnancy a much easier and common choice, since it wouldn’t actually be preventing people form having biologically related children later (and will hopefully put all this “but what if you marry, etc.” gatekeeping to the rest for good).

[discoursedrome]

Technically, banning cousin marriage on those grounds implies that you should ban marriage to people over 40, as well as marriage to people with a high likelihood of passing on a serious genetic disorder (even if they’ve been medically sterilized, presumably).

This is the issue with arguments against incest on the basis of genetic problems: they’re arguments against having children being used to discourage people from having relationships, which doesn’t really make sense unless you’re also against non-procreative marriages generally or birth control/abortions. Unless you’re willing to say “incest between consenting adults is totally fine so long as they don’t have children with one another,” and unless you’re willing to treat anything with a comparable risk of serious birth defects the way you treat kissing cousins, it’s not really a viable line of argumentation.

It seems pretty obvious that the tendency to view incest between consenting adults as icky is an evolutionary heuristic designed to prevent genetic problems, but evolutionary heuristics are blunt instruments so we probably shouldn’t try too hard to extrapolate moral principles from them.

[mitigatedchaos]

I want you to think about the political realities here for a moment.

Banning cousin marriage is relatively politically safe, and has been done in multiple countries without creaking up into extra categories, precisely because it is seen as ‘icky’.

Banning having children over 40 or for people with significant risk of passing on severe genetic disorders is almost politically impossible and will draw substantial criticism from disability rights advocates, feminists, and entire already-existing political structures.  Previous states that have attempted this level of interference have typically been highly authoritarian and have terrible reputations.

Seeing as eugenics is now forever associated with the Nazis, even though of course having children with good genes and not condemning someone to die before the age of 40 of some genetically-passed-on heart disease would otherwise be a smart move, this matter cannot be approached directly.

In fact, even a policy of just paying people with high genetic risks not to have children based on the estimated costs to society would probably fail spectacularly on the political stage and get one labeled an Evil Nazi, regardless of one’s opinions on racial matters.

In light of this, the ban on cousin marriage should stay until the early Transhuman era.  So about another 30 years.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[funereal-disease]

Claiming you don’t need or want a safe space of any kind because “life isn’t safe” is the most obnoxious kind of bravery debate.

Life as an entity/overarching concept isn’t safe, sure, but we’re not talking about safety from random happenstance; we’re talking about things we can control. You could get hit by a car tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean you should take a bath with your toaster. Similarly, the fact that some people out there in the world might be callous and cruel is no reason not to avoid callousness and cruelty when you have the option. On the contrary: it’s a reason to insist on more exacting standards when you have the chance to do so.

[mitigatedchaos]

Part of the opposition to safe spaces is driven by two things:

1. Attempts to turn entire institutions into “safe spaces” are undertaken by SJ advocates, even when making a space safe for one group means making it unsafe for another group, and this can be used as a means of political control.

2. The opposition knows darn well that they aren’t allowed to have their own spaces, therefore they want to deny every other group their ability to make an exclusive space.  Part of the reason for this is that SJ tends to make excuses for why their own policies should not apply to themselves.

Combine these together, and “the world isn’t a safe space” becomes a suitable rhetorical weapon - after all, they aren’t allowed a space so they have nothing to lose by it.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

man-hate

[aellagirl]

I was scrolling through Tumblr and saw a vintage photo of a pretty woman saying ‘I hate men. if one of them touch me I will bite his hand off.“

I assumed this was posted by someone who thought it was funny or relatable. There are lots of images and messages on Tumblr like this - light hostility towards men, from attractive women.

I didn’t even notice my anticipation that this was done by someone approving, for an approving audience - until I imagined reversing the genders. If there was an image of a handsome man demonstrating light hostility towards women, I would anticipate that it is done by a radical or tiny group, for a largely disapproving audience. I would be much more shocked.

I don’t like the general social acceptance of hostility towards men, is my point. It’s hypocritical, because that same social acceptance vanishes if the hostility is towards women.

[mitigatedchaos]

Men are in the process of noticing this, which is why male gender movements (distinct from the movement that is actively opposed to notice this) are popping up.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Why I Can’t Say Yes To Sex

[mitigatedchaos]

<aellagirl post>

Now consider the consequences if this is relatively common - or at least if men believe it is relatively common.

Would male gender norms, with all their fear of deviation, and desire to be high-status and dominant and on top of a hierarchy of masculinity, look like they do today?  Would the norms be seemingly stubbornly resistant to change in ways that can’t be adequately explained by Feminist theories about gender?

I’m not sure how to untangle it, and how much is cultural vs deeper human psychology.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Why glomp chatrooms?

[aellagirl]

There’s this…. aesthetic? I don’t know if that’s the right word. It’s this “style” that pops up in certain internet communities or forums or chatrooms. This style features things like:

* Using lots of action-emoticons like *blushes and nibbles on lip*
* Using cutsey words like “glomp” and “snuggle”
* Innocence and child-like aesthetics, word usage, and attitudes
* High overlap with the kink community, so familiarity or references to things like dom/subbyness.
* Strong affiliation with anime, with avatars and shared images being almost entirely anime.
* High and dispersed “slutty”(?) affectionateness. Anyone may be glomped or tickled, with naughtiness being an assumed hidden but universal trait. Reminds me of the feeling of cuddle parties.
* High sexual undertones, although this generally exists on a spectrum depending on the community. Can range from “innocent” flirting to full on cybering.
 * Association with the queer community

---

I have questions about this but I don’t even know exactly what I want to find out. 

Why the high overlap with anime? Why the babylike combination with sexual promiscuity? I feel like I understand “littlespace” kinks, but this seems different for some reason. Why so much glomping, blushing, and arm pinning? And more importantly, why do they all happen together at the same time so often?

It’s such a heavy and permeating style. I’ll see regular chatrooms that operate pretty normally, except everyone talks like that and has anime avatars. Why? I can’t think of any comparable instance where other “regular chatrooms” operate under an aesthetic so pervasive. I’m assuming engaging in this…. not-quite-roleplay? gives some sense of validation or excitement or security or something, but I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out what it is. Can someone help explain?

[mitigatedchaos]

I mean, I’m assuming your avatar is a picture of you. So you’re attractive and female, which means that:

1. Your advances will, more often than not, be wanted.
   
2. Your advances will usually not be perceived as threatening, even when they aren’t wanted.
3. Your advances will raise, rather than lower, the social status of the person you approach, unless they’re already very high social status.

These groups are going to involve people whose affection is usually treated as unwanted, undesirable, oppressive, or even evil.  But they still have that drive for affection, to want to be loved, to be desirable.  A lot of what you’re probably seeing is that the left half of the bell curve for gender presentation for men has been reserved only for gay men, combined with the side effects of (low-status) men being seen as disgusting and a threat.

I’m actually expecting pretty substantial defections from having male or purely male bodies in the early transhuman era, until masculinity performance is so utterly broken by transhuman body choice and bi/pansexuality becomes so normal that the threat narrative collapses and it returns to a more even distribution.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[kirbymatkatamiba]

@sinesalvatorem A while back in reference to this post about a different video decrying sexual racism you said:

Someday, someone is going to 100% seriously claim that gay men and straight women are sexist for not finding women hot, and I am going to bash my skull in against a gay rights monument.

Well. um. I hope you won’t feel the need to bash your skull against anything, but:

In the comments of this video, someone made this excellent critique:

I very much disagree that a sexual preference can be “racism”… Similarly, the fact that I have no sexual preference for men does not make me sexist. What you find attractive is not something you consciously control, so it is wrong to put the label “racist” on it.

I’m curious, Lindsey, if you would consider anyone who is not pan/bisexual to be sexist. If not then why the double standard?

and in her response she said:

…indeed if we preference “race” and call it racism, then preference for “sex” or “gender” would be sexist. It’s not what this episode is about so I didn’t bring it up but I think it is where the world is going. We’re going to realize that sexual orientation, like racial preference is a form of discrimination and have to muddle through what that means and whether or not to change it.

(This is not just anyone saying this, it’s a popular internet sex educator, who is also a clinical sexologist… so yeah I find this pretty fucking horrifying.)

(Also, oh my god, how obvious is it that this is The Worst Argument in the World. Racial/gendered sexual preference = racial/gender discrimination, racial/gender discrimination = racism/sexism, racism/sexism = bad.)

[sinesalvatorem]

aaaaaaaaahhhh

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH

AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

No no no fuck you fuck you fuck you

I don’t usually feel this intensely about politics but no no no you may never be allowed to have power I cannot allow this person to have power you can’t do that to people can Lindsey Doe please stop existing

This is so so horrifying. I actually liked this show when it first came out, and then I forgot about it, and now I come back and it’s evil?

Most of why I’m so viscerally upset is that her reasoning is this is “where the world is going”. That the inevitable moral arc of the universe must tend toward sexual coercion. “It’s the current year, lesbians! Just let men rape you just do it!”

No no no resist modernity do not accept be martyred to hold hell back no no no

[mitigatedchaos]

This kind of thing contributes to language where someone’s sexuality (say, men’s) is presented as fundamentally evil and oppressive just for existing, since ordinary methods of refusing to have sex (where just not feeling like it would be acceptable) have been removed. Very dangerous indeed.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[dunkaroos]

why do grown ass men at my work think it’s a compliment to say things like, “it’s so endearing that you’re such a nerd but if you were a guy i’d totally wanna be you up for being a loser!!! hahahaha!!!” fuck off jesus

[official-mugi]

“since I wanna fuck you I don’t think you’re a loser”

[mitigatedchaos]

To be a woman is to be mid-status.

To be a man is to be high-status or low-status.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[brazenautomaton]

okay so someone tell me why this won’t work

transgender people should get to use the correct bathroom and not be misgendered, and it is an issue of basic rights. and trans people are not going into bathrooms to commit sex crimes, that whole idea is absurd

but the conflict is not relevant to most people in the country and they view it as either a distraction, or just more culture war or at worst an attempt to sexually threaten precious and vulnerable women. pushing on the issue almost unavoidably creates disproportionate blowback because to the majority of people, the issue is being given a disproportionate focus and that means it must be nefarious

so why haven’t we, instead of saying “we keep pushing in exactly the same way, casting it as an issue where everyone who opposes us is ideologically befouled and deserving of punishment, thus getting disproportionate blowback and alienating people who we should not be alienating because that leads to a loss of our political power”, and instead of saying “we get so much blowback from how we present this issue as one where people must bend the knee to us or be cast out of respectable society, so we should give up on trying to secure rights for trans people as it’s not convenient for us to do so any more”

why don’t we make the law “people are allowed to use the bathroom of their gender identity, but if someone is convicted of sexual assault in a bathroom that they entered by pretending to be a different gender, their sentence is more severe”?

like from our point of view, we’re not losing anything. we know trans people are far less likely than baseline to commit sex crimes and bathroom access is not about enabling sex crimes. but for the people who don’t already agree with us, it looks like we’re both taking measures to deter the thing they don’t want to happen, and putting our money where our mouth is, instead of telling them “this is how things are you are not allowed to notice otherwise now bow to our worldview”. by making it a sentencing rider, we don’t increase the ability of transphobes to frame trans people for sex crimes – if we are afraid this law would encourage them to do so we should be exactly as afraid of them doing so without this law. 

like if your position is “we should allow X because it is just, and will not allow Bad Thing Y at all” and your opposition says “we should not allow X because it will just promote Bad Thing Y”, it seems to me that “How about we allow X, but punish Bad Thing Y more harshly if it gets promoted by X, so people don’t do it?” is pretty much the easiest compromise ever.

so why won’t that work?

[earthboundricochet]

I imagine people would just say it’s already creating a dangerous situation where sexual assault is more likely to happen and reject it. They will say you are already allowing a risk and that in itself is unacceptable. (Same reasoning why same sex parents adopting kids is not allowed here, even when there is heaps of data showing kids elsewhere are fine, they insist we cannot put children at such a  risk not knowing the consequences (even if we DO know!) and it’s too much of a gamble.)

Also we both know cases of fake sexual assault stories, who are widely believed even when there is plain evidence of the contrary, exist. What makes you think it would not happen in this case, when trans women are seen as even more inherently predatory than men?

[brazenautomaton]

If they say “Punishing people more won’t deter them from doing bad things” then we just won a huge victory and we get to reduce all the Draconian sentences for all this other shit, since they are the exact people who say we need to have incredibly harsh sentences to prevent people from doing bad things. But I doubt they’ll say that. 

And yes, we do know cases of fake sexual assault stories exist. The point is that by being a rider on a sexual assault conviction instead of a crime in and of itself, it does not increase the ability of anyone to frame trans people for sexual assault. It doesn’t even increase the incentive to do so, as it isn’t like the utility of framing someone for being trans is correlated with the number of years they serve is convicted. 

We keep saying that there’s no reason to be afraid because letting trans people use the right bathroom is not exposing anyone to danger. If we won’t do this, then either

A: we believe that trans people will commit enough sexual assault in bathrooms that this will be a problem and that means we have been lying this whole time, or

B: we believe that trans people using the right bathroom in transphobic areas will lead to a rash of them being falsely accused of sexual assault, in which case why the fuck are we trying to push this law on transphobic areas when we believe it will just lead to trans people being falsely accused?

right-wingers keep saying “The left wants to let people into the women’s room to assault them because they can claim they ‘identify’ as a woman! It’s just a way for perverts to threaten (precious, wonderful) women!” 

we keep telling them “That isn’t what this law is about and that isn’t a thing that happens anyway, the thing you are concerned with is not an event that occurs, you are imagining it, this is only about not harming people for being trans”

if the slightest token effort to put our money where our mouth is and say “this is so much not about letting people attack women in the bathroom that if anyone actually tries to do that we’ll come down way harder on them, because we want to show that we are not about letting women get attacked, and because we don’t think trans people being allowed to use the right bathroom will cause them to attack women” gives us pause, then we need to stop and figure out how we have fucked up because we have fucked up very very very badly.

[mitigatedchaos]

I am all about this kind of ideological trade.