Light and Water for the Trees

Societies that provide infants with a great deal of physical affection ('tender loving care') are later characterized by relatively non-violent adults. When the exceptions were investigated, it was found that the violence of all but one could be accounted for by the absence of premarital sexual behavior.

"Body pleasure and the origins of violence" by James W. Prescott

http://www.violence.de/prescott/bulletin/article.html

Clearly, if we consider violent and aggressive behaviors undesirable then we must provide an enriched somatosensory environment so that the brain can develop and function in a way that results in pleasurable and peaceful behaviors. The solution to physical violence is physical pleasure experienced within the context of meaningful human relationships.

For many people, a fundamental moral principle is the rejection of creeds, policies, and behaviors that inflict pain, suffering and deprivation upon our fellow humans. This principle needs to be extended: We should seek not just an absence of pain and suffering, but also the enhancement of pleasure, the promotion of affectionate human relationships, and the enrichment of human experience.

If we strive to increase the pleasure in our lives this will also affect the ways we express aggression and hostility. The reciprocal relationship between pleasure and violence is such that one inhibits the other; when physical pleasure is high, physical violence is low. When violence is high, pleasure is low. This basic premise of the somatosensory pleasure deprivation theory provides us with the tools necessary to fashion a world of peaceful, affectionate, cooperative individuals.

The world, however, has limited time to correct the conditions that propel us to violent confrontations. Modern technologies of warfare have made it possible for an individual or nation to bring total destruction to large segments of our population. And the greatest threat comes from those nations which have the most depriving environments for their children and which are most repressive of sexual affection and female sexuality. We will have the most to fear when these nations acquire the weapons of modern warfare. Tragically, this has already begun.

I was watching a lecture on morality by prof. Sandel when some questions occurred to me (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY&feature=share&list=PL597DA5F21A55365E)

Most students chose the option to divert the trolley on a track with only one person, thereby avoiding five. But most students didn't want to save the five by pushing a fat man in front of the trolley car.

Sandel is a Kantian, so he theorizes that pushing the fat man in front of the trolley is "using a conscious entity as a means" and we instinctively shy away from that. But what intrigued me was the (all to brief) explanation from one of the very few students who didn't want to divert the trolley in the first scenario - in my opinion it was basically a similarly Kantian argument; the student said that by diverting the trolley you are sacrificing the one to save the five, and that is something one should categorically never do. Sandel asks, almost sarcastically "even if it means five people are killed instead?" yet doesn't ask this from people who don't want to push the fat man.

Personally I think Kant's maxim is flawed because it's totally fuzzy what "treating a person only as an end in itself" even means. I think you can *always* find a perspective that says you're using someone "as a means". So I was probably not going to be convinced by that anyway, but I think the student's position shows how subjective and arbitrary Kant-like arguments are applied.

An interesting idea then occurred to me: look at what the choices *avoid* rather than what they select. In the first scenario people don't actually choose to kill the one person; they choose to avoid running over the five others. What of the second scenario? You avoid either (1) pushing the fat man in front of the trolley, killing him; or (2) standing by and doing nothing while five people die.

I think we can explain the reaction to the second scenario by stating that people would vastly prefer to stand by and do nothing rather than get involved, deciding who lives or dies, and run the risk of criticism for it. The difference with the first scenario is I think that there, we are said to be at the steering wheel of the trolley, and one could argue that steering one way or the other is anyway our choice so we can't really escape blame either way. But if we DID push the fat man, the trolley would stop, the fat man would be dead, the five would never know they were in danger, and it'd be left to us to explain why pushing someone onto the tracks seemed like a good idea.

It seems to me that the student who objected to diverting the car in the first scenario basically declined responsibility for steering, he wanted to let the car run as it would rather than bear the moral consequences of making a choice. He preferred to be a bystander, it seems.

So I don't think this shows that we somehow instinctively obey Kant's moral maxims. Rather I think it may show our penchant for what is called the "bystander effect".

But knowing that humans have a proven tendency to shirk responsibility in emergencies, what are we to make of our instinctive reluctance to push the fat man in front of the train, thereby saving five lives? Can we trust it as a "moral intuition" telling us what's right? Or are we merely finding justifications for our unwillingness to do the right thing and take responsibility for it?

Do you often find yourself preoccupied with thoughts about music? Do you feel that your musical tastes are not normal? Has the music you like ever created problems for you and your family? Do you hide some of your musical tastes from others? Has music been a way for you to escape your problems? Have you purchased services online for musical purposes (sites for MP3 sharing, music fansites, iTunes, etc.)? Have people in your life been upset about your music? Have you paid professional musicians to satisfy your musical needs? Have you spent considerable time surfing for music online? Have you regularly purchased music (records, CDs, MP3s), or materials about music (books, magazines, videos)? Do you visit music clubs or concert halls as part of your regular musical activity? Have you gone to public parks or street fairs looking for music? Have you ever been paid to make or sell music?

If any of these describe you, you are a Music Addict and should seek deprogramming and religious indoctrination right away!
/sarcasm>

"In our culture now, there is tolerance of violence and even sexual violence (or even ESPECIALLY sexual violence) but complete INTOLERANCE of naturally expressed sexuality."

http://toddshammer.wordpress.com/2007/10/22/jk-rowling-and-violence-guest-post/

Note: I'm not implying OMG violence == bad (or even HP == evil) but I do find it upsetting that "naturally expressed sexuality" is this big taboo whereas there are so many portrayals of dysfunctional, unhealthy, mean, twisted or even violent sexuality... can anyone name even one pop culture icon who could be considered a role model for healthy sexuality (compared to, say, spades of role models for being an ass-kicking mofo)?

The way sex is usually portrayed in media seems... very off to me. All too often it is portrayed like a performance of sorts, an empty ritual with only the barest of contexts. There is no real sense of intimacy because even though people are naked they don't seem to disclose anything personal so it's all so completely unsurprising and predictable that they don't even *need* tenderness... so it's often like watching space aliens to me.

The Hajnal line is a border that links Saint Petersburg, Russia and Trieste, Italy. In 1965, John Hajnal discovered it divides Europe into two areas characterized by a different levels of nuptiality. To the west of the line, marriage rates and thus fertility were comparatively low and a significant minority of women married late or remained single; to the east of the line and in the Mediterranean and select pockets of Northwestern Europe, early marriage was the norm and high fertility was countered by high mortality.

What surprised me was that this difference was supposedly noticeable since the 16th century. I somehow didn't think it would have been that long since we "suddenly" decided to marry for love. It was not entirely clear to me if the marriage age difference didn't exist earlier, or if they just failed to establish whether it did or didn't. The second wouldn't surprise me; it's not like "the media" back then didn't adore love stories long before the 16th century...

There was an article in the Hartford Advocate (http://web.archive.org/web/20071116212115/http://www.hartfordadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=3873)
from a journalist who entered a furry con under false pretenses with the hope of finding some shocking smutty furry orgies to report on.

The result is a rather poor con report - because about the only thing the intrepid reporter observes about the different events is what was NOT going on that she expected, namely, visible plushfucking. We learn that there was a dealer's room and some sort of art, but the main gist of the descriptions is whether or not anything "adult" was discernible. Aside from that, the only furry that is presented with any amount of detail is described as some sort of social misfit (I'm skunk, because when a skunk enters a room, everyone leaves! Haha unfunny), which isn't exactly flattering.

While it's a welcome change to see an article without blatant misrepresentations about what happens at furcons, there still seems to be an implicit assumption that it is acceptable to judge an entire subculture based on whether or not anything "adult" is going on. The author seems to have gotten an inkling of how important furriness is to some people, yet still predominantly focuses on the (lack of) sex angle, and that saddens me. Being furry is not about sex, but this is completely separate from whether or not anything sexual happens at furcons. Being furry is also not about designer drugs, or gambling, or satanic rituals, or a million other things far more unwholesome than kinky sex, whose absence at the con might have been mentioned.

I regret the media's preoccupation with passing negative judgments based largely on sexual stereotypes and prejudice. The above article is a good example of this, as the author is rather blatantly the one with "sex on the brain" and engaged in Jungian "projection onto the Shadow" - as can be seen from quotes like Thus I went undercover, after visiting a Halloween store to buy a belled collar, velvet cat ears and a nice piece of tail (30 inches, if you think length matters). That the reporter went looking specifically for sexual stuff, or that the presence or absence of sexual stuff in, say, furry art, is seen as the most crucial issue - that is a problem.

Peggy McIntosh wrote the classic White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack wherein she describes the difficulty of realizing one's own privileges, likening them to a knapsack full of useful things that is visible to everyone but oneself. She writes about the path of self-reflection and soul-searching she traveled in an attempt to unpack her own invisible knapsack.

It is darkly ironic that the most common reaction to her piece has been people making inventories of others' privileges while vehemently denying their own...

Some related articles:

http://creativedestruction.wordpress.com/2006/06/02/privilege-and-disadvantage-as-sexist-framing-devices/
(Sexist framing; a man has a privilege, a woman lacks a disadvantage)

http://sweatingthroughfog.blogspot.be/2007/10/playing-games-with-privilege.html
(Alleging superior moral and epistemic knowledge based on claims of victimhood while silencing others based on alleged privilege)

http://adamjones.freeservers.com/effacing.htm
(Effacing the Male: Gender, Misrepresentation, and Exclusion in the Kosovo War)

Here's a disturbing old article on Japanese shops selling used panties:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040226204619/http://www.smn.co.jp/e/key/burusera.html

Personally, if I could get good money from selling my worn-out underwear to a shop that caters to perverts who get off on that sort of thing, I would.

That said, I find it disturbing that the author of the above editorial reserves her moral outrage for the fact that girls are "allowed to sell themselves" - not only does it seem like a huge leap to equate selling panties with "selling yourself", what I find particularly disturbing is that the author deplores that girls are allowed to make their own choices, not that there are schoolgirls in a possibly unhealthy relationship with the sex industry. One gets the feeling the author wouldn't object to parents selling their surplus daughters into sex slavery (a historical practice in Japan), or would prefer a situation where girls are forced by poverty to sell their panties ("girls who come in to sell are not from poor families") over one where they can freely choose to do so for whatever reasons appeals to them.

I find *that* far more scary than a guy who likes to stick his face in other people's laundry. I am a bit shocked that the panties bought for $20 sell for $50, but I guess having to interact with pervert customers is worth that much...

(I totally don't understand the objection that material things are exchanged for material things, or how the situation could be made in any way better by involving the girls' "soul" in the transaction.)

Someone else objected to the shops because "it does contribute to the overall culture in which the men buying these panties are free to dream about schoolgirl panties as if they were illicit. The underwear may have actually been freely sold, but the image in everyone's minds, the thing that I think the shops are trying to evoke, is that of illicitly-stolen underwear. By reinforcing that image as something that's okay for everyone to partake in, one is encouraging guys to get off on girls' underwear that they feel like they "shouldn't" have, which of course encourages a feeling that these guys have taken advantage of the girls without their consent, even though they haven't. This feeling thus becomes more commonplace in society, and then society becomes more complacent to the idea of guys taking advantage of young girls without their consent, and that is what is bad."

I'm reluctant to agree that an activity is problematic, based on assumptions about the way people think in general. In my opinion, these shops didn't *create* the attraction of stolen underwear/taking advantage of young girls. I doubt one can "encourage" someone to get off on something one wouldn't otherwise get off on. I'm not convinced that offering a legal, harmless outlet for that attraction necessarily makes society more complacent about harmful actions. There are some really scary things happening in Japan, but is it actually worse now than, say, during Meiji when it was acceptable to take advantage of girls as long as they were poor? If access to escapist fantasy material had a detrimental effect, things *should* be exponentially worse now than ever before in history.

Also, if there is no relation between our actual consent and the way our actions are perceived, what can we do? We could refuse to sell our used panties, or we could burn them to make sure they don't fall into the hands of perverts, but that seems like playing into the trope - we pretend that we don't want people to perv over our panties, whereas we really couldn't care less.

If you sell your dirty underwear, openly and unambiguously, with full consent that any stranger may use it for whatever, and the buyer nevertheless likes to imagine that he really obtained it from you against your will, what can *you* do to disabuse him of the notion, except to repeatedly and enthusiastically say - and demonstrate - that you really want to sell your dirty undies? Criminalizing possession of dirty laundry hardly seems practical. =P And it would only re-enforce what you try to avoid by making it actually illicit.

The answer that you simply can't ever consent to selling your underwear is not only totally objectifying, it's also promoting a society where consent really is meaningless. No doesn't really mean no, unless and until yes really means yes.

Loving the person next to you is the most difficult thing, isn't it?

It's easy to love Jesus today, because he lived 2000 years ago. For the people living at the same time, it was so intolerable that they had to kill him...

Lately I've discovered the joy of customizing wall clocks. Most clocks are super-boring when left as-is, and can be made much more interesting with just a little work, like printing out and pasting on a new clockface.

Here are a few I made so far:
( Read more... )