Tuesday 8 May 2012

Short Treatise on Speciesism

Stilgar from the sietch got me thinking about this one - how do we get to decide which animals we can kill, legally and uncontroversially. The Bulgarian Law for the Protection of Animals(in Bulgarian, translation) was soon posted, exposing flagrant speciesism deeply rooted into the bulgarian legal system.

Now it's clear that such legislation raises more questions than it answers and it's bound to have critics. Humanity should be allowed to kill certain animals e.g. ones transmit diseases but on the other hand some are creepily similar to us to be used for cruel entertainment. There has to be a line somewhere - but how do we define it?

The classical school of thought here, advocated by luminaries like Douglas Hostadter, dictates that we should rate animals by intelligence and the most intelligent should be deemed closer to us, and thus - not eaten. This has also a lot of anecdotal support - quite a few vegetarians eat fish for example, for plenty of reasons, with "because they don't think" being one of them. Indeed, the more sophisticated nervous system an animal has - the closer to our experience of pain and distress it should be able to experience. Some problems arise though with the lack of reliable measure of intelligence - no one has managed to have a chimp and a dolphin play a game of chess yet, so we get to choose from the different sets of superficial criteria that give us different results. And of course the line has to be arbitrary - there is no such thing as universal maximum edible intelligence (this would make old people legal).

There is also the competing measure - cuteness. Kids nowadays grow up with children's books and films with super cool talking farm animals that don't stink even the slightest bit; kids can more easily imagine them being friends rather than source of food and stench. And with the rise of the internet with its feline obsession and vigilantism, cats became a no-no (sorry Alf). So, by natural selection optimizing for the cuteness factor some animals have found a new evolutional niche. This makes good sense - they live off the human society, which is profoundly stratified by physical appearance in many ways - better looking people of all sexes get a disproportionate amount of all the benefits, why should we then not discriminate against animals in the same way?

What we are seeing now is actually an evolutionary arms race for a part of humanity's waste resources between stray dogs and our anti-cuteness defence mechanism - the cutest of dogs have better chances to survive and produce progeny, thus cutifying their kind. If they do well maybe one day they'll achieve the level of protection that cats now enjoy and survive.

Friday 4 May 2012

How not to love your children

This BBC story about the Interpol child porn caches reminded me about the sympathy I hold for paedophiles, but let's explore some of the implications of this article before delving into that.

First of all, the Interpol unit that combats child abuse must be the dream workplace for, well, paedophiles. Can you imagine, the collection of all CP seized anywhere in the world, ever - something so illegal that the mere sight of the CP image I accidentally landed upon on /b/ once made me consider throwing my laptop in the nearest river before the feds1 come - constantly at your disposal. And not only that, but your job involves sifting through millions of depictions of children being abused. I won't be the least bit surprised if they actually hire paedophiles on purpose - think about it, will anyone who's not a sick pervert agree to work such a job? We're talking about someone who has to not only view all those pics and films but recognize the children in them and given a new image - to determine if he's seen this child somewhere in the pile or it's fresh material. I can't see a more efficient way to do this apart from having a devoted person go over2 the images time and time again until he knows their faces (and bodies) as if they were his own children (which he has probably also screwed). But yeah, that's of course necessary as child abusers need to be caught before they get a chance to father 7 children with their own daughter.

Which brings me to my next point - shouldn't, then, child porn be legal to posses and share, in order to generate more exposure and improve the chances of those degenerates being caught? Why do we have to rely on just the perverts that Interpol has hired to catch fellow perverts? The argument against this is that it would maybe encourage more people to produce child porn as, with the urge to throw laptops in rivers taken out of the equation, there will be much more demand? I don't think that's bad - I don't believe that CP producers are just attention whores who normally don't abuse children, but "hey, I can get millions of views on porntube.com, why not rape some minors." I'm convinced that CP is made by people who like screwing children in the first place and this just gets compounded by the natural urge to do home porn that every sexually healthy individual experiences. So if they want to film themselves committing crime and let it circulate online - well let them do it and have the hordes of semi-perverted online vigilantes and super-advanced dick-recognizing software catch them - there are so many subtle accidental tell-tale that might reveal the victim or abuser's identities or at least the location.


Now what do I mean by sympathy - don't get me wrong, I certainly don't approve child abuse! I agree that it's a deplorable crime and perpetrators should be put behind bars in order to discourage other enthusiasts. They are, however, sick people with a psychological disorder that has directed their natural sexual desire towards a target on which society won't let them act. Indeed, traditional morals in most cultures teach us that sexual desires are not such a big deal and individuals are expected to single-handedly resist these temptations. I, on the other hand, am willing to stick my prick in the traditional morals' bigoted, hypocrite mouth as my sexual desires are extremely hard to resist (especially when there is no good reason to do so). If I lived in a universe where no woman is willing to have sex with me and no prostitution exists, I would either be a rapist or an extremely sad and troubled person - and this is pretty much the choice that paedophiles face. The ones that have either low libido or strong moral code somehow manage to abstain and desperately try to persuade themselves that chicks with tits are actually better - the rest end up abusing children. It might be brutal and repulsive but at least it's understandable.

Now back to my previous point - better availability of child porn will give these people a way to relieve themselves of these desires without hurting anyone. Studies have shown that there is an inverse correlation between incidence of rape and availability of pornography, so there is no reason why this shouldn't be the case with child porn. Now I'm not saying that we should legalize screwing children for the production of CP (as is the case in many countries - paying for sex is only legal if there is a camera filming the process) - but tons of material already exist, why not let perverts jerk off to it rather than rape your children? Also, what about digitally produced child porn that doesn't involve any real children? Technologies need to improve just a tiny bit more in order to allow life-like films to be produced digitally for low cost - I can't wait to see what possibilities will these open up for the porn industry! But apart from proliferation of kinky practices, this will also make the streets safer for our children!

I have a lot more to say on the effect of sexual attraction on society so I'll be posting more on the topic in the future - hopefully taking equally controversial stance. I had other things in mind for this article but I might as well do some useful work instead - but if you have any comments and ideas about related topics that needs discussion make sure to drop a comment here or speak up in some other way. Wish you all a nice weekend with sex so kinky that will put the digital porn of the future to shame!


1 - even though I actually live in Europe (as can be deducted by the spelling of paedophile I've used)
2 - or more suitably - come over