Scots Taffer on 15/1/2008 at 10:05
I think it's meaningless debating that though, as in the case of determining consent through a dog's misplaced affections with your leg into meaning sexual intercourse... entirely different concepts for human and beast I reckon.
And now who needs to take a chill pill, mr serious.
D'Juhn Keep on 15/1/2008 at 11:13
Robots, animals, bicycles. Is comm chat as a collective a bit frustrated at the moment?
DinkyDogg on 15/1/2008 at 11:15
An animal can't consent to being slaughtered for food, either. Honestly, society has it's priorities wrong if things like (
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=battery+hen&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2) this are acceptable and deviant sex acts are not.
Not that I think you should be boning animals, by any means. It is abusive, though much less so and on a much smaller scale than the institutionalized abuse in the poultry industry.
As to your other points:
Quote:
1. Incest has not been an observable evolutionary imperative, so saying that it's purely "social taboo" is bullshit"
2. The lack of incest could be directly correlated to its potential implications with regards to congenital defects and weaknesses inherent in limiting the genepool
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. It's not beneficial for evolution, therefore it's not social taboo? I'd say that it's social taboo for exactly that reason - it leads to kids with twelve toes. But with birth control (and abortion) readily available, that seems like an obsolete taboo. And then you would also have to apply the no sex doctrine to anyone likely to have dysfunctional or malformed children. Could you imagine legislating that people with genetic diseases may not have sex?
Quote:
3. We kill each other, so animals are fair game and in the evolutionary sense it's predatory in nature (try killing a lion for food or fun) and more or less balanced - breeding for killing is slightly different but an obvious byproduct of our natural instincts and industrialization
First let me say that I am not against raising animals for meat - I eat meat, though not poultry. (I avoid the industrially raised poultry because of abhorrent treatment of the birds, and I support free range but don't eat it because I am the proud owner of three little chickens myself). Anyway, I again don't entirely understand your point. Being useful for evolution justifies abuse of animals? In that sense, activities like rape could be considered helpful in terms of passing on your own genes, but certainly that's not acceptable in civilized society. I think I might be missing your point - please clarify if I am.
PigLick on 15/1/2008 at 11:15
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
Cuz I know for sure of male dogs that would do women given the chance.
where the fuck do you live
haha also between the time i wrote this and posted it huge wads of other people posting shit happened
Scots Taffer on 15/1/2008 at 11:25
Quote Posted by DinkyDogg
An animal can't consent to being slaughtered for food, either.
The immediate and irrefutable human need for food does not require consent. The animal kingdom functions on a kill or be killed, predator-prey principle and that's what I'm applying here (hence my "go hunt a lion" comment). Most meat is prey for human fodder, much as insects are fodder for smaller creatures and so on. It is simply the way of things; do shows like Animal Planet reduce to tears and gnashing your teeth?
That is not to say I don't agree with you entirely on the mistreatment of animals, such as battery hens, and I've avoided eating veal ever since I became aware of how it came to be.
Quote Posted by DinkyDogg
It's not beneficial for evolution, therefore it's not social taboo?
My point is that social taboo is coincidental and to be expected as a byproduct of it being rejected in the evolutionary process. I'm quite sure at certain stages of human development there may have been tribes/communities that attempted interbreeding with the mixed success that it's guaranteed to deliver, and hence it slowly dwindled out then over time, becoming "taboo" when we started to label things as such.
I couldn't really care less about the "taboo" of it, I was just commenting that the reason any taboo exists is because of the likelihood that it was tried and brought bad genetic followthrough. If we're moving onto social concepts of why incest is taboo, I'll leave that alone but basically I consign it to a very small subset of sexual acts that are either deviant or have a potential for massive corruption.
Quote Posted by DinkyDogg
Being useful for evolution justifies abuse of animals? In that sense, activities like rape could be considered helpful in terms of passing on your own genes, but certainly that's not acceptable in civilized society. I think I might be missing your point - please clarify if I am.
The predatory in nature part could quite easily lend itself to the idea of passing on your genes through rape, if it were a necessary function of all humans, but as we all know sex is something that everyone wants but doesn't necessarily get because our social precept of this act is based on consent.
mopgoblin on 15/1/2008 at 11:42
Quote Posted by Scots Taffer
The immediate and irrefutable human need for food does not require consent.
In humans, the need for food doesn't imply a need for meat, thus it is not necessary to slaughter animals in order to satisfy it. Eating meat, like producing offspring, is something you might want to do, not something essential for survival.
Scots Taffer on 15/1/2008 at 11:45
Isn't that entirely debatable??
mopgoblin on 15/1/2008 at 12:14
Quote Posted by Scots Taffer
Isn't that entirely debatable??
I assume you're referring to needs regarding meat, and not offspring? I reckon I can objectively say that there are plenty of (long-term) vegetarians who are not dead, so it's generally true in Western countries. If I recall correctly, there <em>are</em> some medical conditions which require consumption of meat, but from memory they're not particularly common, so it's still not an irrefutable need for many/most people.
Scots Taffer on 15/1/2008 at 12:19
But isn't stating that we don't need meat and can subsist on vegetables basically being preferential in a devil's advocate sense? I'm talking about biological and evolutionary imperatives... man developed the ability to cook, eat and digest meat and it has become a cornerstone of the human diet. I'm not talking about if we can survive on vegetables, nor am I asking the question of is eating meat right, I just don't see how the comparison even arose to be honest - I'm just saying that eating meat is an observable recurring human trait (without directly attributable side-effects that one could make a case for us having rejected it through the course of human progress) and that incest is not, and there are reasons behind both.
mopgoblin on 15/1/2008 at 14:02
Quote Posted by Scots Taffer
I'm not talking about if we
can survive on vegetables, nor am I asking the question of is eating meat right, I just don't see how the comparison even arose to be honest - I'm just saying that eating meat is an observable recurring human trait (without directly attributable side-effects that one could make a case for us having rejected it through the course of human progress) and that incest is not, and there are reasons behind both.
People have rejected plenty of things through the course of human history for all sorts of dicey reasons, <em>especially</em> where sex is involved. Pornography, erotica, masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, homosexuality, interracial sex, transsexualism, BDSM, fetishism, and contraception have each been rejected by various societies at various times, yet there's nothing <em>wrong</em> about them, nor are they inherently harmful. In particular, during the period we refer to as the "Enlightenment", Western society managed to construct some astonishingly fucked up ideas regarding sex, some of which are still hanging on. There's been the notion that sex defines gender, and the notion that intersex people don't (or shouldn't) exist.
On the other hand, humans have also, in various cultures and at various times, decided that some horrible practices are acceptable. Societies have endorsed or used rape, genital mutilation, sexual slavery, and chastity belts, generally with few regrets. Intersex people are often assigned a sex at birth - the criteria are rather arbitrary - and given surgery so that they resemble the assigned sex, with little regard for the consequences for the individual. In the near future we'll have to deal with the ethically dodgy prospect of testing embryos for genetic "disorders" and allowing only those that pass to develop. It's little more than eugenics dressed up in fancy technology, but there are people - otherwise apparently rational - who think this is a great idea.
Observing human societies can tell you a lot of interesting things, but culture is not objective. Throughout history, it's been directed and shaped by those who wish to acquire or maintain power, by those who abuse power, and, once in a while, by those who don't care about power at all. The process of creating a culture is often as destructive as it is constructive. Looking through all of the distortions in order to discover natural human behaviours, even if those can be defined at all, is probably not going to be very successful.
