Death Is Bad

So I guess right now Britain is having a moral panic about online porn. Here is just one recent article documenting this generation-destroying menace. It’s another great example of wide-eyed parents jumping all over the chance to believe anything outrageous because indignation feels sooooo good. It’s almost as stupid as the Rainbow Parties “phenomenon”. (Seriously… ‘nuggets’? How intentionally gullible do you have to be?) And as always, it can be refuted with a simple statistic:

100%

That’s how many men watch porn. All of them. So for every guy that can’t even hold down a job because he’s addicted to online porn, these documentaries conveniently skip over the dozens-to-hundreds of men that are MAKING THAT VERY DOCUMENTARY who have jobs, friends, and normal lives. Plus the almost-every-other-male-in-the-country demographic. If your kid grows up to be like the one guy who can’t function rather than the everyone-else who can, it’s not the porn that’s the problem.

There’s also a huge difference in the types of sex that 12-year-olds are having and the types of sex that 30-year-olds are having. 30-year-olds have actual sex, whereas 12-year-olds have imaginary sex. The difference between these types of sex cannot be overstated. Whatever the effects porn has on imaginary sex, it has much less impact on actual sex. In fact, the impact porn has on real-life sex is approximately the same as the impact Hollywood violence/romance/life has on real violence/romance/life – it makes them seem kinda lame by comparison.

Porn isn’t some magic mind-control drug. Porn is what every guy in the world saw in his mind when he fantasized between the ages of 12 and… forever. It is simply that fantasy acted out on a stage, recorded, and served back to you. The same way Hollywood violence is what people fantasize THEIR violence would be like if they were bad-ass, the same way Hollywood romance is what girls fantasize THEIR romantic encounters would be like ideally, the same way Hollywood life is what people wish THEIR real lives were like, if they were rich and talented and courageous and lucky. Long before film was invented porn already existed, it just existed in the mind and couldn’t be shared as easily.

And then people have real sex and it turns out that just like every other fantasy – it’s nothing like the fantasy. And they adjust and are disappointed and learn and grow and move on. Everyone has to learn that life isn’t like fantasy the hard way – that’s what maturing is. Maybe some people lash out at porn/Hollywood/Disney and scream in rage about how distorted fantasy is, how real life doesn’t meet their expectations, and that fantasy should be banned because it warps the minds of impressionable young children. Those people are idiots. The fantasies already existed. Moreover, it’s entirely possible to enjoy fantasies as fantasy once you realize real life doesn’t work like that.

If they’re that upset about it, perhaps they should use all that energy to try to make their lives more like their fantasies. It’s hard work, which admittedly was never part of the fantasy! But it’s worth it. If it turns out you don’t like the fantasy as much as you thought you would that’s ok… don’t pursue it. But for fuck’s sake, stop freaking out about your kids having sex fantasies. It’s what people do, and kids are people.

Let’s assume that Twilight did the right thing by eliminating the excess Pinkie Pies. (Yup, I’m continuing this thread) If we grant a few premises, the ones commonly spelled out in these sorts of disaster stories, this is a safe assumption. What, then, is my complaint? If the correct decision was reached and the correct action was taken, can’t we just celebrate that? Do we really have to see the person who did the right thing tortured with self-doubt and regret?

Yes, we do – and not because we’re a sadistic audience. It’s because this is a morality tale – specifically one that examines the morality of killing certain people so that the rest of society may survive. The moral that is taught in these stories is that it is better for one person to die than for everyone to die. However it presumes that the audience already has internalized the “killing people is bad” lesson. The story is about the conflict of two moral desires – the desire to never intentionally kill anyone, and the desire to not allow society to crash and burn.

Alonzo Fife’s explanation of Desirism (the best human-level ethical system I’ve yet found) states that intentional actions are motivated by the desires of the actor, and that the purpose of a society’s moral code is to instill in actors those desires that society deems important. In our society two very strongly promoted desires are those to not kill, and those to prevent social collapse. That’s why the conflict presented in this morality tale is so intriguing. As Eliezer says, as story of Good vs Good is far more interesting than a story of Good vs Evil.

When a character is forced into violating one of those desires to fulfill the other, the level of his/her torment at having to break that rule demonstrates how dearly s/he held it. A character forced to eat vanilla ice cream instead of chocolate in order to save a sibling shouldn’t show any remorse or hesitation. A character forced to kill to do so should be tortured. S/he should have lasting psychological scars, and require therapy. When this happens in real life to good people, suicide sometimes results.

If a character in fiction quickly and without any signs of discomfort resorts to exterminating a large group of people, it means something. Yes, the answer was right in a utilitarian framework, but human characters should have other desires besides simply “maximize utility”. Humans are limited, humans are flawed, and humans are notoriously running on corrupted hardware. Utility Maximization is a morality that is only safe for Gods. It’s good for a human to have reached the right conclusion, but unfortunately that human must feel some remorse if it has the desires it should have. If it doesn’t show remorse that is a sign it does not have the desire to not kill others. It is dangerous, and should not serve as a model for others!

The fact that all of Ponyville was OK with this mass execution means either that their society is deeply corrupt, or that the clones are not people and therefore are not counted in morality. I’ma go on further about that, but this post is long enough as it is, so it’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

When I hear about the pope I feel like a hipster. His apologia fills me with intense irritation rather than joy, which I realize is a flaw. I should be happy that they’re finally coming around. Secular morality is always advancing and pulling religion kicking and screaming into the current century. It had to be done for slavery, women’s rights, gay rights, and it’ll just keep happening.

50 years from now all the church leaders will be saying how religion was always at the forefront of the gay rights movement, leading the way with Jesus’s teachings of “brotherly love”. And their followers will believe them. So when the pope says gays are cool, or atheists aren’t going to hell, I acknowledge that it’s good that more of the world is moving out of the dark ages, and we should be celebrating that the world is getting better. But I can’t help but think “Took you long enough you freakin’ idiot.”

It’s like atheists are the hipsters of morality. “Oh, you like gay rights now? That’s cute. I was into equality before it was mainstream and cool.” /thick-rimmed-glasses

(Continued from yesterday) So what is the profit that would come from attacking Syria? Why would a reasonable nation pay those costs?

I don’t know what the further motive is. Maybe it’s there and I can’t see it, or maybe there isn’t one. After ten years I’m still not sure why we attacked Iraq.

But…

I submit…

The continuation of the military is its own justification.

In Roman terms, it is both our Bread and our Circus. It is our welfare program, our eternal economic stimulus package, our cathartic release, and our way of keeping united in the face of a common foe. It has become the shiney top-of-the-line hammer that we use to fix most problems whether they are nails or not. And when we have such a fancy hammer we need to keep finding reasons to keep it funded. It’s hard to justify spending as much on military as every other country on earth combined if we don’t “need” it.

This does seem a little too convenient, a bit too “explains everything” for me. But it fits, it explains the insanity of the previous war, and it was predicted well in advance by men much smarter than me.

/sigh. I wanted to move away from Blurred Lines, as it seems to have taken over my blog the last couple weeks, but shit keeps coming up.

I get most of my news from social media and podcasts. And I gotta say, I’m pretty proud of my friends-list! Barely a peep about the Miley Cirus thing, except to comment on how stupid the media is. I finally learned about it from NPR, which is a black mark on NPR. :/

Much is made of American rape-culture, and a large part of that is slut-shaming. Taking any positive expression of sexuality by a woman and attacking her for it, tearing apart her reputation and destroying her social net. Rape culture depends on fear of slut-shaming both to control women and to scare them into staying quiet about sexual assaults. The entirety of this Miley Cyrus “scandal” is nothing more than one giant slut-shaming extravaganza by all the privileged white men who can’t abide the young women they feel they own showing any sexual agency. It’s a blight on our culture, and the news media are gleefully wallowing in it like pigs in shit because it drives up their web-traffic. NPR could have thoughtfully reported this as “millions of people in our society are still slut-shaming assholes”. Instead they jumped on the sexist bandwagon. With an online poll to boot! So all the ass-brained pricks can reassure themselves of how right they are to be getting high on self-righteous indignation. Once again The Onion shows itself to be the American news source with the most integrity.

I sent an adapted version of the above to the NPR Ombudsman. It’s not much, but at least it’s not nothing.