la noblesse wrote: ↑Thu May 30, 2019 3:57 am
To put it in simpler terms: There is no way anyone will prevent me from discussing in this forum stuff that is legal, and quite possibly--if it takes my fancy--perhaps illegal stuff too. I would rather nuke the forum than administer a forum in which I have to censor myself for the benefit of strangers with weird hang-ups. So you guys as well might save yourself the effort and not bother trying.
I do like that attitude, but sex between teenage girls and much older men is definitely a hot button topic in the USA. Over at the Christian Ayatollah's forum, in the thread about the recent Fatwa, there was a link to this article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/internation ... in/311230/
Dawkins comes across as sensible, but the author of the article takes a hard line and will have nothing to do with Dawkins' argument, presumably because the public takes an equally hard line.
Similar line of reasoning to that of Dawkins is the following. Currently, there are absolutely no penalties in the USA for parents who call their children "stupid", "worthless" and similar names that can scar a person psychologically for life, with no demands by the media for changing the law here. Mild penalties for things like forcing a child to be a vegan or denying the child sunlight so that the child doesn't develop properly, so again scared for life. But sex between father and 17yo daughter? All hell breaks loose: 20 years in prison, lifetime listing on the sex offenders registry, chorus of commentators on yahoo (appropriate name) and similar forums foaming at the mouth and clamoring for harsher punishment, either castration or death. I'm neither approving/condemning any of the above listed behaviours, just remarking on the wildly disproportionate penalties.
I thought this would be a good thread to make my first post on this forum, since I do tend to be something of a shit-stirrer myself on the internet. On the other hand, I'm not really into political discussions these days, so I probably won't post here often.
With age, I've come to the nihilistic worldview that individuals have very little impact on the world. So-called leaders of the course of human events are like leaders of spontaneous parades: people who happened by chance to be already near the front when the parade started, or else who pushed themselves to the front later, but in either case not the cause of the parade. No one started the parade in motion. It just happened spontaneously. Tolstoy famously argued for this worldview in "War and Peace".
Another metaphor is that history is like a great machine rumbling along, with us as individuals caught up inside but having no control over the machine. Best we can do is try to avoid being crushed in the machine's gears. Not every one can avoid being crushed, so situations arise where saving yourself requires the destruction of someone else. For rich people in the First World to live well, who knows much suffering by poor people in the Third World? Etc.
This worldview justifies my current lifestyle of wandering hedonism, and since that lifestyle makes me happy, unlikely that I'll be changing my worldview anytime soon.