Forums of the Libertarian Left

I read that story a looooong time ago. Like I said I find it repulsive, but I realize that's just my personal view and there's nothing inherently immoral.

Incestual couples having children-- I wouldn't suggest it since it's pretty dangerous as far as the children's genes are concerned.

My recent obsession with the Fritzl case resulted in me discovering this:

Fritzl case sparks global incestuous embrace.

Making children: stupid.

Francois Tremblay wrote:Making children: stupid.

Dude, do you know how much those little fuckers bring in the counter-economy?

Yes, har har, very funny.

Im not going to judge on this article morally, and its obvious that the sister and brother liked it, but subjectively I find it disgusting. I would rather have a tubgirl, 1guy1jar, and 2girls1cup than have this shit happen to me. Its gross as all hell.

I find the Times article beautiful. This world has so little real love, and damns most of it; it has so much fake love, and celebrates it as holiness. I could only bless people who have experienced such wonderful things with each other.

I agree that incestuous couples should avoid producing children. Of course, it's not entirely unlikely that in the medium term future the results of inbreeding may be fairly easily correctable.

Wikipedia remains helpful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incest

The Fritzl case is unspeakably horrifying. I can only say: "this is what will happen everywhere if you close doors to sunlight".

isn't inbreeding used all the time by, well, breeders of different domesticated animals ?

lol @ incest. eeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwww.

its gross to 99.999999% of people, but there is no real rational objection to it if its agreed to by both parties though i'd guess there is a good chance they've had some traumatic experiences in their past. or they just find each other hot - i dunno.

now heres a question: would you do a clone of yourself?

Aster wrote:This world has so little real love

how do you figure? you must have an awful strong view of what constitutes 'real love' *sings mary j blige song in head* maybe you need to dl the <3 mix i made.

ctmummey wrote:its gross to 99.999999% of people, but there is no real rational objection to it if its agreed to by both parties though i'd guess there is a good chance they've had some traumatic experiences in their past. or they just find each other hot - i dunno.

I'm not sure what to make of it. I personally find it disgusting. I personally don't care what the two do in keeping with my philosophy of, 'whatever gets you off,' however, I get the feeling a friend of my with a background in psychology would say that they're actually 'ill'.

now heres a question: would you do a clone of yourself?

It wouldn't be sex. It would be masturbation.

I'm not quite sure what you all find so especially repulsive about two human animals who share slightly more than the usual percentage of their genetic code engaging in the act commonly known as fucking. Sounds like a lot of excess "moral" and cultural baggage. Anyway, good for them. If you can find happiness, take it.

However, I get the feeling a friend of my with a background in psychology would say that they're actually 'ill'.

The woman in the article seemed anything but mentally unbalanced to me. She sounded clear-minded, purposeful, and passionate. Nor would I place much faith in the wisdom of a profession which also pronounces as science such notions as 'oppositional defiant disorder', with which I hope we are all here afflicted.

You must have an awful strong view of what constitutes 'real' love.

Yes. I do think erotic relationships may be pleasurable, friendly, or useful and still be wonderful things. I would very deeply like to see every kind of chosen sexual relationship given greater respect. But finding someone who values you more and more for everything most deeply important to you, who wants you more and more the more you show your own most authentic self, and who thereby gives you strength you'd forgotten you had, yes, that's rare. It's tragic that most people who carry their lanterns their entire lives and never find a good reason to put it down. But then, the world forces most people to snuff their candles out before they've any real chance to try. The very notion of choosing one's mate on the basis of mutual attraction- companionate marriage- is still a radical and dangerous thing in most of the world. And most people who do find love keep it for a few years and then watch it fade and die within the confines of responsibility and institutions. Even worse, most people never find the conceptual tools or aesthetic inspiration by which they can discover themselves well enough to know how to discover another.

1: my understanding is that incest is close to universally reviled across cultures and times. that could be an argument for it or agin it i suppose, but i suspect its something most of us are hardwired to be disgusted by and if humans are hardwired to be disgusted by something then they are hardwired to be disgusted by it. now if people want to start their own incest colonies in the freed market...i kid, i kid...

2: Yeah Aster it seems we differ on what constitutes love you seem to have a Platonic ideal of it and at the same time gave no mention to Platonic love! you also forget grandmas who - the good ones anyway - have enough love for the whole world if we'd all just visit them more often!

Aster wrote:

RoyceChristian wrote:However, I get the feeling a friend of my with a background in psychology would say that they're actually 'ill'.

The woman in the article seemed anything but mentally unbalanced to me. She sounded clear-minded, purposeful, and passionate. Nor would I place much faith in the wisdom of a profession which also pronounces as science such notions as 'oppositional defiant disorder', with which I hope we are all here afflicted.

Bleh. Sorry for the bad use of words. It's been a long day.

You don't know this friend or how she works (any deviation from her particular attitudes and there's something wrong with you). One way they determine if someone is insane is statistically -- if you're doing something different to what everyone else is, you're nuts. I've pointed out on the odd occasion that if it just so happens that everyone else around you is batshit crazy and you're relatively 'normal', they'd be justified in sending you to the asylum. Or prescribing drugs to rectify the 'problem'.

Then again, some parts of psychology seem credible. At lot of stuff to do with learning, persuasion and so on seem to have scientific basis. The infamous Stanford Prison experiment serves to show that there has to be some basis in psychology because it validates what we as Anarchists have been pointing out for decades now. However, a lot of the disorders propose are BS as they're compiled not by objective testing but by professional consensus -- such as how homosexuality was considered a 'disorder' not very long ago.

Although another interesting thing I picked up, apparently homophobic men are more aroused when they witness homosexual sex than non-homophobic men. It all seems pretty give and take.

ctmummey wrote:lol @ incest. eeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwww.

its gross to 99.999999% of people, but there is no real rational objection to it if its agreed to by both parties though i'd guess there is a good chance they've had some traumatic experiences in their past. or they just find each other hot - i dunno.

now heres a question: would you do a clone of yourself?

Well, my identity rests on my values, choices, and experiences, not on my genes. I do not like my genes. Someone else, with different experiences, choices, and values, with the same genes, would not even have the same body. They would be my not-really-identical twin. They probably would not be my physical type, or, for that matter, my emotional type.

ctmummey wrote:1: my understanding is that incest is close to universally reviled across cultures and times. that could be an argument for it or agin it i suppose,

How would that be an argument?

AlaskanAnarchist wrote:I'm not quite sure what you all find so especially repulsive about two human animals who share slightly more than the usual percentage of their genetic code engaging in the act commonly known as fucking. Sounds like a lot of excess "moral" and cultural baggage. Anyway, good for them. If you can find happiness, take it.

Word. S/he says it so I don't have to.

In case anyone was wondering about what I think, I absolutely fucking refuse to condemn this person. Because I am a "sexualist".

ctmummey wrote:2: Yeah Aster it seems we differ on what constitutes love you seem to have a Platonic ideal of it and at the same time gave no mention to Platonic love! you also forget grandmas who - the good ones anyway - have enough love for the whole world if we'd all just visit them more often!

I'm certainly not a Platonist(=)! And the ideals I described were meant to be real human possibilities which, however rare, can be experienced, and are wholly of this world. I do think most human relationships which are called love differ in kind from my ideal, primarily because of false and confining notions of what human relationships ought to be- especially the notion that one 'should' love someone, or that its proper expression occurs in contexts where individual happiness is ultimately treated as a means to social or moral ends. I certainly don't believe that love for the whole world is possible or desirable, except in the sense that people who are deeply pervaded with happiness because they know and find what they love in life can be overflowing in general benevolence and capable of generously appreciating the best in everything around them.

I certainly think that asexual friendships can be wonderful, and that there are nonerotic kinds of love that are beautiful. My neo-mom is a wonderful woman and I admire her greatly. I don't find anything noble or worthwhile in the celebration of love precisely because it is not erotic, which is what most of Plato's popular heirs have meant in practise. I think 'Platonic love' is a useful description for a good thing which I've certainly felt, but as a normative ideal I think that Plato got everything as sublimely bass-ackwards as usual. He certainly knew depth of feeling, but he felt a need to place its source outside reality. To me that's both very dangerous and very sad.

As for grandmothers, I was thinking about erotic love, and it didn't occur to me to think about them in this context. I seriously doubt that all grandmothers have 'enough love for the whole world', since grandmothers are humans who differ immensely in their personalities, values and affections. I don't think we honour love by ascribing its source and nature to the social relationships wherein it's socially expected. I'm sterile, but were I to become a grandmother I severely hope that I wouldn't adopt this ethos. Relating to children in this way seems valuable and rewarding and deserving of respect, but it doesn't logically support a romanticised essentialism; qualifying this by confining one's appreciation to 'good' grandmothers seems a version of the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy. I've certainly nothing against real affection one may have for one's grandmother (real affection from any source being so valuable and rare), and there's almost certainly a sociobiological string which such relationships easily pull. My maternal grandmother was one of the two people in my extended family I ever admired; her urbanity and aestheticism were inspirations. I'd merely say that from a 'transhumanist' perspective that the best thing would be to recognise the possibility that we can detach this given sentiment from literal biological relations, and feel deeper affection of this kind if we look for people whose spirits reflect and inspire our own. I care far more for the woman who has adopted me than I did for either of my birthparents, but I can recognise that some mother-child button is being hit in both of us. I immensely treasure the affection and do everything I can to repay her for one of the kindest things someone has ever done for me, but don't find value it the unchosen community which is usually held up as the relevant familialist ideal.

If we look at those we choose as friends, in a context where we have choice, we quickly find that the depth of our friendship accords with seeing something in another person, and that those with whom we have something in common are thinly and inconveniently scattered across the entire world. And then we look back at the roll-of-the-dice collection of people we're given as family, and in most cases we realise we'd never be friends with these people if we judged by our own standards. Unfortunately most people respond to such realisations by negating their own perceptions and trying to make themselves feel things that they don't. And since one can't fake an pretenced emotion without denigrating and eventually denying and suppressing real emotion, we also make honest response to desires which are inconvenient to the social portrait a shameful thing to be hidden. The result is a perfect inversion which places false love over appreciation for the real. In an emotionally closed society, happiness and benevolence occur in the dark; pretense is awarded sacred honours.

My own experience is that the celebration of familial love often covers over situation where a group of people who really don't have much in common except genes are told they ought to have certain feelings to one another, while such real feelings as may exist are refused recognition as appreciation of particular persons and instead falsely distributed to the credit of institutions whose primary purposes have little to do with love or happiness, but a great deal with preserving group identity and maintaining social stability. I think that tribalism, racism, nationalism, religious enthusiasm usually begin here and are in essence extensions of the same ethos. I think the world would be much happier if we realised that to be able to love someone one needs to grasp the 'why' of that love, and to recognise the incompatability of social and moral expectations to love with a deep concern for another based upon appreciation of who he or she is. Caring for people because they were born near you, or merely because they are, has always in my experience meant shallow attachments, covered by a sentimental PR machine cranked up to 11, and buttressed by formidable social barriers which help to preserve the pretense by restricting outside options and information. Most people fall in love with idealised pictures of patterns which truly create a prescription for lovelessness. And the misery and spiritual hiding nourished by such moral expectations cultivates illiberality. Nationalists love an image of 'America', 'the Fatherland', 'Mother Russia', 'our Southern heritage' which has little relation to the realities denoted by such psuedo-abstractions. Men kill and die to assert their tragically intense love for institutions whose nature is essentially opposite to the virtues they want to admire in it, projecting feelings they can't experience themselves onto the power-structures which robbed them of their passions in the first place. Typically such authoritarian delusions begin at home; the 'sweetness' of dying for one's country starts with the 'morality' of giving up one's independent judgement or one's dreams and passions in order to secure the love of one's family or husband. The parent says to the child 'you must love me'; 'you must love the right things instead of the immoral and socially worthless things you actually love'; 'you must love without regard for feeling'. The rest of the sordid chronicle of human existence precedes from this point. Every woman adores a fascist and every man honours a fascism.

You may of course believe what you wish, but as I see it much of the world talks loudly about 'love' and knows nothing about it, and the heart of the problem is an inverted concept of love. Real mutual human passion comes from places which established virtue and conventional morality ought to damn and which they do damn where they have the power. This world is a hideous crime where illegitimate authority keeps genuine passion under military occupation in love's name. The human spirit will never find safe refuge until these valuations are reversed and human passion emerges from confining underworld catacombs to walk openly in the sunlight.

(=) Altho' it seems likely that in exception to my own stated premises I may become identified as an Aristotelian realist. ROTFL.

I pretty much agree with Aster's statements here about love. In particular, I'm not fond of the notion of love as some sort of intrinsic duty to your family members, your "community" and even "humanity" in the abstract simply on the basis of circumstantial relations such as blood ties and geographic locale, irrespective of the virtues of the people in question. I find such manifestations of love to often be shallow and rather disingenous, in that one is expressing "love" merely out of an instilled feeling of obligation rather than out of a genuine respect for people's virtues. Even in romantic relationships, in which one perpetually says "I love you" merely because it is ritualistically expected rather than out of sincerity. I think that this diminishes the value of "love", making it dishonest and indiscriminate to the point of absurdity. This is something that I've commented on before elsewhere, and I got some flack for questioning the idea of loving all of "humanity" for its own sake - I don't think that this is even possible. This isn't to say that I'm against humanism in some other senses, but one should be careful about abstraction and overgeneralization to the point at which such thing begin to ring rather hollow.

Questions of what constitute real love aside, what always raised red flags to me about incest was that family units are already riddled with uneven power relationships and it can come off as exploitative for, say, a father and daughter to enter into a sexual relationship together. Even if both parties claim it's consensual, it's hard not to shake the nagging suspicion that at some point there was some level of coercion involved.

That said, I don't see a reason not to take this article and the woman's comments at face value, so more power to them I guess.

Flex wrote:Questions of what constitute real love aside, what always raised red flags to me about incest was that family units are already riddled with uneven power relationships and it can come off as exploitative for, say, a father and daughter to enter into a sexual relationship together. Even if both parties claim it's consensual, it's hard not to shake the nagging suspicion that at some point there was some level of coercion involved.

That is, on the one hand, a fantastic point but, on the other hand, couldn't the same thing about family dynamic apply to, say, marriages?

i took a nap for most of your post Aster. i thought youd get a kick out of being accused of being a platonist it looks as though you ascribed views to me too.

I wonder how Star Wars would have turned out if the sexual etiquette of that universe had been different.

Of course. Marriages are as contrary to love as any family structure.