The director of the first Human Centipede film – the one about a psychopathic doctor who sews three unwilling and unwitting captives together mouth-to-anus to make a sort of “centipede” — proudly declared that his film was “100% medically accurate.” That is, he found a doctor who was willing to say that if one were indeed to create such a centipede, the second and third segments (i.e., people) would be able to survive, provided that you supplemented their rather dismal diet with IV drips to give them the nutrition they were lacking.
This dubious claim to 100% accuracy came to mind today as I perused a post by the blogger who calls himself Dalrock, a manospherian nitwit with a penchant for pseudoscientific defenses of old-fashioned misogyny. In a post with the whimsical title “We are trapped on Slut Island and Traditional Conservatives are our Gilligan,” Dalrock argues that the best “solution” to out-of-wedlock births is some good old-fashioned slut shaming.
Here’s how he breaks down the (imaginary) numbers in a post that is “100% mathematically accurate” – which is to say, not accurate at all:
Assume we are starting off with 100 sluts and 30 alphas/players. The sluts are happily riding on the alpha carousel. Now we introduce slut shaming. It isn’t fully effective of course, but it manages to convince 15 of the would be sluts not to be sluts after all. This means an additional 15 women are again potentially suitable for marriage. This directly translates into fewer fatherless children. This also makes the next round of slut shaming easier. Instead of having 99 peers eagerly cheering her on her ride, each slut now has 15 happily married women shaming her and only 84 other sluts encouraging her. After the next round this becomes 30 happily married women shaming the sluts, and only 69 other sluts cheering them on, and so on. This process continues until all but the most die hard sluts are off the carousel. You will never discourage them all, but you can do a world better than we are doing today.
Why not shame the fathers as well, while we’re at it? Dalrock explains that this just doesn’t make good mathematical sense:
Start with the same base assumption of 100 sluts and 30 players. Now apply shame to the players. Unfortunately shame is less effective on players than it is on sluts, so instead of discouraging 15% of them (4.5) in the first round, it only discourages three of them. No problem!, says the Gilligan [the social conservative], at least there are now three fewer sluts now that three of the evil alphas have been shamed away, and all without creating any unhappy sluts! But unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. The remaining 27 players are more than happy to service the extra sluts. They are quite maddeningly actually delighted with the new situation. Even worse, the next round of player shaming is even less effective than the first. This time only 2 players are discouraged, and one of the other 3 realizes that his player peers are picking up the slack anyway and reopens for business. This means in net there are still 26 players, more than enough to handle all of the sluts you can throw at them.
Well, there’s no arguing with that!
Seriously, there’s no arguing with that, because it is an imaginary construct with only the most tenuous connection with how things work in the real world. “But … MATH!” doesn’t really work as an argument here, since human beings don’t actually behave according to simplistic mathematical formulas.
Film critic note: While the first Human Centipede film offered little more than a workmanlike treatment of a fantastical idea, the recently released sequel, which details the attempts of a deranged Human Centipede superfan to take human-centipeding to the next level, is actually sort of brilliant. If you like that sort of thing.
Wow have you not been pregnant.
(Neither have I, but at least I respect people who have and I’ve actually listened to them. It’s hardly a matter of “la la la go about your business trouble free la la la” and then a baby painlessly and safely plops out.)
Bagelsan, you beat me to it! I want to see the babby chapter in the book o’ larnin’! 🙂
@zhinxy
“So what happens to me if I won’t pay taxes to support your stripped down Womb Police State, NWO?”
Womb Police State? I’m not asking for anything extra. Don’t kill. I realize I’m such I misogynist. How dare I ask women not to kill.
Well now, you’ve framed the question wrong. What’s a good excuse to end an unwanted pregnancy, you mean? Or, slightly more nuanced, I guess: What’s a good excuse to terminate a fetus that didn’t have the capacity for good or evil?
The only answer I can give to that, milkslave, is that I have respect for women who need to make decisions about their bodies. I would never substitute my judgment for the woman’s and whoever she trusts to help her make the decision, be it her husband, boyfriend, doctor, or family. What’s a good excuse for a person making a medical decision that doesn’t affect me? Probably that person, in their own specific circumstance, would know best, right?
I don’t buy into the idea that personhood begins at conception, though. I support physician-assisted suicide. I don’t support the death penalty or unnecessary wars, and I believe that people have the duty to make sure that, to the extent that they are able, the other living people around them are able to live lives free of pain and suffering. So we’re probably at opposite ends of the spectrum. And THANK FUCKING GOD for that.
Okay, Owly, but when a woman does “kill” a fetus, then what do you do? Just look at her very very sadly and maybe sniffle a little?
“We’re arguing about personhood with a guy who doesn’t actually view women as people.”
Spearhafoc is a point. I am going to make a grilled cheese and be happy that I can have sex without having to carry a baby anytime soon.
*has a point!
NWO, I wouldn’t want to bring a child into a world where people like you exist =P
Yes you are. You’re asking for extra laws. Laws require government.
NWO, looking at things from another angle, what’s a good excuse to bring a new human being into the world?
NWO clearly knows nothing about female anatomy or reproduction. I’m kind of surprised he doesn’t think the stork brings babies.
@zhinxy
“So what happens to me if I won’t pay taxes to support your stripped down Womb Police State, NWO?”
Womb Police State? I’m not asking for anything extra. Don’t kill. I realize I’m such I misogynist. How dare I ask women not to kill.
So, you will throw me in prison if I don’t pay taxes to support a State with policies I do not support. Lovely. Statist.
I was born because my mother spent nine months performing very hard, potentially life-threatening work, followed by several hours of intense pain. During that period I was a parasite, feeding off resources her body very much needed – if it weren’t for the modern medicine of 1976, I would have either caused her lasting damage from nutritional deficiencies or been miscarried.
And all this from a pregnancy that was about as easy as pregnancies get!
I’m glad that she wanted me enough to go to all the effort and risk, but the idea of her being forced into it against her will makes me sick.
Your “autonomous being at conception” foolishness insults my mother’s courage and ignores her work. Don’t do that.
I’ll throw you this, NWO – Heck, I’ll shout it from the rooftops. It is morally wrong for me to force you to pay money to a goverment whose morals on abortion you do not support. So I would never do so. But you would. Statist.
And he condemns single mothers…
@Holly Pervocracy
“(Neither have I, but at least I respect people who have and I’ve actually listened to them. It’s hardly a matter of “la la la go about your business trouble free la la la” and then a baby painlessly and safely plops out.)”
Oh well, perish the thought that a woman should feel any pain or inconvenience what-so-ever. Please forgive my callousness. Killing it is. I too have a book o larnin. If a woman feels any pain, kill whatever causes it. No woman should ever feel discomfort. Go kill, go die, off to war we go, a woman feels discomfort.
Oh well, perish the thought that a woman should feel any pain or inconvenience what-so-ever. Please forgive my callousness. Killing it is. I too have a book o larnin. If a woman feels any pain, kill whatever causes it. No woman should ever feel discomfort. Go kill, go die, off to war we go, a woman feels discomfort.
No. A woman risks her life.
And you would jail me if I did not pay taxes to a State that would apply the death penalty to women who cannot take that risk. Statist.
My sister had to spend several weeks hospitalized during her last pregnancy (her current one is going better, but she still had to leave her job because of her health dangers) because her kidneys started to fail. Pregnancy is a very high risk issue (one in ten risk of serious complications, and that’s in a developed country). The question of which organs the fetus uses is all of them and pregnancy leaves permanent physical changes, to the point where you can makes a pretty good estimate of how many times a person has given birth from the skeleton alone. Not to mention how extremely invasive and hampering all of the medical care around pregnancy is. Every had a doctor stick their arm up inside you, NWO? Most pregnant women have had that one happen multiple times before it is through. Having blood tests, ultrasounds, the list goes on and on. Even a “healthy” pregnancy carries a lot of issues for the pregnant person’s lifestyle, physical comfort, privacy, body, etc.
In fact, you’re the only one who has a book o larnin, milkslave. You’re special that way.
It’s a pity he doesn’t work on the dairy with the cows. He might have picked up a bit of info on ‘where calves come from’. At least I know now why he won’t answer my question.
Oy, again with the war. We were talking about abortion, NWOslave. Pick a subject and stick with it.
Protip: If you are physically incapable of gestating a fetus and delivering a pregnancy, you don’t get to tell people who are physically capable of those actions how simple/easy/morally required carrying a baby to term is.
In this case, it really is that simple.
I know that not everybody here agrees with Amanda Marcotte on a lot of things, but I begin to suspect that the reason she’s held up OMGmosthorribleradicalfeministonlineever is because she’s so devastatingly right about forced-birth pieces of shit like NWO.
Her argument is that the whole point of the “life begins at conception” argument is to erase all the effort contributed and the risks taken by the inconveniently-sentient vessel into which a man ejaculates to create his baby.
And behold. She could make her next blog post on the subject by cutting and pasting from NWOSlave on this thread.
All these horror stories make me wanna rush out and get my tubes tied XP
It is horrible for men to be marched off to war and perhaps die “to protect the children” because the evil women and big Daddy say so, but it is good for women to be forced to give birth and perhaps die for the babies because the good men and Good Father State says so, Spearhafoc. It’s all relevant. TOTALLY relevant.