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.
@Magpie: She can do whatever the hell she wants.
Are we quoting from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” now? I like Burl Ives as much as anyone, but come on.
OK Brandon, let me put it this way: what should she do that isn’t “offensive and immoral”. (And thank you for answering)
“While I think mandatory paternity testing will help everyone in the long run. I would be more than willing to move mandatory paternity testing to the family court system (i.e child support can not be established without a paternity test proving fatherhood).”
Oh, crap, not this again…
What if you want to support the child and it doesn’t match your DNA?
@Magpie: Umm…remove the skull.
@Magpie
“Brandon, I’ve asked NWO (who thinks abortion should be illegal) but he won’t answer, so I’ll ask you. What should my friend have done after her partial miscarriage which left (what would have become) the skull of the fetus in her tube?”
Why would I answer such a stupid question? Here’s one for you. There’s a car accident, a mans head has been decapitated? Waddya do with the skull? Sew it back onto the body? Play soccer with it? Make a lamp out of it?
Is this a contest to see who can ask the most ridiculous question? Well you win.
If you are so against killing, NWO, may I suggest you hold true to your beliefs, and stop eating.
Magpie, can you not ask that question *ever* again? Agh.
Magpie – Brandon is several different kinds of pain in the ass and he has his own misogynist paranoias, but he’s nowhere near the sheer depths of woman-hate and disconnection from reality that NWO reaches.
Ding ding ding! Spear, you win a coconut!
The idea that an embryo is exactly the same thing as a born human *depends* on the idea of the soul. Otherwise it makes no sense.
As Manboobz’s official Pregnancy Correspondent (28 weeks), I can set Owly straight on what pregnancy entails:
– 1st trimester: You will be exhausted all the time, throw up frequently (I was lucky and avoided this, but something like 75% of pregnant people do), have mood swings and weird food cravings/aversions. Also your boobs will really, really hurt. And you can’t tell people and explain why you never want to go out and don’t like red peppers anymore, because a sizeable percentage of pregnancies don’t make it past week 12, and it would really suck to have to explain to everyone you know that you had a miscarriage. Oh, and you have to have a bunch of medical tests, including a series of blood tests which requires the drawing of 5 vials of blood. And you have to pee all the time.
– 2nd trimester: You’ll have more energy and less vomiting, which is great. But your belly will grow alarmingly, forcing you to buy a bunch of new and expensive clothes (there are no discount maternity stores…grr), and you’ll suddenly be treated to lots of unwanted advice and belly-touching, some of it from total strangers. Suddenly you and your body are public property, and everyone and their dog has an opinion about whether or not you should eat that/carry that/ride a bicycle/go to rock shows/keep doing your job/wear sunscreen/participate in home renovations/really anything you can think of. (I had one woman tell me I shouldn’t drink soy milk, because the phytoestrogens in soy might feminize the baby if it’s a boy. I was like BITCH I NEED THE PROTEIN YOU’LL HAVE TO SHOW ME A REFERENCE THAT ISN’T FROM NATURAL NEWS IF YOU WANT ME TO BELIEVE THAT.) Your appetite becomes insatiable, but you have to control your calorie intake so you don’t get gestational diabetes and have a monster-sized baby, as well as making sure your diet has exactly the right balance of nutrients or else you are a horrible, horrible person. If you have allergies or catch a cold, it will be worse than normal, and you can’t take anything for it. If you have a mental illness you may have to go off your meds. If you get migraines you can’t take ibuprofen. If you get really sick, your care will be complicated by the fact that you’re pregnant. You still have to pee all the time, though the breast soreness gets better.
– 3rd trimester: I’m just starting this one, so I have no first-hand experience yet. From what I’ve heard, the fatigue comes back. You get even bigger and more awkward and your movements are even more constrained. All those criticisms and unwanted advice you got in your second trimester are redoubled. If it’s hot you will suffer the agonies of the damned. If it’s cold you won’t want to go outside for fear of slipping on the ice, because all of the sudden you’re really clumsy. The pace of medical appointments steps up; eventually you’re at the doctor/midwife once a week. You can’t make any plans or take on any commitments, because after week 36 or so the baby could come at any time. You can’t travel by plane or take long car trips; you have to weigh any travel plans extremely carefully, because you can’t be too far from medical attention. (For example, I may not be able to go to my inlaws’ place for Christmas, because they live on an island. Getting to the hospital in an emergency would require a ferry ride + at least a 30 minute drive.) You’re still ravenously hungry, but you can’t eat much at a sitting, because your belly is so enormous that it squishes your stomach. Sometimes the baby will kick you in the ribs, which is excruciatingly painful. You also might get sciatica and/or lower back pain. And you can’t take anything other than Tylenol for that either! Your boobs will become enormous and uncomfortable, and you might even outgrow those expensive maternity tops you bought. (This is starting to happen to me. I am so short my uterus has run out of upward room to expand, leaving it nowhere to go but forward. Right now I have about 4 shirts that I can wear out of the house, one of which is a man’s T-shirt with a picture of an octopus riding a bicycle on it.)
And then you give birth, which is dangerous (even in the First World) and extremely painful. Depending on where you give birth you may have an unnecessary caesarian and have to recover from surgery while learning to care for a newborn. If you breastfeed you’d better not do it in public, because BOOBS, but if you don’t breastfeed you’re a selfish bitch and a bad mother. And then you raise a child.
I don’t know if I would call pregnancy an active process, in that I am not literally making the child with my own hands; but it isn’t exactly a passive one either. It is most certainly *not* just going on as normal for 9 months. I’ve had a very easy pregnancy, and I have had to make a huge number of decisions, adjustments to my lifestyle, and accomodations to my new (and decreased) capacities to do physical work. I’m happy to do it, because this is a wanted and planned pregnancy. If it weren’t a wanted pregnancy and I couldn’t terminate it, I wouldn’t be so happy. And I probably would not be so diligent in making sure I got enough protein, avoided paint fumes, and I certainly wouldn’t have stopped biking a month ago.
But Owly doesn’t care, I know. In order to care he would have to a) believe that women are people and b) be willing to listen to one, and neither of those is true.
“If you are so against killing, NWO, may I suggest you hold true to your beliefs, and stop eating.”
If women were solely responsible for slaughtering livestock, you bet NWO would have a thing or two to say about that =D
@Magpie: There are already ways to do this via adoption. If a non-bio man wants to be the father, he can adopt the child. All he has to do is fill out the proper legal documents to establish legal guardianship and voila, he is legally the father. The point being is that he is willingly and consciously entering into that agreement.
NWO – You only want me to stop because it makes clear to you what a Statist you are. Now, most people are statists. But you on the other hand, scream like you aren’t. Bad, bad, hypocrite Big-Daddy loving NWO.
So, any answers? Military, Prisons, State Schools, Taxes, Courts? What does the government do BESIDES outlaw abortion. Borders? I’m opposed to “immigration” restrictions too. This is all getting expensive and very very big…
Sorry Molly, I know I’ve been hammering on it. If it’s any consolation, she went on to have two lovely children.
Anyway, NWO says abortion was the right thing to do, even though it would be illegal in NWO world.
Let’s talk about kittens for a bit, ay?
Because it was about abortion. In countries where abortion is or was absolutely illegal – Argentina comes to mind – women have died because doctors weren’t allowed to abort tubal – i.e., absolutely doomed, will-not-come-to-term – pregnancies. That is the inevitable result of the laws you want to make: dead women.
Brandon, “The condom broke” is not a moral failing.
Are there birth certificates? Driving licenses, official “papers?” – Does the goverment need a record of what “sex” you are it can hold over trans, intersex, and genderqueer people? You do seem to picture a very “natural” gender segregation, so I suppose it must… Is there a medical monopoly? Limited liability corporations?
What about contraception?
In other words, you have no intention of showing the same consideration you asked for on initially arriving, and that Ami requested on your behalf. Okay then. Because your horse shit about how horrible the state is, as an absolute, is growing grating and it’s nice to know I have no reason to treat your shallow, harmful views lightly any longer.
I mean really, treating warfare as though it were only a thing the state indulged in, and the ever so wonderful people never once supported it, and had to be coerced into it at all points, was grossly stupid, but not really so bad as trying to erase all the good done with state power, that anarchism simply can’t manage (off the top of my head, the construction and maintenance of the infrastructure required for your comfortable standard of living).
@Voip: Do you actually have a point?
I mean really, treating warfare as though it were only a thing the state indulged in, and the ever so wonderful people never once supported it, and had to be coerced into it at all points, was grossly stupid,
?
What?
Here everybody, have a kitten: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWu6jfplE0U&feature=related
…and while I was typing that novel, Brandon showed up!
This thread is FUN!
@Bee
“Are we quoting from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” now? I like Burl Ives as much as anyone, but come on.”
I’ve never seen cat on a hot tin roof and I don’t know who burl ives is.
Hey! You support murder, dontcha? Kinda hard to take advice from any ideology that condones, in fact demands murder. I wonder if those little guys and gals gurgle out a little scream of agony in the embryonic fluid as their life is being sucked away? Maybe they could hook up one of those sound amplifiers on a woman when she has an abortion. We could play it like whale song and call the sound of a womans right. That’d be cool!