So the New York Times ran a trend piece today about cannibalism. Well, to be more precise, about an assortment of recent novels and films and TV shows that use cannibalism as a plot device. The piece, I shouldn’t have to say, is in no way, shape or form, a call for real-world cannibalism. Indeed, writer Alex Beggs points out that even the concept of cannibalism can be “stomach-churning,” and notes that several of the authors she spoke to had managed to seriously gross themselves out writing the cannibal portion of their novels.
So, nothing there about how best to barbecue your aunt Helen.
The piece nonetheless raised the ire of right-wingers online and in the media who reacted as though the Times had run a cannibalism how-to, complete with diagrams and recipes.
“Demons at NY Times Are Now Pushing Cannibalism,” a headline at the Gateway Pundit declared. “Twitter disgusted by New York Times piece suggesting there’s a ‘time and place’ for ‘cannibalism'” reported Fox News in a headline of its own that completely misrepresentied the original Times story.
On Twitter, a vast army of people who had clearly not read the article took aim at the Times for supposedly “normalizing” people eating.
Yeah, none of that is happening.
It’s infuriating to see an article so thoroughly misrepresented as Beggs’ has been. But the Times, and the mainstream press in general, needs to learn how to read the room a lot better.
Surely whoever wrote the headlines for Begg’s piece knew — or should have known — that it would be picked up by right-wing flying monkey squads who would have no problem assuming that the evil Demon-crats really would advocate, if not actively practice,” cannibalism. And then you get more cynical sorts who know that “interpretation” of the piece is utterly bogus but have no trouble spreading the disinformation anyway, knowing that a good portion of their readers will believe the worst about the NYT and its readers.
Maybe there is “a time and a place” if not for cannibalism itself than for articles like this. Right now, with those on the right wantonly embracing conspiracy theories as fact, may not be such a good time.
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Soylent Green is
tastypeople!For about 25 years now I’ve wanted to write a screenplay. But I’m really lazy.
It’s about a case called R -v- Dudley & Stephens. It’s a fascinating story; and a major case in jurisprudence. Even cropped up after 9/11
In summary, four guys were adrift in a lifeboat. Things got desperate. So they drew straws and ended up eating the cabin boy. He was called Richard Parker.
This all happened in 1884.
As it happens Edgar Allen Poe wrote a novel. In that novel four guys end up adrift in a lifeboat. Things get desperate. So they draw straws and end up eating the cabin boy. He’s called Richard Parker.
Thing is, that novel was published in 1838.
Twilight Zone Music
To be fair I’m sure plenty of leftists are having a good time having kinky and weird sex. The fact they’re mad about it suggests they’re just jealous tbh.
But also, wow! What a reach! They can’t call a trans woman a woman but they sure can call us cannibalistic satanists for no actual reason!
As Ivan Stang once said, “Proof that certain forms of fanaticism have exactly the same effect as methamphetamine.”
And yet, were one to advocate for abolishing the Mass/Communion ceremony, well…
If I remember correctly; didn’t Alex Jones suggest that the time for Cannibalism was when the pandemic began.
So how is it that some of these Borons are the one’s saying that it’s “leftists” that are the “pro-cannibal ones” here?
Or is this more of the “every right wing accusation is a confession” situation going on here?
@Robert Haynie: Symbolic cannibalism is a rather different thing from real cannibalism; it’s more about taking on the traits or abilities of the person in question rather than the actual consumption of flesh. (Which is, incidentally, also usually the case with ritual cannibalism as opposed to eating people for food, as in most cases the flesh is rendered non-nutritious before consumption.) It’s a form of sympathetic magic, where one person or thing is somehow given a connection to another person or thing, in order to share or absorb qualities.
Of course, Christians don’t see the Eucharist as witchcraft because “God approves of it”, and most modern Christians don’t even see it as real magic anyway, just an abstract psychological connection. If they bother to even think about it at all, which as far as I know most don’t.
Geez, it just got me thinking, should it really count as cannibalism if it meets the bare minimum of a human consuming a mass of cells which are biologically homo sapiens, or should the line be drawn somewhere else? This is the sort of thing which comes up whenever there’s a minor advance in lab-grown beef muscle, or a post-pregnant woman serves up cooked placenta. And for that matter, if you consume meat grown from your own cells, does that count as cannibalism, autophagia (eating parts of oneself), neither, or both?
And if you’re going really out there, let’s say it’s 2125 and we have full-body regenerators. So you decapitate a willing volunteer, stick their head in a regenerator, and… you know. Does the headless body count as a corpse despite the person technically being alive, medical waste despite the procedure which produced it not really being “medical”, biohazardous material despite it not being left sitting around long enough to become meaningfully biohazardous*, personal property of the non-deceased which they can give others permission to use as they wish, or what? I mean, this is clearly sci-fi, but I suspect current laws aren’t well-equipped to deal with this… or in general, with non-gaming situations where people don’t die when they are killed.
*I’m assuming enough precaution was taken that disease isn’t a factor here. It’s not like we inherently classify the remains of food animals as “biohazards”, otherwise we’d all be forced to be vegans… wait, does this situation count as vegan, at least morally? After all one of the most common justifications for veganism is that the animal didn’t consent…
Yeah, I think way too much sometimes.
@ snowberry
Ah yes, but…
Looking at that post from “3rd Position Enjoyer,” I am a bit confused. I thought that “3rd Position” types tried to pretend that they are not Nazis? He’s not doing a good job of it.
Back in the Satanic Panic days, there were also accusations of cannibalism. Borrowed from the old Blood Libel.
I am fond of reminding people that a couple million years ago there were more than one species of proto-humans roaming the savannahs of Africa. One; large, pastoral, herding herbivores that may have looked like Klingons, didn’t make it.
The small hunting/scavenging packs of those who would eat anything did …
I am not at all sure that the headline writer thought about how the lunatic fringe would respond to it. I am sure that said headline writer should not have thought of writing something else. There have always been loons that will twist anything, and if a writer feels they must tailor their work so as not to upset the loony tunes they shouldn’t be writing.
Nimrods like this have always been with us. Ask any editor of letters to the editor from the days of print journalism. They got responses like these all the time.
If you want to blame anyone/thing, blame the internet.
@ Alan Robertshaw Now you have reminded me of real memoir ‘The Wreck of the Whale Ship ‘Essex ‘ – another case of sailors adrift with inadequate rations resorting to survival cannibalism.
Oh, I’m sure the headline writer knew exactly what they were doing, and went to sleep that night with visions of free publicity, traffic, and oodles of ad-views dancing in their head.
@Alan Robertshaw: The Dish of the Day skit in THGTTG adds on another layer of “is it moral to create what is essentially a slave race, where most of the members of said race appear to be fully consenting to their slavery?” …provided, of course, that any clear non-consenting members are allowed a different life. This mostly comes up in robotics and AI research, but there’s no reason why it can’t apply to biological beings, especially since there are people who consider work animals, livestock, and sometimes pets to be slave races already. (Looking at you, PETA…)
@ snowberry
You raise a really interesting point. One we do chat quite bit about in my circles. With all the consent thing; and the weird sort of acceptably of cannibalism.
That’s back to my thing of how we conditions ourselves. To get to the nub; my thesis is that, because we normalise the general concept of it being ok to kill, so long as it’s for food, we avoid cognitive dissonance by extrapolating that to humans.
Survival cannibalism was pretty much accepted for a long time. That’s why the Dudley & Stephens case was such a cause celebre. Most of the public couldn’t see what they’d done wrong.
But even with serial killers, it’s like cannibals don’t seem to attract the same disgust as other criminals.
An obvious example; Hannibal Lector is practically the hero of the franchise; and no-one would thing it distasteful if you went to a fancy dress party in his signature outfit. But I don’t think Hannibal would be as socially acceptable had he been a sex offender. And we see that with real life serial killers too.
But, to me, that’s pretty understandable. A hog roast is a fun affair; but we look down on beastiality. Yet both involve using animals for pleasure without their consent.
But as we ignore non consensual violence when it comes to animals, it seems we paradoxically abhor the same violence to humans, even when it is consensual.
Cannibalism per se isn’t generally illegal. It’s only the murder part that is. But what if someone consents to be killed and eaten? Again, it’s the murder element that leads to conviction.
What though if someone agreed that they would kill themselves so the other person could eat them? If you respect bodily autonomy then that should be perfectly acceptable. But even in those cases people find it abhorrent and unacceptable.
Personally I don’t find that logically consistent. But for further consideration on the ethical issues involved, I hand you to Moss.
@Surplus to Requirements:
Oh, I’m sure the headline writer knew exactly what they were doing, and went to sleep that night with visions of free publicity, traffic, and oodles of ad-views dancing in their head.
Which brings to mind an article some years ago, by an artisanal pet food manufacturer whose approach was to approximate what a dog or cat would be hunting in the wild: raw meat with proportionate amounts of organs, bones, and stomach contents, rather than the clean cuts of muscle tissue preferred by (prosperous white Anglo-diasporic American) humans.
The point they were trying to make—that People Food will malnourish carnivorous pets—resulted in this jaw-dropping header:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180822123524/http://rawprey.com/why-feeding-raw-human-meat-is-not-enough/
@Alan Robertshaw:
That’s why I posited a full-body regenerator for the scenario: It sidesteps the whole issue of “can you consent to die” by having the volunteer simply… not die. Hell, they could even watch a video of what happened to their body after they were decapitated, in a few weeks or months after the regeneration is complete. While cannibalism technically isn’t illegal in most places, AFIK most places do have laws on what it is acceptable to do with a corpse, and you can’t give pre-death consent to exempt your own corpse from those laws (which is why consensual necrophilia is still illegal, for example).
My musing was that, does it even count as a corpse if they’re not actually dead? And there are usually laws about medical waste and biohazardous materials, but those weren’t designed to cover this situation either (though depending on how they’re worded, they might still anyway in some jurisdictions, just not on purpose). So would that be a loophole for all kinds of things which are presently unthinkable? And if it is, should the loophole remain open for body autonomy reasons, or should it be closed due to being too open to abuse? What exactly counts as “abuse” when these things exist? I suspect that they’re not answerable from our present-day perspective, but it’s fun to speculate.
@ snowberry
It is. Your regeneration point is a fascinating one.
I suspect if/when we ever get the ability to transfer consciousness and produce bodies for our thoughts to live in, activities like no-parachute free falling will be a popular past time.
(As an aside when we can hire/swap bodies all the trans controversy will seem pretty silly).
There’s the flip side to that. What if we manufacture humans with no, or lesser, cognitive functions. Like an unthinking spare of ourselves for organ transplants. But might there also be a market for human facsimiles that had just enough cognitive function to be able to carry out tasks (say dangerous ones) but that society didn’t feel qualified as human and thus did not warrant the same general rights.
If you made them so they were less sentient and smart as some animals then arguably you could treat them the same way. Although I suspect that would open up a lot of debate about what counted as sentient.
As for your point about who owns a body, the starting point is, no-one. The law holds ‘there is no property in a corpse’. That means that even stealing bodies or body parts can’t actually amount the theft.
There is an exception to this if the body (part) has been modified in some way. So you can’t just waltz into one of Gunter Von Haagen’s Bodyworks exhibitions and help yourself.
More prosaically, this sometimes crops up with family disputes about who gets granny’s ashes.
https://www.forbessolicitors.co.uk/news/45228/no-property-in-a-corpse-body-and-funeral-disputes-on-death
Bunch of random thoughts:
• If the body does count as a corpse, can the volunteer make a will and name an executor? Would the executor be able to actually execute anything, considering that the volunteer is still essentially alive and there’s presumably no death certificate? For that matter, what if, instead of cannibalism, this was all about fake funerals, how would that even work, legally?
• Something which very rarely comes up, but when it does people seem to find it squickier to deal with than “can you consent to die”: Can you consent to downgrading your sapience? If not, what’s the fundamental difference between that and upgrading your sapience, which quite a lot of people are okay with as long as it doesn’t exacerbate class divisions?
• Can we replace dairy cows by turning volunteers into cow furries? Would that be any less prone to abuse, even if they kept their intelligence and ability to communicate? (Though one would think any civilization which could do that wouldn’t need to, they could probably just make fungi which produces various animal milks or whatever, but should it be allowed if there were people who genuinely wanted to do it?)
• Combining the previous two, can you consent to becoming a different species? Even if you keep your general sapience level, there’s a pretty big difference between a being which looks exactly like a wolf but is biologically human, and a former human who is also biologically a wolf (which in turn is not quite the same as a wolf who was always a wolf). This includes novel species, like cow furries (assuming they’re not just modified humans).
• At some point it is likely that a lot of things society never had to deal with simply because they were impossible will no longer be impossible. Scenarios like those discussed so far may even become the tip of the iceberg. Even if some of them are near-universally banned, what remains is probably going to make a hell of a lot of people very uncomfortable. “I don’t consent to living in a society which allows these perversities and depravities!” Even if “just move” is more viable of an option than currently, there might not be many good options for most. On a scale of “sucks to be you” to “even though most of those practices are objectively ethical we’ll ship those ‘perverts’ to asteroid colonies so ‘decent’ folks don’t have to be exposed to them”, how much consideration should easily-squicked “normals” get?
• I suspect that part of the opposition to trans rights (not the main part, but a still significant part) is along the lines of “I don’t consent to people I know deviating from the imaginary version of them which exists only in my head” which isn’t even exclusive to trans people, just typically more severe. I suspect that this is going to get really ugly once more radical changes are possible, up to the point of “provoking” murder. (My child is dead and I must kill the thing which is pretending to be them!) Even if only a very small minority chooses to do so (and even if it’s only a very small minority because such attacks have a chilling effect) that’s an issue which is likely to be a headache in the future.
@David: At this point I’d be pleasantly surprised if the NYT headline writers can even remember what planet they’re on. The paper’s standards have sunk like the Lusitania after the second torpedo hit. I’m old enough to remember when there was a debate over whether the Times or the Washington Post was America’s best newspaper; nowadays the Times doesn’t crack the top 100.
To tie in this thread with the previous one, apparently Johnny Depp is a cannibal.
(I thought this was a spoof at first; but looking at their other posts it seems genuine.)
https://twitter.com/mehtabackupacc/status/1551278538795298816
I find it weird that people made this into A Thing. The article was about cannibalism as a theme in some recent fiction, and clickbait titles / tongue-in-cheek* taglines are nothing new.
*the tongue and the cheek belonging to the same person 🙂
I read the article; I’m not much into body horror, so I probably won’t check out the stuff it discussed, but someone in the comments section mentioned a comedic book called Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander where someone from an imaginary cannibal minority in the States isn’t “out” to his current friends and family, but then his mother’s dying wish is for him to eat her… I don’t know why, but this strikes me as funny.
I’m also into sci-fi, so the Snowberry/Alan conversation here was interesting to read. I’m not sure I totally agree with
because it seems that people find it grosser than plain murder.
Now, I think the disgust with sexual assault is another variety – less like visceral disgust (something is “gross”) and more like moral disgust (something is wrong*). I certainly don’t think sexual assault is worse than murder, but in a way it’s more unfair; everyone’s going to die, but no one needs to be forced into anything sexual against their will.
*of course there have been problems with this too, where women for instance were considered the property of men, so it would be some kind of “honour” or “purity” that was violated…but anyway
@ epitome of incomprehensibility
Ah, good point. I should have perhaps said some criminals. I can imagine cannibals might be seen as a bit more outrageous than ‘plain’ murders. Although I suspect that might depend on the particular case. I can imagine some murders that people find especially abhorrent because of the nature of the offence or the victim.
And yes I can see that repulsion thing. I think it might be that a lot of people can understand why someone might murder someone. There is quite a trope of sympathetic murderer/asshole victim. But, unlike murder, there can never be a justification for sex offending, or a victim that was asking for it.
George Orwell did a nice piece, lamenting the loss of the more genteel old school murders.
https://interestingliterature.com/2021/05/george-orwell-decline-of-the-english-murder-summary-analysis/
Someone took “eat the rich” a little too seriously.
@FMOx: Looks like they changed the headline but were stuck with the URL. Soylent Green is dog food! And, y’know despite the mean-spirited jokes about cats eating you when you’re dead, it’s almost always dogs that start nibbling on corpses. So much for Man’s Best Friend.
Which reminds me obliquely of a story I heard about in the forensic field. Some rich old lady had died and wasn’t found for a while, so her fluffy little yap dogs chowed down and pooped all over the house. Including her extremely bejeweled fingers. The CSI or coroner (whatever) told the family, “yeah, if you want Granny’s jewels, you’ll have to go through all the dog poop”, which they didn’t. The assistants were all “eww, do we hafta?” and the boss was like “Hell no, I just wanted to throw a scare into those greedy bastards who didn’t even notice she’d been dead for weeks. We’re gonna freeze the dog poop so it doesn’t stink and then put it through an X-ray!” A vet x-rayed the doggos, who were clear by then, and the family decided they’d make do with what was in her jewelry box.
@Alan: It seems the people of Dominica also called him a cannibal for portraying their recent ancestors as such while filming one of the “Pirates” movies on their island. Predictably, he made fun of them and dismissed their concerns.