WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
I'll note that I'm not the OP, and also that I didn't mean that slavery being legal entailed that raping slaves must have been legal, I was merely making explicit Opt-out's apparent factual claim that this was so with American slavery pre-1865.
Quickly looking into it, the situation does seem to have been more complex, and unsurprisingly varied from state to state. When it comes to white masters raping their black slaves, no state seems to have been so crass as to explicitly allow it in law, even if it was a widespread practice. That being said, I did find this 1850s Mississippi Supreme Court case which explicitly ruled that "the crime of rape does not exist in this state between African slaves" as "their sexual intercourse is left to be regulated by their owners". This seems to decriminalize master-on-slave rape only by implication, but it does at the very least explicitly legalize slave-on-slave rape, so it was sometimes legal to rape slaves.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
1865 was the Thirteenth Amendment. So long as slavery was legal, it was legal to rape slaves.
He's not deceiving himself, he doesn't have the IQ for that.
This seems like a strange claim. Three-year-olds lie to themselves when they've been naughty. I agree with @urquan that it's an extremely basic, natural human reaction to a feeling of guilt, not some sophisticated cognitive contortion that only superior minds can master. If anything, I'd say that idiots lie to themselves more thoroughly and more successfully than midwits and geniuses - less cognitive bandwidth means less lingering self-doubt about one's own bullshit, once swallowed.
These aren't the words of a man who is trying to defend his own ego, his self-image of being a good person!
Why not? It all depends on where he's built the mental wall. One form of denial is "I never raped a woman at knifepoint, of course not, it's not true, you're lying", but another form, which is just as psychologically soothing, just not legally helpful, is "it's an animal instinct, I couldn't control myself, it's not that I'm a mean person who wants the girl to suffer, I just literally couldn't think about that until I got my nut out". Many serial killers, never mind rapists, rationalized their behavior to themselves in this way - not by lying to themselves about what they were doing, but lying to themselves about how much agency they had in choosing to do it.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
I agree; but the idea that British bureaucrats would carefully overthink the conjugation of the modal verbs in a piece of official paperwork, on the other hand, isn't so implausible.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
Guardianship exists, in theory, in the interest of the child/disabled person. Enslavement definitionally exists to benefit the slaveholder. This isn't to say that some system of slavery can't be worked out that also gives guardianship-like benefits to the slave - or that guardians don't often take advantage of their charges in some way - but let's just say that as much as guadianship isn't perfect, the historical record viz. slaveholders prioritizing their slaves' welfare and flourishing over their profit margins really isn't great.
That's also true. You can probably play infinite recursion with this, and plausibly you're right that it would be better to leave it at "You will" than start playing the triple-bluff game. I just sort of got the impression that you were accusing the authors of the booklet of wanting to soften the threat - that you interpreted them as saying "well, if you're naughty, we might have to expel you, although don't worry, we might choose to be lenient" - and I wanted to make the point that this was not necessarily the intention behind the "could"s.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
And no one in Europe aside from Ukrainians and Russians is real asylum seeker.
That's rather my point (I mean, I'd say there are a few others e.g. Uyghurs, but same difference). As someone who does believe in the moral duty to aid genuine asylum seekers, I dislike the fact that the "asylum seeker" category has been turned into "immigrant 2.0" and massively overstrained. I would like it to get its old meaning back. Therefore, I approve of official documents which acknowledge that coexisting with asylum seekers is not necessarily comfortable; that when and if we choose to grant that status, we do it out of ethical duty, not because we are mistaking the asylum seekers for swell, prosocial immigrants whom we'd love to see put down roots once the crisis is over. Asking if asylum-seekers are a good fit for Western values is a category error, and pretending that they must be before we can let them in is precisely the overreach that lets asylum-seekers trade on public goodwill to turn into permanent residents.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
Are any of these so-called "asylum seekers" fleeing literal genocide?
My point is that they should be - that this is what the legal category "asylum seeker" is supposed to be for - and the booklet makes sense in that context. To the extent that the category has been artificially expanded in a way that makes the booklet look weird, it's the expansion that is to blame, not the booklet.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
In principle, I don't see a problem here. If the concept of "asylum" is coherent at all, then we shouldn't be looking to vet asylum seekers for whether they're good additions to the country, the way would ordinary immigrants - any more than hospitals ask for patients to send in resumes in triplicate. Of course some of the refugees you're temporarily taking in out of humanitarian concerns will be ill-suited to coexisting with the locals; by all rights your standards for Jews you are willing to hide in your basement when the Gestapo are on the prowl should be lower than your standards for peacetime houseguests. A booklet like this only looks off if you take it for granted that "asylum seeker" is nothing but a fancy word for "immigrant". Which is understandable in the current status quo, but it's not the booklet that's at fault.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
My only complaint is that the "could"s in the list should be replaced with "will"s.
Charitably, this could be an attempt to acknowledge the reality of imperfect enforcement from the word go so as not to come across as all bark and no bite later. i.e. a way to head off reasoning of the form "Hur hur, the fancy booklet said that if anyone has sex with a sleeping woman he will go to jail, but my cousin Ahmed did that last month and totally got away with it, can't fool me with empty threats" by saying upfront that it's a risk you incur, not an infallible process.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
I for one was astounded that no one had dared to pull one of the many threads dangling from Arday's vast spider-on-amphetamine-ish web of lies
I mean, I have to think a great many people realized his autobiographical tall tales were bullshit, but treated them as just that - the tall tales of an eccentric egotist, which academia isn't short on. Without evidence of his track record of actual plagiarism, I don't know that lying about being a world-class marathon runner should be a fireable offense for a humanities professor - and I don't find it implausible that most people honestly never made the jump from "this eccentric scholar is obviously bullshitting about his athletic abilities (etc.)" to "wait, could it be he's lying about his actual scholarly work as well?". Not a great reflection on the rationality of the average human being, either, but not implausible. There's a group mentality at work, if everybody treats this guy as a respected authority in his field, then what's more plausible: he's a slightly crazy genius whose quirk is telling absurd tall tales, or he's a laughably obvious fraud and you're the only one who's noticed? Past a certain threshold the problem becomes self-sustaining. Of course, I don't doubt that people being afraid to seem racist by calling him out was a factor, especially at the start to get past the threshold in question. But I don't think it was necessarily the only force at play, nor the most potent by the late stage at which the bubble was finally popped.
"Not working" how? The alternative viewpoint is that shooting at the Strait is literally the thing we care about, the one thing we want them to stop doing, and so long as they get to keep doing it then we're losing.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Doesn't every website / forum do that? If not they'd be flooded with spam.
Yes, but most old-school Forums - and, of course, subreddits - are modded by volunteer users, not by the domain holder. This would be the equivalent of specific Facebook groups policing themselves, as distinct from Facebook itself stepping in. (I suppose all it would take for even the Motte itself to comply with such a paradigm would be for Zorba to agree not to take any conventional mod actions, and I don't think he makes a habit of it anyway.)
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
but repealing Section 230 altogether would be a bad idea because it may affect smaller forums like this
I don't think FtttG was saying it ought to be repealed, merely that it ought not to apply to any platforms that censor content on particular topics.
They aren't real concerns at the nation-wide, environmental level. They can be very real concerns for the locals whose utilities get diverted.
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