Comments Elsewhere

No rational person would invest such a huge amount of time and money into pharma if there wasnt a protection in place that made it possible for them to make a profit off of their findings.

Again, boo hoo. This is an explicitly protectionist argument, and like all protectionist arguments, the answer is: if they can’t earn a profit on their product through honest labor, without the benefit of protectionist trade barriers, then they need to think harder about their business model. Big pharma’s failed business model is their problem, not mine.

I’m dubious about the validity of this map. Michigan and Delaware are highly likely to ban abortion?

I don’t know anything about Delaware, but I do live in Michigan, and am quite sure the map is accurate so far as that goes. The NARAL “Report Card” gives Michigan an “F” rating for state abortion laws (we’re tied with Mississippi and Arkansas; only Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Dakota have more onerous restrictions) are worse. The pre-Roe abortion ban has never been repealed (so will remain on the books to re-activate if Roe is ever overturned). Both houses of the state legislature are controlled by the anti-abortion Republicans heavily influenced by the Religious Right in Western Michigan and by Michigan Right to Life.

Womble: Distrusting any government anywhere anytime in any matter is a case of a clinically paranoid mindset. People like that should seek professional help.

Sham medical diagnoses for political disagreements isn’t going to get you very far in rational argument. It is, frankly, a sleazy rhetorical tactic, and you ought to feel guilty about having indulged in it.

That said, the issue I mentioned didn’t have to do with whether or not you categorically distrust all government action. It specifically has to do with how far you trust incumbent parties (who have the power to set the legal criteria, if we allow legal criteria to be set) to put up legislative barriers against competing parties. Because the ability to exclude your own challengers is a dangerous thing for governing parties to have.

Womble: Believing that the rights of any party, however violent, anti-democratic and racist, must be defended no matter the cost is a case of either total loss of morals or deliberate blindness to reality.

I don’t care about the rights of any “party;” I don’t think they’ve got any. I do care about the rights of party members to freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, etc. I don’t really care very much about the ability of folks to challenge in an election either, since I don’t regard government elections as having any legitimate authority (I think there are some weak pragmatic reasons to resist moves like that, but not principled moral objections). But your dark suggestions that you’d be fine with using “harsher measures” against anti-democratic parties is troubling, because it’s hard to imagine what that would mean other than compromising those rights, and suggests that you’re fine with violent retaliation beyond simply delisting their candidates (for what crime? If their candidates can’t be recognized as standing in the election, what “resistance” do you have in mind suppressing through the use of violence? Advocating political views? Electioneering for qualified candidates? Printing literature? Meeting? Assembling in public? Something else?)

N.B.: I am quite willing to take the stance in question for Kach as well as Hamas, for Maoists, for the Ku Klux Klan, and just about any other example of bare-fanged evil organized that I can think of.

“I always thought the vanilla thing came from vanilla being the default icecream flavor, ie if there’s only one flavour of icecream available, it’s going to be vanilla. Thus making BDSM, I don’t know, the Spumoni of the sex world.”

Yes. It’s an intentionally condescending term, and frankly I think it’s disingenuous in the extreme for vocal BDSM advocates to pretend like they don’t mean anything derogatory by it.

I don’t have much in the way of an opinion on whether it’s possible to have a social environment in which abortion is safe, legal, and also rare. It seems to me that this is an empirical question that hasn’t adequately been answered.

But whatever the answer may be, why anyone should care about minimizing the number of abortions as a policy goal in the first place? I mean, really, who cares? Is there supposed to be something wrong with having an abortion?

scott: Rad Geek, From the comments here and at your site, I think we’re just coming at things from totally different angles. I’m looking at these things as givens, for the time being, that have to be considered regardless of if we support them or not. You’re looking at the more theoretical aspects of all this – governments, elections, etc – which are important questions on the whole, but not as immediately pertinent to me at the moment.

Well, I’m sure there is a difference of focus here, but I’m not convinced that it’s best understood in terms of the distinctions between theoretical and practical. It seems to me that the very real problems with government-to-government aid make for good practical reasons to take the “purist” stance: because government-to-government aid is actively harmful (in particular, in the P.A., it has propped up and lined the pockets of a corrupt, unaccountable, and co-opted one-party state under Fatah for years), complaining about it being cut seems rather like complaining about someone getting a reduction in their dose of arsenic-laced wine.

scott: At the same time, because of the occupation and destroyed economy, the Palestinians need aid right now. I don’t see anarchists stepping up, or the left, so until then, we’re left with the Japanese government giving UNWRA $500,000 donations, and the EU funding PA programs. Certainly not an ideal situation.

Well, so why not make an effort to get anarchists (and for that matter, statist Leftists and humanitarians of various stripes) to step up like they should and give direct mutual aid? It seems to me that they’re probably more open to persuasion than U.S. policy makers, more likely to give money to the right people, and, if you fail to hit the goals that need to be hit, that’s still more money to people who need it than the nothing that results from failed political pressure campaigns.

scott: Rad Geek, From the comments here and at your site, I think we’re just coming at things from totally different angles. I’m looking at these things as givens, for the time being, that have to be considered regardless of if we support them or not. You’re looking at the more theoretical aspects of all this – governments, elections, etc – which are important questions on the whole, but not as immediately pertinent to me at the moment.

Well, I’m sure there is a difference of focus here, but I’m not convinced that it’s best understood in terms of the distinctions between theoretical and practical. It seems to me that the very real problems with government-to-government aid make for good practical reasons to take the “purist” stance: because government-to-government aid is actively harmful (in particular, in the P.A., it has propped up and lined the pockets of a corrupt, unaccountable, and co-opted one-party state under Fatah for years), complaining about it being cut seems rather like complaining about someone getting a reduction in their dose of arsenic-laced wine.

scott: At the same time, because of the occupation and destroyed economy, the Palestinians need aid right now. I don’t see anarchists stepping up, or the left, so until then, we’re left with the Japanese government giving UNWRA $500,000 donations, and the EU funding PA programs. Certainly not an ideal situation.

Well, so why not make an effort to get anarchists (and for that matter, statist Leftists and humanitarians of various stripes) to step up like they should and give direct mutual aid? It seems to me that they’re probably more open to persuasion than U.S. policy makers, more likely to give money to the right people, and, if you fail to hit the goals that need to be hit, that’s still more money to people who need it than the nothing that results from failed political pressure campaigns.

Womble, the distinction between meaningful democracy and majority tyranny, as those terms are usually used, has to do with protections for minorities and individual rights. It has nothing in particular to do with whether or not “anti-democratic” parties can be elected to office.

Do you think that believing in an inalienable right of free political association, or simply not trusting the incumbent government to be able to make the decisions about which competing parties are sufficiently “democratic” and which aren’t, is not only mistaken, but in fact an insane form of “blind ideological fanaticism”?

And, just to be clear, when you say that anti-democratic political parties ought to be suppressed by the government, just how far do you think that they ought to go in the name of democracy? Banning the anti-democratic party from competing in parliamentary elections? Banning members of the anti-democratic party from standing for individual sets? Dissolving the anti-democratic party by government diktat? Restricting their rights to electioneer or lobby or contribute to campaigns? Restricting their rights to meet or publish political literature? Rounding them up and shooting them? Less? More? (I ask because this bears partly on just what’s entailed by your answer to the first question.)

belledame222:

I validate that BB had a bad experience of BDSM and does not want any truck with it.

Well, that’s mighty big of you.

It would be nice if y’all could recognize that other people have different experiences, and that ours are also valid.

Look, experiences aren’t “valid” or “invalid.” Experiences just are. There’s a question here, though, about what some people’s personal experiences with BDSM, in and out of the formalized “scene,” mean. That’s not necessarily just a matter of “Well, you had your experiences and I had mine.”

And for the record, there *is* a recognized difference between abuse and BDSM, and while there are plenty of assholes within the scene(s), there are also plenty of healthy, evolved people who would immediately understand that what BB went through was coercion by any other name.

Part of the question here is whether it’s just some big accident that there are plenty of assholes in the scene in addition to the people you’re comfortable with, or whether there’s something about the scene (or about BDSM itself) that encourages that.

(And before you mention it, I know that there abuse and coercion happen in non-BDSM sexual relationships too. Most feminist critics of BDSM do think that there are plenty of things about normative sexuality in our society that encourage that, and criticize them at length. Part of what we are asking y’all for is not to just stop applying that level of scrutiny and criticism when it’s your own sexual “scene” that’s in question.)

Q Grrl:

Belladame, how can they be negotiating for what they want without simultaneously negotiating for what they don’t want: being pushed beyond their comfort levels.

Brava. This helped clarify what it is that bugs me so much when BDSM advocates are talking about the supreme importance of “negotiation,” in particular, in BDSM sex. Consent is unilateral, based what each partner wants to happen to her own body. “Negotiation” over “boundaries” is something that warring states do to work out territorial claims in order to avoid a conflict. One party suggests that they take X but give Y, the other says they want to take Z instead of Y, they either hash out a tit-for-tat compromise or else they get the guns and fight until their positions in the negotiation changes, and then they try again with a bit more quid on the table and bit less quo.

Sex shouldn’t be like that.

BritGirlSF:

I think a lot of people are failing to distunguish between the actual BSDM scene and the facsimile of it produced by the porn industry. … Honestly, I think that part of the problem is that the porn industry loves to use BSDM themes, and that gives people a distorted picture of what it’s really about. In my experience it was always a playful thing – silly at times, absurd at others, but certainly never scary,dangerous or abusive.

I think that this has it backwards. Sadomasochistic pornography is not taking “themes” from the “scene” and making “facsimiles” of them. Sadomasochistic pornography predated anything like the “scene” you’re involved in (going back, as it does, to de Sade and Sacher-Masoch). Of course, if people try to mechanically apply what they know about sadomasochistic pornography to the scene that you’re involved in they may say any number of things that are ignorant or selective. But I think that a responsible discussion of BDSM as a cultural and social phenomenon does have to discuss not only the scene that you’re defending, but also pornography (both the stories that it tells, and also the “scene” involved in the real people used in its production); it also has to discuss people involved in forms of BDSM who haven’t joined any sort of formal (or even informal) “scene”. The kind of community defense mechanisms that Dim talks about are worrisome when they obscure the fact that we’re talking about something broader than just the community that you’ve found.

As for Twisty, who was explicitly talking about the “official” BDSM scene and not the phenomenon of BDSM as a whole, well, she didn’t say that the scene defended by BDSM defenders was scary, dangerous, or abusive. She said that it was self-important and dorky.

Lis Riba:

I think people may be missing the cause-and-effect.

Part of the reason there’s so much more communication regarding BDSM scenes and so much more emphasis on active consent is because BDSM can so easily be misread or misinterpreted as (or possibly even slide into) abuse. … Because the actions taken in so-called vanilla sex are not seen as inherently abusive by mainstream society, participants don’t feel the same need for negotiation and explicit consent. It’s quite easy for people in the heat of the moment to slide from first to third, because there aren’t as many risks if somebody goes too far and the other objects.

Right, I understand why the necessities of BDSM (in particular) are supposed to demand much more explicit discussion of boundaries and consent, and I’m sure that it does often work out that way in much of the “official” BDSM scene. (My own concerns about BDSM lie elsewhere.) My point is that this situation isn’t unchangeable; there’s nothing about so-called “vanilla” sex that prevents communication between partners and explicit care about consent. Talking as if it were just a choice between communication-rich kinky sex and wordless, manipulative non-kinky sex — which is what Aero was doing above, even if that’s not what s/he intended — confines the issue unnecessarily. And that this isn’t something that feminist BDSM critics are unaware of, or sanguine about.