hopelesslyInvo
Posts: 522
Joined: 2/10/2008 From: the future Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Archer The toaster example is fairly weak actually since the obvious rebuttal is that live property would make a better and closer comparison. Take the baseball bat to the dog and see how far the property rights extend when it comes to "live property". And there have been forms of minimum standards of treatment of live property in some societies for centuries. i suppose you could look at it that way. on the other hand i could make many other examples of how more often, livestock was of greater worth than the life of a slave. i guess i could have used the example of taking my dog out and shooting it, but even then, it's unlikely anyone would find out i did it, as well as doubtful anyone would care, and even if they did, it's doubtful that i'd suffer any reprocussions, largely in part that i live where i have a fair bit of privacy and don't have people like peta up my ass, much like the similar situation people enjoyed "back in those days". even if i did have animal rights on my ass, the most likely situation is that i would not be allowed to continue to own any pets, and that any other animals i already had at the time would then be seized. what examples did you have in mind with "minimun standards of treatment for live property several hundreds of years ago", was this also basically just in regard to anything living, or with slaves that to this belief, "you weren't allowed to beat to all hell for no apparent or significant reason"? i figure if people can compare their "slaves" to a microwave, that they are just property and that "it" should never question its role and just do as its told without hesitation, without taking into concern what is harmful to it, what it is capable of, or even show notion of thinking for itself... then i'd say using a toaster as an example isn't much of a stretch. guess it really comes down to the meaning of a slave. i still stick to the traditional definition, "a person who lacks freewill and lives in servitude, not someone who willfully serves". my question is still; if nothing more is holding a slave to remain in service to someone except their will alone, how is that not simply submission or servitude? how does that fit into "not having freewill", when their will is the only reason they do it, what else could possibly merit the word slavery other than what the mindset and viewpoint is of the "slave", and the one they serve? even in the life debt example, is every moment they "choose" to stay not an absolute testament to how much they are not a slave? there's no question of legality in this inquiry, nor any question of if i can kill my dog in the middle of times square. i know i couldn't kill my dog like that with no consequences, and it's for the same reason i can't own a slave, "rights". but from someone not worried about the "legalities" of a slave in this argument, the rebuttal of what i'm legally allowed to do with a pet of mine is a bit hypocritical is it not? i know you weren't the one to bring up the subject, but my standpoint was in the fact that you can't treat people that way, that they aren't toasters. i wouldn't any sooner want to compare a person to a dog either, as also people are not dogs. the point i was trying to make, is people are not property, which is why murder would be the issue i'd face, and people are much more accounted for than animals, even "human strays". saying i couldn't get away with it if it was a living creature was the very point i was trying to make. legality and rights come into play depending on the example, but in dismissing those things and getting right the root of it, what will be left to discuss if everything is so quickly disregarded as being an irrelevant point? just semantics and word play? we'd all be back at square one then. the only difference i can possibly see is that you're saying, a "slave" doing something like paying a life debt would serve in honor of "what" a person did for them, and that this honor can hold them to it. i see a "submissive" as serving so as to honor "who" that person is, and they will continue to do so for reasons no different. their devotion to their cause cannot be compared, what they do cannot be compared, what they are capable of cannot be compared. now the way i word that puts a pretty stark difference between the merit of the two, but these aren't my views between the two, and i'm not tryin to discredit or glorify one or the other; my first post pretty well clarifies how i actually feel about both. i think using the life debt is more of a weak example that my toaster, as i'm sure you're not trying to take the standpoint that a person would need to do something absurdly unlikely like saving their life. i'm sure the "honor" is your point in it all, but i would argue quickly that having or not having honor doesn't even help to prove anything, and that especially in bdsm terms... honor might be among the least likely of reasons to form or to hold a relationship of that nature. i'd be more concerned with proving that much like a submissive can offer themselves and service to another at will, a person calling themself a slave could do just the same, without needing any other reason other than they want to. i think it'll take far more than the example a something like a life pledge to prove anything, if for no other reason that between bdsm and indiana jones saving someone's life, there's not much that is similar in those examples other than the name "slave", but i believe that these are things that don't exactly need to be proven if they even can be. no one needs to prove what global warming is to me for me to know what it is, and regardless of what i believe is causing change in weather, i can see the effects. i wonder as i've tried figuring this out myself, is the word "slave" or "slavery" the one causing more problems to what people are buying into, or does it have the same impact. it might have some merit to questioning it, afterall would a person who's a "slave" to drugs, chinese food, or jazz music count as a person who is "in slavery", or much like "sex slave" is it just wordplay used to describe how passionate or possibly dependent they are to something by means of relating it to another descriptive/definitive term such as a "real slave". people say things all the time like "his god is money", but obviously such things are not a diety, and calling them a god in expressive terms doesn't make them so. i'm not on some madhouse goal to disprove slavery, i'm not going to be relentlessly badgering this subject, and even if i did have a pretty valid point, or even truly proved it, the bdsm community could not care less what i have to say, and nothing would change aside from a handful of viewpoints. the point i would like to make and stress, and not to anyone imparticular, but simply to anyone who bothers to read my rants; regardless of what the wording ends up being, regardless if a person was decided to be a slave or not, a master or not, or any other often questioned title, that doesn't make what they do, what they commit to, or what their beliefs are "roleplay". i will continue to find the idea of "each person has their own reality" to be bullshit, but things don't diminish in how real they are simply because others don't see the reality of it, i can think of some single celled friends and some round worlds to attest to that.
< Message edited by hopelesslyInvo -- 4/11/2008 6:48:15 PM >
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