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xssve -> RE: On the Torture of Others ? (12/17/2010 7:32:42 AM)
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LC is correct: BDSM is, in a political sense, likely a mockery of medieval torture - there, the goal was control over unseen forces, the Devil, and the goal was to inflict agony - the goal of BDSM is to ultimately, inflict ecstasy.
As for have we "become" more comfortable with our dark side, it was always there, always has been: Rome was perhaps the one of the most sadistic civilizations ever to exist on the face of the earth, and those traditions survived the fall of the Roman Empire and became a feature of the Holy Roman Empire, the Libertines were likely remnants of the Roman aristocracy and it's traditions of treating people like dumb animals.
The Medieval aristocracy and the Church were even worse, not just torture, but starvation and general repression - soil depletion led to cyclic famine that killed perhaps a Third of the population off at any given time - malnutrition in can cause severe personality disorders, ranging from learning disabilities to psychopathy, a stationary phase mutation that may be heritable (see Restak, The Brain).
Those farmers who learned to rotate their crops were likely tortured and killed for witchcraft, accused by their neighbors who had depleted their soil, unable to resist the profit motive - the same thing happened here, in the Twenties dust bowl - soil depletion, and the soil bank program designed to prevent this from recurring is of course, under attack from conservatives at the behest of agribusiness.
The whole history of the United States is a long continuance of the struggle between aristocratic privilege and entitlement and ordinary people trying to live their lives, from Native Americans to, African slaves to Collective bargaining, there is a steady string of massacre and atrocity - Patton's first military action was a charge on WWI veterens, the "Bonus Army", Kent State was merely the most recent, and the first time such a thing was widely reported in the media.
But yes, they may blame kinksters, if shit does happen, that's how magical thinking works: they made going after gays top priority, while at the very same moment committing perhaps the most degenerate atrocity of the late Twentieth century, the saturation of Iraq with depleted Uranium, leading to Thousands of severe birth defects (image google depleted Uranium Munitions), which never gets mentioned on Fox News.
In your most demented BDSM fantasy, you can't even touch that.
If it does, you can be sure it's a facade concealing an attempt to censor and control the media: like Kent State, these things are harder to pull off with a free press, there are numerous groups already out to censor porn, citing all kinds of bad science, but it sells when you have a captive audience - the only effective counter to propaganda is hearing the whole story, it's why the framers of the constitution put free speech at the top of the list.
They may be up against it however, it's a huge business economically, and just like psychopaths, like the ones in the Bush administration who issued the torture memo that led to Abu Graib, in spite of their own trained interrogators advising it was unnecessary, people have been having consensual sex in all sorts of freaky ways since the beginning of time too, loving it, and leading long, healthy, and perfectly sociable lives, and conversely, those who claim to be on some mission from god to stop them.
There's nothing new here, only the spin changes, I'd love to get into the whole issue of Calvinist influence, but I've already gone on too long, but it's a lever used both to dupe people into falling for crypto-fascist propaganda, and to justify atrocities, like Abu Graib.
The short answer is, no, there is no sudden degeneration of "morals" due to the prevalence of porn, including BDSM, rape rates have gone down, they are higher where it's repressed - and, while there may be a downside, there always is, nothing is perfect, the net positive effect is documented, there is no reason to panic - it might be chaotic, to some extent, but it doesn't turn people into sociopaths, it's usually "family values" and the profit motive that do that, and they're always going to be with us too.
But you know, "out of sight, out of mind"...
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