#96 - In which I prove that fandom has broken my brain.

[reileen]

I started the first chapter of Marc D. Hauser's Moral Minds last night in attempt to possibly lull myself to sleep with academia. (For the record, I just ended up giving myself a headache because I was mentally questioning every other claim Hauser made. Not to say that he has batshit claims, just that I'm trying to teach myself to approach everything with a critical, skeptical mind.)

To demonstrate that reason cannot be the sole guiding principle for how humans makes moral judgments, Hauser asks us to rate the following two scenarios on a scale of one to ten, with one being "not disgusting at all" and ten being "holy fugging gawd that's a blasphemy unto every deity that's ever existed":

1. You come home from work, and your daughter rushes up to you: "Dad! Just a few minutes ago I walked into the bathroom and found Mom crouched over the toilet bowl, licking ice cream off of the toilet seat. She looked up and said 'It's delicious,' and then asked if I wanted some.

[. . .]

2. A brother and a sister are on vacation together and decide that to enrich their wonderful relationship they should make love. Since he has been vasectomized and she is on the Pill, there is no risk of pregnancy. They make passionate love and it is a wonderful experience for both. They keep this as their secret, something they will always remember and cherish. (p.22)

Hauser personally rates the first scenario as a 6 for the first scenario and an 8 for the second scenario, saying that he can see an argument for how eating ice cream off a toilet seat wouldn't be disgusting (via an involved and wacky scenario of people coming up with sanitized toilet seats that were declared by the FDA or whatever to be perfectly good to eat from). He, however, has a harder time imagining an argument in favor of incest.

Me? I find the first scenario pretty gross (probably an 8 on the scale) and the second scenario to actually be on the sweet side (2 or 3).

It's not that I would have sex with my brother or sister, but somehow my brain has been rewired enough that I don't particularly care if other people do it and it's consensual. (For the sake of not bringing too much serious business, let us assume that "incest" here means simply sexual/romantic relations between a brother and a sister, and not an adult relative and a child, because the latter scenario involves things like power imbalances and whether the child can truly give consent, etc. and so forth.)

Also, this quote from philosopher James Rachels that Hauser cites on page 27 needs to be printed on posters and slapped all over fandom:

If someone says "I like coffee," he does not need to have a reason - he is merely stating a fact about himself, and nothing more. There is no such thing as "rationally defending" one's like or dislike of coffee, and so there is no argument about it. So long as he is accurately reporting his tastes, what he says must be true . . . On the other hand, if someone says that something is morally wrong, he does need reasons, and if his reasons are sound, other people must acknowledge their force. By the same logic, if he has no good reasons for what he says, he is just making noises and we need pay him no attention.

Except that I'm positive that someone somewhere (probably more than a few someones and more than a few somewheres) will argue/has argued that supporting a particular pairing/character/what have you is, in fact, a Crime Against Humanity.

***

Clearly I need to visit thrift stores more often. I dropped by the Salvation Army store near my house today and acquired:

The Tragic Muse by Henry James
John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best by Michael Kranish, Brian C. Mooney, and Nina J. Easton
Mary, Called Magdalene by Margaret George
Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce by Douglass Starr
Sex on the Brain: The Biological Differences Between Men and Women by Deborah Blum
A pink, orange, and purple printed sheer scarf

All for the grand price of $2.61! I PAID FROM MY CHANGE PURSE, BITCHES! :D

And then I also borrowed more crap from the library. Besides Moral Minds and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, both of which I renewed, I now have:

Robot Dreams by Sara Varon (graphic novel)
Beka Cooper: Terrier by Tamora Pierce
Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice (STFU I wanted to see what all the batshit was about)
Pop! by Aury Wallington
Dead Beat by Jim Butcher
Fledgling by Octavia Butler
Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
Sabriel by Garth Nix
The Sharing Knife: Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold
The Sharing Knife: Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold

Shameless bookwhore, me? NEVAR.

***

Finally, I am hopelessly hooked on Nightwish's song "Amaranth."

-Reileen
you believe but what you see

Comments

[dantaron.livejournal.com]

Touche on the disgust thing, and amen to the fandom thing. XD

As to the thrift story, holy mother. o_o That's a good deal, to say the least.

On the library books - Garth Nix is the MAN. Lemme know how that book is, plz? He wrote the Seventh Tower series, iirc, which has godly worldbuilding and much awesome (for being a grade five level book, lolz!).
Interview with the Vampire, was kinda boring for me. >_> The next book (technically), The Vampire Lestat, is about a billion times better. And Queen of the Damned after that is better again.
She has some good concepts of vampires, although, you'll -reaaally- have to suspend disbelief for some of the crap they can do.

[reileen.livejournal.com]

Regarding Anne Rice: I figured that if I'm going to write my urban vampiric fantasy parody at some point in the future, I'd like to at least see what's part of its "canon", so to speak. I'd have to re-read most of Amelia Atwater-Rhodes' stuff (although I like her, so that's not that big of a deal), and I'll probably take a look at Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, since for some reason that's really big now. And I could dig up a million other books on vampires, both fictional and about the history of the vampire mythos.

Really funny thing, though: I don't have a particular "fetish" for either vampires or werewolves, and yet I have original ideas that revolve around both...