I don’t purport to know what an “evil doer” really is, but I do know that when I sit down to make a decision between either seeing a movie I probably won’t enjoy that much for 12$, and helping someone with that money, and I consistently pick the movie.
What’s worse, I somehow ALSO feel morally outraged when I hear a story about some damning case of neglect. The question is: why am I allowed to be outraged about evil doers or people who refuse to help those in need, but comfortable about my own lack of help? Might it not be that what we think of as moral principles are really just principles of convienience? Like WMD law, in which illegal weapons just happen to be those which the countries who write the laws no longer need to use, having invented much more deadly and effective weapons?
But I’m not sure that’s true. Hitler was a violent anti-Semite. He didn’t HAVE the moral values that you and I claim to have, and so he wasn’t playing with anything like the moral deck we have to play with. That means that we can expect LESS from someone like him than we should expect from ourselves.
It’s never that simple. I didn’t create disease, famine, or poverty, but neither did I do anything to be born privaleged, reasonably together, and reasonably intelligent. That was pure dumb luck. That might well not be a good reason to create a society that would take some of my good fortune away to give to others, but it sure is no defense of my own actions or inactions.
And there’s no fallacy there unless you hold an absolute definition for those terms.
You claimed earlier that, that’s what EM was referring to, but I don’t see that from EM’s first post. He brought up a few examples (Carnegie/mines, gated/slums, plasma TV/slavery) but they are all paired with the corresponding relative ‘wealthy’.
If you are inferring that since all those three conditions satisfy criteria for “absolute” poverty as well, the Wealth <-> Poverty refers to the absolute condition, then that’s a presumption, bolstered only by the circumstantial fact that relative poverty often means absolute poverty even today.
The whole bit about trading children in wholesale lots has the same ring about it as the panic in the US a few years ago about satanic cults sacrificing children on a weekly basis and even raising them for the purpose. As you know, the whole satanic-cult thing turned out to be total bullshit and I expect that this will also. I suppose this post has a certain “me too!” sound about it but I’m not going to get worked up about something that probably doesn’t exist.
You may dispute some details, but I think this business has been well documented by many reputible sources. Having said that, I listened to an interview on NPR today with the autor, and he was clearly as interested in promoting himself (and his heroic reporting efforts) as he was in bringing this story to light.
Difficult to assess the veracity of the author’s claims. What’s with the Times journalists lately? I don’t think this story requires sensationalistic claims to have an impact. :dubious: Most of the hard statistics I could find include adult women, so it’s difficult to say what % are actually children.
That sort of sounds like they were using the novel Oryx and Crake as source material. But Atwood must have gotten the idea for her character’s childhood experiences somewhere…problems like this probably exist in isolated spots, even though they may not be of the mythic proportions reported.
Originally posted by Ex Machina :
“Be careful who you roll your eyes at my little intellectual pretender. You are dealing with an intuitive genius.”
This statement is possesed of a rare sublimity to beautiful to dissect here.
Originally posted by Ex Machina :
“It is hypocritical for the wealthy to criticize the poor for their methods of staying alive when their condition is “created” by the wealthy, and the selling of drugs and prostitution are made practical alternatives to sustain themselves.”
Fortunately, however, (and in keeping with the cosmic-karmic balance) this one " has a certain understated stupidity." Just so as to not go off in a complete hijack, I’ll illustrate with an example related to the OP. So, by the very virtue of being poor, the poor are immune to any critique of their behavior? So the Thai sperm donors who sell their children into prostitution to support their predilection for junk, they’re just working with the only means a stratified society has left them for sustainence, correct? I should somehow feel guilty because some waste of space can’t kick like a real man, instead, condemning his own children to a life of misery? Right, gotcha. Think I’ll go pick up that new DVD player I’ve been wanting now.
When I re-read my previous post I seem to come off as doubting that children are sold for sexual purposes which was not my intent at all. Children are sexually abused and always have been. Whenever there is a demand, someone will cater to it and efforts to stop the supply simply result in a higher price. The effort to stamp out child prostitution is probably doomed to failure but is still worth making.
I think what I objected to in the OP was a perceived casual nature of the transaction. Having lived in Thailand, speaking the language, etc. I can say the the “Minnesota Doctor” had better be more careful. The Thais have a lower age of consent (14 or 15 if I remember correctly) but if the doc was renting pre-pubescent children the prison term is lengthy and the Thais don’t like child-molesters any better than the average westerner.
Thanks for the Oryx and Crake reference. I haven’t read it but intend to as soon as the Saudi authorities decide it isn’t subversive. S I’m sure that children do get sold for sex, people are arrested for it all the time and in many different countries. I would never dismiss the problem as non-existant but I suspect that the author has taken a real social problem and blown it up into a crusade for reasons of his own. As John Mace pointed out, the guy seems pretty intent on selling lots of books.
After reading the link in your previous post it seems that this probably is like the Satanist thing, a lot of smoke but no or very few actual examples.
Much - if not all - of what my wife and I have came from pure unadulterated Blood, Sweat, and tears shed by no one but ourselves. Our earnings are based solely on our work ethic and background. I and my wife did what we needed to to get to where we are. We are certainly not afraid to get up early, and work our asses off to afford whatever luxuries we have.
You have that right as well, you can work your ass off to afford what you please…Or not. Rarely are things gifted to you on a silver platter. Most of the time you need to work for what you have…
Excuse the casualness of the OP. I intended no casual nature of the words, I was just sketchy on remembering the actual facts on the show…I’m quite sure the doc was from minnesota, but as for thailand it may have been a different country in that region.
The danger of EX’s odd philosophy is both that it weakens personal responsibility (‘I am evil because someone else is good.’) and that it makes any effort at moral progress meaningless (‘If I save this person, I am killing another.’)
Even if it were true, I would choose to think it was not.
I knew a woman who was living alone, abandoned by her husband, who needed to pay the rent etc. She lived in a tiny house on the “wrong side of the tracks” and was becoming increasingly desperate. The job we both worked at was low paying and tedious. She confided to me that a female friend was encouraging her to become involved in prostitution. The selling point was that her customers were “nice clean successful men” from the “right” side of the tracks. The attraction of the money eventually overrode her reluctance.
This was a nice lady whom I had grown fond of and it was not pleasant for me to see this turn of events. I did not consider her “evil” because someone else was “good.” I believe I have left moral judgment out of my description of reality. It is not my “odd philosophy” that this is how things *should be * but how they are.
I don’t know what the expression “moral progress” means.
If a person chooses to continue in his position ensconced in his recliner before the t.v. then children will continue to be sold into sexual slavery. I don’t say that people should remain in their lazy boys. I say that if you choose to remain there you shouldn’t pretend that just being upset about a matter makes a difference. I don’t see how the statement “If I save this person, I am killing another” follows from that.
I made general statements about the balance of wealth which were half serious and half tongue-in-cheek. These were opinions to support a conclusion and not intended to be self supporting arguments. It’s as if someone said “there’s nothing new under the sun” and someone else disputed the contention by documenting the invention of Silly Putty.
The disparity of wealth creates unpleasant situations. Some people have an excess of wealth and some have a lack. This enables people with base or perverse desires to live out their fantasies. Whether it is some rich gentleman getting a blowjob in his town car or a wealthy doctor renting young girls in a village in the Orient doesn’t matter. It is the same the world over.
We have settled on a system which makes some people billionaires and some people homeless. This system of inequity will probably hold sway over most of civilization in the future. This means that perversions will be perpetuated.
As long as poor people fear death, and as long as the rich have human natures, depravity will continue.
My apologies. Your description was fine. I was referring to the pedo doctor taking a journalist (or anyone else) along on a trip to buy children. That was the part that seemed casual to me.
I can’t say too much about the other countries in the area. I believe Cambodia had a reputation for such things, it is a very economically depressed and chaotic place where just about anything is possible.
Except that the result of buying one of these poor children out of slavery simply perpetuates the industry. The seller now has two thousand US dollars(which translates into far more resources in the rest of the world) to buy other victims. To publish misleading phamplets to ensnare other desperate invidivuals or families. To grease palms. To afford transportation.
Increasing demand, even for the right reasons, increases the problem. Demand needs to be reduced. Either by identifying the root causes of these desires and combating them, or by some other method. Using the system to thwart the system simply doesn’t work. You can’t kill it by feeding it.
Ahhh, but as other posts here have made clear, sometimes it is difficult to tell whether an active stance will, indeed, make things any better, rather than most likely not making any difference at all, or even hurting things. You must ask yourself whether one completely ruined life is better than one completely ruined life AND one completely frustrated, broke, bitter individual who has not made a difference despite giving it their all.
Mere action provides no guarantees. If there were some identifiable way in which bad situations could be helped, you can be assured many people, even in this thread, would avail themselves of them. But it remains to be seen if even the best efforts of these individuals would yield any result at all.
Except it’s unlikely that whatever I pay to save one girl will not likely itself be enough to induce demand for an entire other girl. Regardless, there are plenty of equally worthy other options that don’t include this downside.
I have to side with EX here, with reservations. Historically, women have been enslaved. Sexual service was simply one of the terms of their slavery. In short, sex slavery is not purely the product of capitalism as it long predated capitalism, and in fact capitalism may ultimately prove less friendly to sex slavery than most other systems, like feudalism, which perpetuate social and economic inequality. (I’d argue that socialist democracies, with their greater concern for their welfare of all members of their socieities, are the least slavery-friendly form of society going).
In the Third World there are an awful lot of families that have a lot of children and very little food. Under those circumstances, selling a female child into slavery might be considered giving her a way out from near-certain starvation. We might not like thinking about that but to parents who are looking at their last bowl of rice and their very skinny young daughter, it may be a pragmatic attempt to save her (and their) life rather than a shameful lack of morals. Plus, I have to believe that very poor people in countries where having lots of kids with the knowledge that a certain number of them may die young in hopes that some may survive to support them one day is a common stratagem, may have more distant, colder feelings toward their kids than we in America do.
That poverty is the root of sex slavery. Until everybody in the world has enough to eat, there’ll always be quite a few young girls available for the sex trade. Beats letting them starve to death.
Of course, the people who buy women as sex slaves have some moral flaws, but they can probably comfort themselves that they are saving the girls from starvation. And the hell of it is, they are probably right.