Rush Limbaugh complains about nonconsensual sex being called rape

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I wouldn’t even make Rush Limbaugh touch Rush Limbaugh. I’m sure we can knock together a rapebot or use some VR or something like that.

But seriously, I’m for freedom of thought and reasonable freedom of expression but a guy like this not just thinking what he does but telling other people that this is the way to think seems like a public health issue.

We go after extremist Muslim clerics in society because their work product is terrorists. Rush’s listeners are debatably not quite as dangerous but are Rush’s rights to be heard more important than him teaching or reinforcing a load of people that Christianity his “morality” is more important than the law of the land? Why does Rush get preferential treatment over a Muslim cleric preaching what they believe?

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I would assume that the hard right would only need a tweak to their psycho-social template to turn them in to suicide bombing menace.

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Hey, those are polite disagreement words! (We don’t really have “fighting words” here.)

Canadians are not “Americans”. North Americans, sure. But “American” without a north, south or central attached to it is, to almost every English speaker,* short for “citizen of the United States of America”, not for “resident of North, South or Central America.”

*Some British people excepted, but I’m quite sure it’s almost always a deliberate attempt to annoy the colonials by lumping them in with the traitors.

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No, if we had people who could think outside of themselves, we’d have fewer Trump supporters.

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NOPE, we’re not doing that. For the same reason that I don’t decide that anybody who is African really means “The Republic of South Africa”, simply because their country has the word “Africa” in it.

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For the same reason we get all worked up about Ebola and “meh” about Influenza. Ebola is so virulent and deadly that it burns itself out in short order. But Influenza kills more people by many orders of magnitude, just less dramatically.

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I’m not arguing from logic, I’m arguing from usage. And when it comes to the way real people speak and write, usage frequently defies logic.

Do you know of any dictionaries or other reference works that deviate significantly from the following definition of “American” used as a noun?

[quote]1 a native or citizen of the United States.
• [ usu. with adj. ] a native or inhabitant of any of the countries of North, South, or Central America.[/quote]

Usually with adj, i.e. North, South, Central. In my opinion, those who insist on ignoring the “usu.” part do so from a position of stubborn pedantry, and they help sow confusion (often deliberately).

In English as people actually speak it, not as pedants wish people would speak it, a Canadian, Mexican, Venezuelan or Salvadoran person is just not an “American.”

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I’m gonna have to disagree here. I don’t by the argument that there’s consent inside of a power imbalance is inherently immoral, or is even immoral at all. Consent can absolutely exist in all these situations, and Limbaugh is actually (ugh) right in that consent is not enough.

We, as a society, we do need to put limitations on these situations, but it’s not from the perspective a moral perspective, it’s from a practical one. As you say, the “risk” is too high that consent doesn’t really exist, and I think that’s important. Not every policy we advocate needs to be primarily a moral one. It’s okay to make practical arguments.

We need to be alright as a society with saying “we are okay with restricting the right of certain people in certain situations from freely consenting, while admitting doing this is bad, if in doing so we think we think it reduces the risks of other bad things, specifically situations where individuals may appear to consent but do not actually do so, from arising as often”.

That’s the honest way to approach the topic, and personally the better way, because it gives us the ground to make reasonable and acceptable alterations to policy where possible to minimize the harm we are causing (and it’s important to admit with these policies that we often cause harm, hurting people who have done no wrong) while maximizing the benefits (preventing people from doing wrong).

As an example, let’s take the employer-employee situation. If a woman and her husband both work in the same company, and she is promoted to management, should we consider her initiating sex while they are home to be inherently immoral because he now works for her? Should it be illegal? Even if we agree that in general there should be limitations on power imbalances like this in relationships, we might agree that we should create exceptions for situations like these where the relationship existed before the power imbalance.

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The manipulation to make animals intelligent and intelligible is just straight out of Cordwainer Smith.

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That’s a much broader problem for a bigger topic, I suppose.

I think it’s also dishonest to suggest that people who disagree must be ignoring some sort of substantial truth. I see it as rather refuting a fickle one. Some may disagree, but I think that some degree of consistency in usage assists clarity. “America” in this case is handled as an exception to the usage in context of other continents, and with no compelling reason behind it. “Of America”, or “of Anything” works as a preposition pointing to something larger and more general, so using it instead as the specific misses the point. I can accurately refer to you as “Espresso of bOING bOING”, but not as “bOING bOING.” Of course, I could decide to adopt that usage anyway, but I would still need to acknowledge that there are problems of accuracy and clarity in doing so.

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All I’m saying is that when a person refers to someone as “an American” they are almost always referring to someone from the United States. That’s usage.

It may be correct, in the strictest sense, to say that “an American” can be anyone from anywhere between Ellesmere Island and Tierra del Fuego, but such a statement runs counter to near-universal usage, and therefore it undermines clarity.

Most of the time, being correct in the strictest sense lines up very well with being clear. This is one of those cases where it does not.

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I didn’t mean to imply that furries are the origin point for the concept - the subculture did have to pick it up from somewhere, after all. I was more specifically referring to the context in which “what if animals were sapient?” runs headlong into the question of “can you ethically/morally/legally fuck it?”. It’s just something I see a lot more often within furry circles than without, so it was kind of amusing to see it pop up in this thread.

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This is why I qualified “consent” with “meaningful.” In allmost of the situations that I describe1, I believe that both parties might be able to initially consent, but that the power imbalance applies massive disincentives to the less-powerful person’s ability to withdraw that consent, to the point of coercion. Even if the more-powerful person has absolutely no intention of using that power if consent is withheld. Consent cannot be meaningful without the freedom to revoke it.

1 struck out “all” and replaced it with “most,” because I don’t think that “consent” can apply to those who don’t fully understand the situation. We don’t have sentient chickens yet.

I think that it’s a very bad idea to have a manager placed in a position where a spouse (or other relationship that might create a conflict of interest) is reporting directly to them. It can affect the situation at home, it can affect the situation at work, human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together… Mass hysteria! If spouses are working together, and one of them is to be given a promotion, then one or both of them should be moved laterally within the organization, to remove the conflict of interest. If there’s no way to leverage the power imbalance, then it might as well not exist, and it removes all possibility of coercion.

As for whether a direct reporting position actually affects the consent within a spousal relationship… I would say that, as before, it can affect the less-powerful member of the relationship’s ability to withdraw or withhold consent, if they believe — even falsely — that their professional career might be at risk if they do so. I might not say that it’s inherently coercive, the way it would be if the professional employer/employee relationship existed before the sexual one did, but I still see it as a very bad idea.

I agree. Separate from the whole question of “Is a power imbalance inherently coercive towards the continuation of a sexual relationship?” is a question of whether we should be okay with restricting some truly consensual relationships because those relationships present too high a risk of not actually being consensual. And I agree that we should be making laws practically, and perhaps even scientifically, in such a way to create the greatest good and the least harm.

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Eh. There’s a reason why I evoked the spirit of Super Chicken in this thread:

“You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.”

Stunt performers, military truck drivers in country, fighter pilots, roughnecks on oil rigs, prizefighters, heads of state, and Evel Knievel balance their professional goals (profit, glory, hard-ons, whatever) against the sometimes-lethal dangers of their chosen profession. Often, with high reward comes high risk.

If someone wants to flip a coin with $10 million on one side and instant death on the other, that really doesn’t bother me. I doubt I’d take that risk myself, but I also work in a pretty safe job and have no daredevil tendencies to speak of anyway.

I’m no Libertarian, but I’m at least that much of a libertarian.

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Just in case it needed to be said, I’m not actually seeking that particular ethical loophole for myself.

I just feel that, if one is somehow able to correct for power imbalances related to strength, intellectual capacity, political/professional influence, emotional maturity, or any of the other typical objections standing in the way of informed consent, there wouldn’t necessarily be anything particularly morally or ethically objectionable to fucking a chicken that had given enthusiastic consent. In and of itself. It may be an animal, but under those stipulated conditions, it’d be people, too.

There goes my political career. :sweat:

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My comment was intended mostly as observational.Though, as I recall that point is never directly addressed in Cordwainer Smith’s work, but in The Ballad of Lost C’Mel, you find out that she is a sex worker and the story is written to show that this is part of the oppression of her class of people. It’s definitely a sub-theme.

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I’ve been lectured by Canadians several times in the past that “American” doesn’t mean US citizen, just that they come from the americas, and that it’s impolite of me to assume so when I ask where people are from.

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That’s surprising. Not that I’ve polled everyone I know, but I suspect I know very few Canadians who would take that stand. Maybe there’s a regional element to it? Or maybe there’s an element of context that would make it more understandable to me?

I can’t remember ever hearing anyone say “I’m (an) American” who didn’t mean “I’m from the USA.” Indeed, many of my compatriots have deep tendencies toward knee-jerk anti-Americanism (a term that means specifically anti-USA) that would cause them to go nuts to be referred to as “(an) American.” (I’d forgive you for thinking that describes me right now, but I’m just making a point about clarity, not exactly in a lather here.)

When Trump’s slogan reads “Make America Great Again”, nobody thinks he’s talking about North, South and Central America, and I’ve not heard anyone argue that it would be more proper to say “Make the USA Great Again”. When a British politician refers to “the Americans” nobody hears anything but a relatively casual way of saying “the United States”, and likewise you won’t hear a Canadian politician refer to Canadians as “Americans”.

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I have often found the arguments about legislating against certain sex acts to be interesting. They are often quite convoluted and inconsistent and seem like cursory ways to push for a certain legal result rather than establish any clear ethics.

The “sapience” angle is sticky, because there are some who argue that even humans are hardly as self-aware as they suppose. It might explain away a human engaging in congress with a dog, but perhaps not with a dolphin. A dolphin lacks citizenship only for legal purposes, and arguably not because of its capacity as a rational actor.

Although I can appreciate the sentiment of protecting non-human animals, I think that that pretense is really only used to legislate away what many consider abhorrent human behavior. How can I claim that you violated a cow’s consent if you fuck it, but it’s then perfectly fine for you to kill it and eat it? There is also a strong element of “human exceptionism” here - why is it bestiality if a human fucks a sheep, but not if a dog does? Aren’t both instances equally “unnatural”? Does either demonstrably cause more harm to the sheep? This also frames the issue in terms of some vague “sexual gratification” - how about from an animal husbandry perspective? If I force breed or artificially inseminate some non-human, am I not still violating its consent, and arguably sexually assaulting it? If I forcibly inseminated human women, would it in turn be a valid defense that I did not consider the act to be sexual?

Then there’s the question of what agency a non-human can be said to have. If speech is required to establish sexual consent with a human, then doesn’t this also imply the troubling suggestion that non-humans are also unable to consent to sex with each other? How or why would this suddenly not be a problem? There’s also the problem of rationalizing away consent from a non-human who actively participates. If someone made a video of themself playing sexually, and then they were mounted by an uncoerced dog, would this imply they violated its consent? Would either the human or dog be unduly exploited if people watched the resulting video?

My point in pointing out these scenarios is that none of these factors are generally discussed when such laws are made, the underlying ethics are left vague and inconsistent. It’s an area where people seem to get quickly squicked so there is little debate. And as @Donald_Petersen alluded to, people are even quick to assume that anybody who wants to discuss the topic must have some personal stake in it, which is itself again weird and inconsistent. Why would debating the ethics of bestiality make one a pervert, while debates about, say, murder do not cause one to be equivocated with being a murderer?

tl:dr Since human exceptionism is an implicit presumption which makes all traditional law possible, people are reluctant to question it. And they like to police sex anyway.

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It all comes back down to morality.

Morality is a product of civilization. Our DNA hasn’t changed much in the past 30,000 years, but our concept of morality has. It’s been one incredibly prolonged discussion, with a few wars fought because the people commanding each army had different definitions of what is “morally right” and “morally wrong.”

So, when an animal enters a sexual relationship with another animal (of the same or of different species), they are not immoral, they are amoral. It’s not that they’re acting against a moral code, but that they have no concept (or, at least none that they can express to us) of a moral code.

On the other hand, a human being, part of a civilization that has been spending tens of thousands of years refining “right” and “wrong,” has a moral code. It may not be exactly the same moral code as that person’s next-door neighbour, but it can be compared and judged against other moral codes. In other words, we have reason to expect better of a human being than another life form. And a human shouldn’t engage in a sexual relationship without consent, even if the other party can’t properly conceptualize the idea of “consent.”

You bring up the point of dolphins, and I’ll throw apes into the mix. It’s entirely possible that they have language, and moral codes (I would argue the former is necessary for the latter), and perhaps even the idea of consent. If, at some point in the future, we can communicate with them, and gain that knowledge, then the moral question will change. However, for right now, the problem is that, even if they were able to conceptualize consent, there is no way to communicate it.

The most important part of the word consent is the prefix “con-,” meaning “together.” The act needs to be agreed to by both parties (or more, if that’s what you prefer). It’s a coin that can’t just have one side.

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