Interesting Links for 13-01-2016

[andrewducker]

• Sell everything ahead of stock market crash, say RBS economists
  • shares economics economy
• Actual Facts Related To The Bowie Social Media Shitstorm Today
  • consent age DavidBowie
• A radical new approach to generating human organs is to grow them inside pigs or sheep.
  • organs pigs sheep humans research
• DNA-testing kit 23andme: patient-powered healthcare

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Well, if you want to just get into a debate over whether Bowie was a criminal or not, he certainly was. But he was breaking lots and lots of laws.

This just happens to be the one that people care about.

The sex law was a petty misdemenor.

The amount of drugs he was transporting and the firearms he was transporting were felonies. As was every instance where he got a blow job from an adult man or woman.

So, if someone were to make the argument that "we hate criminals and he was a criminal", then, fine.

But I've yet to see anyone give a shit about him engaging in not procreative sex, drug trafficking or being super into guns.

Instead people are focused on what legally was considered the least serious law he broke.

Also, interestingly, in 1987 he actually did in a cocaine fueled rage try to break a door down to sexually assault a woman - and nobody is bringing that up.

All of that makes me think nobody cares about him being a criminal.

Instead they simply want to hell a young woman how she should feel about her actions and make her into a victim when she says she isn't one.

All the while ignoring a woman who actually says she's a victim.

Seems pretty fucked up to me.

[danieldwilliam]

I don't doubt that he's done worse things (both things that I consider worse and which society considers worse) than the statutory rape that is the subject of discussion.

And you're probably right that the motivation of the people getting very excited about it is not a clean and clear love of justice and jurisprudence.

Personally, I'd be more concerned about the moral implication of kicking down doors whilst high or toting guns around whilst at the same time thinking that still doesn't put him beyond the pale (or at least my pale) completely.

Drugs laws start to push against my boundary of legimate laws. I think they are illiberal and unnecessarily restrictive and I think the process used to lobby for their creation and retention is perhaps corrupt enough to make those laws illegimate.

[steer]

Instead people are focused on what legally was considered the least serious law he broke.

Because it's the most clear moral transgression. The law is not germane here, it's whether what he did was actually pretty messed up.

Everyone (apart from the genuinely morally repugnant) believes that there's an age at which you cannot consent to sex no matter how precocious you are. So I think if the girl was five, you'd probably have a rather different position even if she maintained it was consensual.

Now I don't know if the girl in question was thirteen or fifteen at the time (it seems there's several accounts) but even with enthusiastic consent that put it into the extremely morally dubious territory even considering autre temps autre mores.

So, really, what seems to me pretty fucked up here is your insistence that it's completely unproblematic that he had sex with a child because the child in question continued to say it was OK when she grew up.

She says she's completely OK with it and remains so. (In passing, believing someone when they say they have not been raped is quite definitely not the flip side of believing someone when they say they have -- you don't have to look too long at celebrity rape accusations to realise that you're letting yourself in for a lot of pain if you make such an accusation). Even if she is OK with it, that's a hell of a chance to take with someone so much younger and more vulnerable.

So, long and short, don't fuck children even if they're OK with it and even if you really believe that they'll remain OK with it and even if they do remain OK with it. It's not that complicated -- just don't do that.

[nickys]

One of the things that really bugs me about this and similar situations, is that people seem to think that in order to like Bowie's music (or remain friends with somebody who has done something questionable) they should argue that what he did wasn't wrong.
I'd much rather that people just accepted that everyone sometimes does bad stuff, and acknowledge that a thing was bad, even if someone's general conduct was not especially bad, rather than get nasty with anyone who points out cracks in the perfection.

Trouble is, too many people say "I would never be friends with / hero-worship someone who does X", and then when presented with evidence that a friend/hero has done X they flat refuse to acknowledge it, because admitting an obvious truth would make them uncomfortable with an aspect of themself.

There is an option to say "My friend / my musical hero has done a bad thing. The thing is bad. It's not the whole story of their life or their personality, so I will stay friends with them. And I will not deny the thing, even though acknowledging the thing makes me personally uncomfortable."

[brixtonbrood]

I'll say this for being a Wagnerian - it trains you to be really really good at these distinctions.