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The Fable of the Burning Branch
Once upon a time, in a lonely little village, beneath the boughs of a forest of burning trees, there lived a boy. The branches of the burning trees sometimes fell, and the magic in the wood permitted only girls to carry the fallen branches of the burning trees.
One day, a branch fell, and a boy was pinned beneath. The boy saw other boys pinned by branches, rescued by their girl friends, but he remained trapped beneath his own burning branch.
The fire crept closer, and the boy called out for help.
Finally, a friend of his own came, but she told him that she could not free him from the burning branch, because she already free'd her other friend from beneath a burning branch and he would be jealous if she did the same deed for anyone else. This friend left him where he lay, but she did promise to return and visit.
The fire crept closer, and the boy called out for help.
A man stopped, and gave the boy the advice that he'd get out from beneath the burning branch eventually if he just had faith in himself. The boy's reply was that he did have faith in himself, yet he remained trapped beneath the burning branch. The man suggested that perhaps he did not have enough faith, and left with nothing more to offer.
The fire crept closer, and the boy cried out for help.
A girl came along, and said she would free the boy from beneath the burning branch.
But no, her friends said, the boy was a stranger to her, was her heroic virtue worth nothing? Heroic deeds ought to be born from the heart, and made beautiful by love, they insisted. Simply hauling the branch off a boy she did not love would be monstrously crass, and they would not want to be friends with a girl so shamed.
So the girl changed her mind and left with her friends.
The fire crept closer. It began to lick at the boy's skin. A soothing warmth became an uncomfortable heat. The boy mustered his courage and chased the fear out of his own voice. He called out, but not for help. He called out for company.
A girl came along, and the boy asked if she would like to be friends. The girl's reply was that she would like to be friends, but that she spent most of her time on the other side of the village, so if they were to be friends, he must be free from beneath the burning branch.
The boy suggested that she free him from beneath the burning branch, so that they could be friends.
The girl replied that she once free'd a boy from beneath a burning branch who also promised to be her friend, but as soon as he was free he never spoke to her again. So how could she trust the boy's offer of friendship? He would say anything to be free.
The boy tried frantically to convince her that he was sincere, that he would be grateful and try with all his heart to be a good friend to the girl who free'd him, but she did not believe him and turned away from him and left him there to burn.
The fire crept closer and the boy whimpered in pain and fear as it spread from wood to flesh. He cried out for help. He begged for help. "Somebody, please!"
A man and a woman came along, and the man offered advice: he was once trapped beneath a burning branch for several years. The fire was magic, the pain was only an illusion. Perhaps it was sad that he was trapped but even so trapped the boy may lead a fulfilling life. Why, the man remembered etching pictures into his branch, befriending passers by, and making up songs.
The woman beside the man agreed, and told the boy that she hoped the right girl would come along and free him, but that he must not presume that he was entitled to any girl's heroic deed merely because he was trapped beneath a burning branch.
"But do I not deserve to be helped?" the boy pleaded, as the flames licked his skin.
"No, how wrong of you to even speak as though you do. My heroic deeds are mine to give, and to you I owe nothing," he was told.
"Perhaps I don't deserve help from you in particular, or from anyone in particular, but is it not so very cruel of you to say I do not deserve any help at all?" the boy pleaded. "Can a girl willing to free me from beneath this burning branch not be found and sent to my aide?"
"Of course not," he was told, "that is utterly unreasonable and you should be ashamed of yourself for asking. It is offensive that you believe such a girl may even exist. You've become burned and ugly, who would want to save you now?"
The fire spread, and the boy cried, screamed, and begged desperately for help from every passer by.
"It hurts it hurts it hurts oh why will no one free me from beneath this burning branch?!" he wailed in despair. "Anything, anyone, please! I don't care who frees me, I only wish for release from this torment!"
Many tried to ignore him, while others scoffed in disgust that he had so little regard for what a heroic deed ought to be. Some pitied him, and wanted to help, but could not bring themselves to bear the social cost, the loss of worth in their friends' and family's eyes, that would come of doing a heroic deed motivated, not by love, but by something lesser.
The boy burned, and wanted to die.
Another boy stepped forward. He went right up to the branch, and tried to lift it. The trapped boy gasped at the small relief from the burning agony, but it was only a small relief, for the burning branches could only be lifted by girls, and the other boy could not budge it. Though the effort was for naught, the first boy thanked him sincerely for trying.
The boy burned, and wanted to die. He asked to be killed.
He was told he had so much to live for, even if he must live beneath a burning branch. None were willing to end him, but perhaps they could do something else to make it easier for him to live beneath the burning branch? The boy could think of nothing. He was consumed by agony, and wanted only to end.
And then, one day, a party of strangers arrived in the village. Heroes from a village afar. Within an hour, one foreign girl came before the boy trapped beneath the burning branch and told him that she would free him if he gave her his largest nugget of gold.
Of course, the local villagers were shocked that this foreigner would sully a heroic deed by trafficking it for mere gold.
But, the boy was too desperate to be shocked, and agreed immediately. She free'd him from beneath the burning branch, and as the magical fire was drawn from him, he felt his burned flesh become restored and whole. He fell upon the foreign girl and thanked her and thanked her and thanked her, crying and crying tears of relief.
Later, he asked how. He asked why. The foreign girls explained that in their village, heroic virtue was measured by how much joy a hero brought, and not by how much she loved the ones she saved.
The locals did not like the implication that their own way might not have been the best way, and complained to the chief of their village. The chief cared only about staying in the good graces of the heroes of his village, and so he outlawed the trading of heroic deeds for other commodities.
The foreign girls were chased out of the village.
And then a local girl spoke up, and spoke loud, to sway her fellow villagers. The boy recognized her. It was his friend. The one who had promised to visit so long ago.
But she shamed the boy, for doing something so crass as trading gold for a heroic deed. She told him he should have waited for a local girl to free him from beneath the burning branch, or else grown old and died beneath it.
To garner sympathy from her audience, she sorrowfully admitted that she was a bad friend for letting the boy be tempted into something so disgusting. She felt responsible, she claimed, and so she would fix her mistake.
The girl picked up a burning branch. Seeing what she was about to do, the boy begged and pleaded for her to reconsider, but she dropped the burning branch upon the boy, trapping him once more.
The boy screamed and begged for help, but the girl told him that he was morally obligated to learn to live with the agony, and never again voice a complaint, never again ask to be free'd from beneath the burning branch.
"Banish me from the village, send me away into the cold darkness, please! Anything but this again!" the boy pleaded.
"No," he was told by his former friend, "you are better off where you are, where all is proper."
In the last extreme, the boy made a grab for his former friend's leg, hoping to drag her beneath the burning branch and free himself that way, but she evaded him. In retaliation for the attempt to defy her, she had a wall built around the boy, so that none would be able, even if one should want to free him from beneath the burning branch.
With all hope gone, the boy broke and became numb to all possible joys. And thus, he died, unmourned.
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Comments (175)
I'm sorry about your pain, but I don't think LessWrong is the right place for this post, as it cuts too closely to identity politics to be productively discussed.
It's one thing to argue that non-consensual celibacy is painful; that's a fact that's often neglected when talking about sexual dynamics. It's another to frame the issue as a situation entirely perpetuated by women who are resisting for trivial reasons. That casts women as malicious, when that's not a universal or common case.
Like NancyLebowitz said, why is it acceptable to leave out the costs that women face in this dynamic?
If your point is that some sexual assaults are the product of desperation and tragedy, I agree. That doesn't make them acceptable, and you seem like you're implying that.
I'm not really sure what you're hoping to accomplish here. The fable isn't framed in a way that accurately represents reality. The sympathetic arguments you're making could be made without euphemism. The story falsely equivocates refusing sex as maliciously refusing to save someone's life.
If you're hurting, I'm sorry. I have sympathy for people who are unable to be sexually active and have few or no solutions. This, however, is bad framing at best, and harmful at worst.
Given that the author has, in other comments, mentioned suicidal tendencies... I'd suggest the equivalence might be real to them.
Shrug I dunno. I find this poorly written, and poorly thought out, and fails to touch much at all in me; granted, my moments of compassion are few and far between.
But the hostile response is disproportionate to what was actually written, to the point where I must conclude that this piece has successfully made its readers feel deeply uncomfortable, and the hostility is a rationalization to cover that discomfort.
That's fair, I suppose. I do feel accused of callously ignoring a population of people for whom I have a great deal of sympathy. I think my criticisms stand, but I guess I could have been kinder.
I want to engage and think about this more, but I'm not sure I can have this conversation without feeling hostile.
Which is why the anti-politics rule exists, I think. Because most people can't disengage enough. The downvotes are perfectly fair, otherwise any authentic-enough political crying fit would be a heckler's veto on the anti-politics rule, which would just become politics by another name as people tried to decide what qualified as authentic.
But people should view stuff like this as... exercises in recognizing and overcoming their biases. Not excuses to attack wrongthought.
You make good points. I'm not going to redact, because I don't think I'm incorrect, but I'm tapping out of this thread.
I agree that refusing sex is not malicious. However, these things could be interpreted as malicious -- slut shaming, anti prostitution, anti pornography. A lot of that comes from women.
If a woman refuses to have a sex with a "sexually starved man", that's perfectly okay. It's just not okay if she also goes on a political crusade trying to prevent him from getting sex or some sex-substitute by other means. For example if she writes an article about the danger of sexbots -- that I would classify as malicious. It's no longer "I don't want to be involved in solving this person's problem", but it's "I prefer that person to suffer". Yet this hostile behavior is often accepted in our society, and often encouraged.
Yes, thank you. I agree with all of that.
If there are means by which a sex-starved person can get sex, that don't infringe on anyone's agency...and that means is still maligned? I think there's a strong case for its critics being malicious (or at best, severely misguided).
... a fascinating world, exactly as written. Seeing that the lifting of the branch seems like a totemic thing, a ritual absolutely structuring the society, would it not be logical that: 1) spouses lawfully married to each other can covertly negotiate that the wife lift a branch off a boy badly in need, which would bind him to them as a servant until a girl willing to have him comes along, but most probably for life? 2) incest is not an offence so much as a favor? 3) girls generally have more chance at entering and staying in the workforce? 4) it is preferable to have more girl children, as possible negotiation material?
As has been said, there's no need to view this as bad goth poetry.
I, for one, like my moral assumptions and cached thoughts challenged regularly. This works well with repugnant conclusions. Hence I upvoted this post (to -21).
I find two interesting questions here:
How to reconcile opposing interests in subgroups of a population of entities whose interests we would like to include into our utility function. An obvious answer is facilitating trade between all interested to increase utility. But: How do we react to subgroups whose utility function values trade itself negatively?
Given that mate selection is a huge driver of evolution, I wonder if there is actually a non-cultural, i.e. genetic, component to the aversion (which I feel) against providing everyone with sexual encounters / the ability to create genetic offspring / raise children. And I'd also be interested in hearing where other people feel the "immoral" line...
In practice the debate is about the price payed for providing everybody with sexual accounters. This article completely ignores it. As such it's not a good article for checking cached thoughts. For checking cached thoughts it makes much more sense to actually engage with the real arguments for the subject.
In Germany the price of legalizing prostition is that a lot of the prostitures aren't prostitute out of their own free will but are forced into it. You can say that price is worth paying, but simply ignoring it and instead informing your opinion of the subject by what makes sense in unrealistic parable makes no sense.
I don't know the details, but my guess is that mere legalization without regulation will not be enough to overcome a strong "tradition".
To explain, imagine an alternative society where e.g. computer programming is considered extremely low-status and also illegal, so that most people who have the necessary skills would never do it voluntarily. But there is a market demand for applications, therefore some criminals will start kidnapping people with math skills and forcing them to write programs. Of course the programmers would be abused in various ways, and most of the payment for the programs would be taken from them by the criminals.
If one day the government would merely decide "let's make computer programming legal", what is the most likely outcome? A few programmers would volunteer for the work, but the existing criminal networks would stay in their place with expertise and contacts to customers, only with less risk. I would expect that even in the new system a few people would be kidnapped and make to work as slaves, simply because the infrastructure already exists, and has become a "Schelling point".
The real change would require breaking the existing "Schelling point". The details would depend on specific situation. One solution could be that every programmer would have to register themselves at some government office... and employing programmers who are not registered would still be illegal and harshly punished. And the government would check actively whether all employees of software companies are registered. That would reduce the temptation of the software companies to kidnap a person or two to improve their profits, just like in the old days.
It's very misleading to compare the psychological effects of the activity of prostitution with those of software programming.
If a software programmer get's drugged an put under pressure so that he can't think clearly anymore he won't be able to do his job. On the other hand there's a market for prostitutes that do whatever the client wants them to do and who take part in drug orgies.
Apart from drugs there are strong psychological forces involved in sex that simply don't exist in software programming.
You seem to focus on details and ignore the main point, which was:
If there is a "tradition" of (1) forcing people to do (2) illegal stuff, one does not remove the tradition by merely declaring the stuff legal. One also has to make extra steps to ensure that all participants are there voluntarily. Otherwise the already established "infrastructure" for forcing people to do stuff will remain there.
My Googling suggests that in Vienna where prostiutes have to be registered around half of the registered prostiutes are victims of human trafficing.
The policy of registration which as of the beginning of this months also entered German law, doesn't seem to result in an elimination of prostitution that shouldn't be there.
I think your arguments also rests on the fact that there are programmers who actually want by their own volition to do the programming jobs that customers demand. On the other hand there are prostitution services that are demanded by customers that very few woman actually want to do.
Seems to me that the interests are often not literally opposed, such that one group literally has "X" as a terminal value, and the other group has "not X". More often, the goals are simply anticorrelated in practice, thus wanting "the opposite of what the other group wants" becomes a good heuristic. This is why calmly debating and exploring all options, including unusual ones, can be a good approach.
For example, in this specific situation: (1) legalize prostitution, and create safe conditions so that the prostitutes are not exploited; (2) create good cheap sexbots, or maybe rent them.
Looks to be a fable about natural selection and how it works on learned helplessness.
I'm interested to know if anyone would have considered voting this up if the attempted rape portion of the metaphor had been omitted and the story had been ended just before then?
I wouldn't upvote this in any case, as it doesn't belong here as it stands.
With some thorough editing, and a lot of boiling down, it could turn into an insightful discussion of the blind spot so many people have where social needs are concerned; that education or internet are something like a basic human right, but sexual satisfaction, which is far more primal and necessary to us, isn't. It's a necessary blind spot in ideologies which treat needs as rights to be satisfied by other people, because it's full of ugly truths about those ideologies.
But I doubt the insightful post would be received well, either. Perhaps I overestimate people, but I suspect most people have an inkling of the currents running under the surface, here.
Interestingly, there appears (at least in my local cultural circle) that being attended by human caretakers when incapacitated by age, is supposed to be a basic right. Hence, there must be some other reason - and not just the problem about rights being fulfilled by other persons, why the particular example assumed to underlie the parable, is reprehensible to many people.
There is another reason. In social-standing friendly language, "Sex is sacred".
For the less socially-friendly approach... sex is clearly not sacred, and the issue isn't the idea of sex being a right, as one can readily see by looking at people who can complain about involuntary celibacy without much social risk, and do so. I'm not going to name the ugliness, both because it's broad and ill-defined - a patch of area defined more by what a set of ideologies fail to say, than what they explicitly name - but also because it's something you have to see for yourself to believe.
I can't find it - where IS the rape part?
2nd to last paragraph.
I can see a reference to rape in the second to last paragraph if I squint real hard and look at it through rape-colored glasses, but when I take the glasses off or stop squinting it simply doesn't look like rape anymore.
Many LWers are careful enough to notice when even the slightest signaling towards a hot button issue crops up. This is just a good idea as a form of basic social hygiene since people in other environments have very powerful reactions to even the slightest of comments made towards those topics and can easily put you into an Enemy category or become much less comfortable around you for the foreseeable future.
Much of the annoyance at this thread was the fact that it included a signalling towards that at all since it's a substantial faux pas. This is especially true if the story was meant to have a different purpose as the writer later claimed.
This is a horrible thing to do from a rationality stand-point since it amounts to pre-mindkilling yourself.
As I write this, the parent comment is at -1 despite the fact that it simply answers a question someone asked. There is something very strange about the voting in this post's comments.
Someone downvoted your comment as well. Elsewhere in the thread, username2 asserted that Nancy could not be trusted as a moderator. I am pretty sure that comment was negative before, now it is at +4 with 55% positive. So that looks like some kind of vote manipulation.
There are some comments on this post where I wonder about vote manipulation because they seem to have changed score rapidly, some considerable time after posting.
TheAltar's comment upthread, and my comment on it, don't seem like examples of that. I think they may be unreasonable downvotes but not improper ones, if you see what I mean. (My reading of the situation is that there are some people on LW who have a strong aversion to anything suggestive of "social justice", and that that's responsible for a lot of the downvotes here. E.g., someone suggests that one bit of the OP is endorsing rape or complaining about people getting punished for rape; vocal opposition to rape is a Social Justice Thing and therefore bad in these people's eyes[1]; and then anything that engages with that without condemning it -- e.g., TheAltar's comment -- is guilty by association.)
[1] How could anyone have a problem with vocal opposition to rape? Well, the idea is that the word "rape" gets attached to things that are not rape (e.g., in phrases like "rape culture", "rape apologist", etc.) and then those things can get smacked down almost as if they were actual rape, even if they don't remotely deserve it.
EphemeralNight and Old_Gold's posts seem to have jumped up in votes massively in the last 1-2 days when they were both in the negative iirc.
This is a behaviour I have often observed on the scores of comments from Eugine_Nier/Azathoth123/VoiceOfRa/The_Lion. (And, I think, more generally on the scores of "neo-reactionary-friendly" comments[1].) It's tempting to attribute this to Eugine's socks, but it could also be that there are a few people of a particular political persuasion who happen to read LW only every few days, and happen to do so in sync.
It might perhaps be worth noting that Lumifer called out Old_Gold as Eugine redivivus practically as soon as he appeared. Make of that what you will.
[1] I don't like this terminology; perhaps someone can suggest something better. I mean comments that say highly negative things about groups that traditionally have low status but that more recently one is supposed to be positive about and understanding of: those who are female, black, gay, poor, transgender, etc.
I suspect it's because infrequent old members like myself only check the site every couple of days. I didn't upvote because the fable was good; I upvoted because I felt the author was being unfairly penalized by the downvoting.
Doubtful. The differences are large, one-sided, and occurred in a cluster. They also don't match LW's general leanings for voters.
Old_Gold seems to be Eugine. (My subjective probability is about 70% at this moment.)
EphemeralNight behaves quite differently. If I had to guess, I'd guess that Eugine used his sockpuppets to upvote him.
I've seen the votes fluctuate and some posts with odd points counts. The karma amounts do seem to be balancing out into what I would generally expect from LW users over time though.
(The entire thread has slowly moved from -22 to -17 which seems odd.)
I can't speak for anyone else, but I thought it was very bad[1] even aside from the attempted-rape bit.
[1] I mean in quality rather than morally, though the attempted-rape part (at least) is horrible morally too.
IMHO the 'attempted rape' claim is far more interpretation than substance - an interpretation that is specious at best.
In my experience, people who are not the likely victims of a kind of danger are much less likely to spot the warning signs of that danger than those who are. Women spot potential-rape more frequently, the same way that soldiers that have been stationed in the middle east are more likely to spot potential IEDs - not every discarded thing on the road is an IED, and not every "man roughly handling a women" is a potential rape... but some are... and some women have gotten better at spotting the latter due to either being trained to do so, or having had the experience themselves...
In other words... just because many people didn't see it for a potential-rape... doesn't mean it can't easily be interpreted as pattern-matching on exactly that kind of situation.
To some extent, it doesn't even matter that it was not the original intent of the author to represent rape. It was close enough that it was a plausible interpretation (specious or no) for those who know what to look for. I expect the author has learned something about how people can interpret things even when they are unintended...
Interestingly, and vaguely related, there's an ongoing debate about the Cumberbatch Sherlock Holmes series: apparently many women interpret the relationship between Holmes and Watson as containing a lot of sexual tension... and a lot of men (and the writer(s)) think that idea is rubbish.... it all has to do with how close they stand to each other, and the way they are portrayed to gaze at each other.
I'll admit that I'd missed that part when I first read the post, I only noticed it after I went through the comments section
While almost everyone who commented interpreted it that way, I think it's also worth pointing out that at least one person in the comments thread missed the metaphor completely.
I made one reply to this, and later deleted it. Then, I made another reply, and deleted that one as well.
I feel mind-killed and I can't tell who else is mind-killed. I'm just going to take this in stride as a time-appropriate refresher course on why we don't discuss politics.
The metaphor doesn't even make sense, assuming it's about sex. If the burning branch represents virginity, then it would be possible to pay a girl to free the boy from the branch, but it would not be possible for another girl to put him under again. If the branch represents "having regular sex", then it would be possible for a girl to put him under the branch again, but it would also mean that the girl given the gold nugget has to be given a continuous stream of gold nuggets or she would also put the boy under the branch again.
Also, dragging someone under the burning branch to free yourself doesn't make sense even as rape. Rapists do not turn other people into virgins.
So don't assume it's about sex. The author stated as much.
Extreme matriarchal community with slavery somewhat like in Rome (some men earn freedom, most don't, discussing it at all i taboo). Sex in itself is secondary.
OP Upvoted.
It's been stated elsewhere that a long standing member of the LW community was leaving because of this post. Well, to counterbalance that, I'm also strongly considering leaving LW, but it's not because of the OP. It's because of these comment threads.
In particular, the comments have shown me just how far the LW community has fallen. I'd really rather not be around people who both get offended so easily and are so willing to mindkill themselves should the slightest opportunity present itself. FYI, the OP isn't about you. It's not about your pet projects. It's not insulting everything you stand for. You're just not that important.
Five years ago, this post would likely have died a simple, unglorious death by being too vague or poorly written to be upvoted. Today it causes a political shitstorm as the community decides to interpret it in a way directly contrary to the stated goal of author. Five years ago, it would have been discussed rationally, the writer would have received tips and suggestions, and quite likely some good would have been drawn out of it. Today, it causes mass mindkilling because people feel that their identity is being attacked.
Those are the kinds of people I don't wish to be around.
The overwhelming majority of comments in this thread have little to do with the topic and are meta-discussions that people have strong opinions about. These have almost nothing to do with identity, their pet projects, or what they personally stand for. Discussions like these cropping up in an unfavorable thread aren't surprising to me at all and are fairly standard non-political topics for strong disagreement on a forum. The consensus opinion on the thread seems to in fact be that it wasn't well written, doesn't necessarily accomplish its purpose, was overbearing, and should be downvoted as not really relevant to LW.
For anyone just coming into the mix, the main comment threads are:
The upvotes/downvotes in the thread, Eugine, and keeping around annonymous public accounts
The role of having threads that people strongly disagree with continue to exist on LW rather than be deleted
Vote manipulation going on.
How the thread doesn't really belong here
Moderator actions and the overall role of moderation on LW (which makes up over 37% of the thread's comments).
Who is banworthy
The overall harmfulness of the article and arguments back and forth about it
Posts like this driving people away
The only non-meta thread that directly has anything strongly to do with gender was the pluralization of the phrase "non grata" in Latin.
and I think everyone should be reminded that it was all clearly about credit card debt.
None of the criticism of the OP, however intemperate, looks to me as if it's based in the idea that "the OP is about you"; quite the opposite. The basis of the criticism is that (e.g.) the OP is about women, or the OP is about rape, or the OP is about sex. I don't think you can say "just not that important" about those.
Of course not. My point was that people are taking it personally, are taking it as a personal attack on something they identify with. But the reality is that it's not about them.
What makes you think they're taking it personally? Is it just the fact that they're taking it seriously and getting cross about it? (It seems to me that one can perfectly well get cross about something without taking it personally.) Or is there something else?
The great majority of the comments so interpreting it were written before the author made any statement about his goals.
And you're trying to be one of the witch-hunters?
No, I'm afraid of the witch-hunters. (So far, polling indicates that this was not the right hypothesis for the commentary in general.) I avoided commenting until my previous comment because I was pretty sure I'd regret it--probably missing the point or getting drawn into the political deluge--and it seems this was the correct expectation.
Someone who joins the witch-hunters out of fear is still a witch-hunter.
Well, if you're not willing to stand up to the witch-hunters you should at least avoid joining their mobs.
I don't see anything CAE_Jones has said or done here that can possibly be described as witch-hunting or mob-joining.
to which you have successfully contributed by writing this comment.
A bit heavy-handed and overspecified. For this style of narrative, you should identify and address the root of the social phenomenon you're writing about, and wrestle with that, instead of translating it as literally as possible into an arbitrary metaphor.
Well, first, I'll admit up front that I logged off and metaphorically hid for a day after posting this, so I would not be tempted to engage in a pointless argument in the comments. And yet, I was somehow still too optimistic about what I'd find when I looked.
First point of order, this isn't about me. I've been on this site a while, it should be obvious by now that I have no qualms sharing gooey personal details about myself. So. Stop making it about me. If it was about me, you'd know.
Second point of order, the pronouns assigned to the characters do not matter and I think it says more about you than me that you fixated on that. So. Stop making it about sexism. Perhaps I could have chosen some other combination of genders, but I had hoped that commenters here of all places would be egalitarian enough to see those genders as the placeholders they are.
Third point of order, the parable was never meant to reflect reality. If it seems one-sided, that's because it is. It is meant to reflect a generalized emotional journey that I think is valid for a lot of people, of all sexes and orientations, who are too scared to speak up because they, rightly, expect to get nothing but vitriol for doing so.
Fourthly, if the parable even has a moral, it is about prostitution and modern attitudes towards prostitution and not really anything else. If you think the parable is advocating anything else you don't like, that, again, says more about you than me. I am astounded that I have to explicitly point this out, but there is a difference between not actively helping a person and actively interfering with help reaching a person. So. Stop putting words in my mouth. We should be above that, here.
Compare these two lines:
Either you want your audience to use their ability to infer (which includes imputing motives), or you don't. (And it doesn't matter if you don't, because readers will.) Watch for the illusion of transparency, and make it obvious by highlighting the part that you want people to focus on. If this is a policy argument about the legality of prostitution and not a commentary on anything else, 1) post it to Omnilibrium instead of here because policy arguments about the legality of prostitution are off topic and 2) make that explicit (and even then, consider whether or not the example will distract or focus your audience).
When you get a reaction this bad, doubling down is ill-advised. It's typically best to just cut your losses.
...oh. I was about to PM you with a personal account from the other side of the story to defend the people I thought you were accusing of not saving you, personally, at a small cost or themselves. I still want to point out that had I read your story in the past, I would have taken it for an accusation of practically murdering someone like the author and tortured myself over it.
If you had a modicum of sense in you as you were considering this, you would have flipped the genders. I assume you have a modicum of sense, so I must conclude you just didn't think about it; you defaulted as much as the people you're complaining about, because you were, in fact, thinking of a specific situation.
Your comment about the real point of the story being the immorality of the opposition to prostitution is fair, and well-supported by your story.
Your complaint about people putting words in your mouth is not. You bludgeon the reader with the metaphor, you stretch it to insane and untenable places, and then complain when readers observe that the plaintext reading of the metaphor suggests attempted rape? I'm perfectly willing to ascribe that to bad writing, but it isn't -unfair- for somebody to ascribe it to your intent, when your intent is so heavily dumped all over the rest of the story.
Plaintext reading of the metaphor suggests attempted rape? WTF?
I also inferred rape from the story. It was the part about how in desperation, he reached out and grabbed at her ankle. And then he was imprisoned in response to that.
Thank you for your reply. This is not at all what I expected.
I think there's a rule for allegories that the symbols shouldn't be too much like the thing symbolized (in this case an allegory about sex shouldn't use real world genders). I also recommend updating about people's ability to interpret (especially about a fraught subject like sex) rather than complaining that they didn't understand things the way you hoped.
This being said, I agree with you about prostitution, though more from a libertarian /sympathy for the prostitutes who should be allowed to do their work in peace than sympathy for people who have trouble finding sexual partners.
I'm not sure what the emotional journey is supposed to be. Maybe going from thinking of something as a personal problem to realizing that there's a systemic problem?
It's just a bad metaphor no matter how you explain it. It's very contrived, it elevates sexual choices to life-and-death, and it really doesn't illuminate anything about any of the problems it might be targeted toward.
I suspect it's a mind-killing topic that just can't be discussed well here, but even if you want to try, don't use long, obtuse, pointless stories. Use either personal truths or rational analysis, so there's something to support or discuss.
It only elevates sexual choices to life-and-death if you choose to interpret it that way. I did not. I chose to interpret it as about depression.
I don't think I believe everything you said in this comment :-/
You were downvoted to -20. It's utterly absurd of you to try to blame people for making the obvious interpretation of your parable and then crawl back and claim you are "astounded." Either you wrote this very poorly, and should apologize, or you are lying to try to conceal your true intention after the fact.
That's your problem right there. If you want people to respect you, don't hide, fight. Attempting to apologize or beg does not earn you respect from women or SJ-goons like gjm or Comrade ChristianKl, it earns you mockery and signals that you're someone it's safe to beat up on.
The boy's mistake in the story was begging rather than being assertive. And your problem here is that your immediate reaction to extremely unfair criticism by people who can be extremely charitably described as mind-killed is to apologize and attempt to say "no really I didn't mean it".
You seem to pressupose a quite peculiar definition of respect. Also, you're generalizing too much about what's inside women's heads.
The conditions in the story were rigged so that he had no other course of action open except begging. That's one of the 5,429,236 reasons why it fails as a metaphor.
The whole reason he wrote a parable instead of a fact-based article was hidding. Hidding was part of my critcism from the start.
I don't think saying "no really I didn't mean it" and appologizing are the same thing. Sincerely apologizing does earn respect. Falsely pretending that you didn't actually wanted to say what you said doesn't earn respect. It's again a symptom of not wanting to communicate openly and sincerely and that's one of the core criticisms I had from the beginning.
As far as me being SJ In the days where I actually did run a forum where I had moderator power I took the side of the right of an African to speak of homosexuality as a crime that's legalized in some countries. I don't have a problem with people sincerely arguing for positions that aren't PC.
More in a "how dare you try to hide from me" kind of sense.
Would you have done that for someone who didn't belong to a "more protected" category?
I find that incredibly hard to believe given your behavior elsewhere in the comments but especially in this thread.
No, you get that sense because you mislabel me as SJW when I'm not.
I guess that says more about your model of the world than about me. Or that the topic is heavily mind-killing.
If you read through my LW history you will find my quite civilly discussing the issue of pedophila with a person who wants to legalize it.
On Omnilibrium he have been called right-wing because of how I see the perfomance of the post-apartheid government of South Africa.
My position is that everybody should be allowed to argue any position but not that everybody should be allowed to argue any position in any way they like. The more extreme a position the more important it is that the person focus on focusing on having a fact based discussion.
An SJW is someone who engages in certain types of behavior, and your "nice forum you got here, would be a shame if someone called it sexist"-style blackmail here was definitely SJW-behavior. You don't get to act like a SJW and then complain when someone calls you out on it.
So you're willing to discuss extreme positions to your left.
The more extreme position the more trouble one can get into for attempting fact based discussion. There is in fact a long tradition of dissidents writing stories set in the past or in sci-fi worlds when it's not safe to object directly to what's going on. Granted, EphemeralNight is overestimating the current danger and the amount of hiding required.
Also, what do you consider an "extreme" position for purposes of this rule? Can you cite any instance where you applied this to any position that was to "extreme" left-wing?
That's mistakes my perspective. You are likely either Eugine trying to circumvent his ban or somone without a real stake in this forum. I do care about this forum and also regularly attend LW meetups.
I know that there are woman who don't participate on the LW forum but who do participate on meetups. Reinventing LW2.0 means shifting LW into being more welcoming to those people.
Even before reading Richard posts I predicted the post to drive away people and my prediction was accurate. Far from being mind-killed I made an accurate prediction. Most people who leave LW also don't post publically about the reasons why the leave.
I have little to gain by calling LW sexist.
As a result of mind-kill you confuse the issue of what's true from the social level of complaining and winning arguments.
As far as truth goes it's irrational to think that a the actions in a single case determine who someone happens to be.
That's basically if you don't know how to setup the debate. Part of my upbringing as far as having political conversations was a debating seminar by people from the Cambridge debating society who considered it important that and position can be defended.
EphemeralNight and you hide behind anonymity, and can therefore speak without much personal consequences anyway. My own real world identity is linked to this account. Richard's also is.
It's not good for LW to move to a point where only people who want to hide their idenity want to participate.
Most of the time people don't try to make points on LW by telling stories. Can you point to a single parable that someone posted on LW that you think I should have opposed based on my standards but didn't?
Would they contribute anything besides starting witch hunts. If the very existence of a single post at -19 is enough to drive them away, things don't look good in their favor.
"I only murdered someone once, I'm not a murderer."
No, it just says that you don't understand the effect of your writing or a clueless about modern culture.
The news of last weeks are about how Rossy is pro-rape because of one article he pretends to have intentend to be satirical calling for the legislation of rape on private property.
Not denouncing writing like that has a high cost for a community like this because it affects people who come to this community and read the article.
I think the best action from your end if you really claim not to intend to communicate the message that readers of your article understood would be to simply delete the article.
First, it's Roissy, not Rossy. Second, it's not Roissy at all, it's Roosh.
What are we, in Maoist China? You feel the need to reaffirm your loyalty by denouncing (!) writings which deviate from the Party line?
The problem isn't about the writing, it about LW's editoral decision to publish it or not to publish it. I have no problem with the author having a blog and publishing his writing on that blog.
Once the LW community publishes it, it however becomes responsible for dealing with it.
Ain't no such thing. Does not exist.
You seem to be very confused about the nature of LW. It is NOT a publication where editors select some submissions for publications and so provide curated content.
Hosting a website like this does come with both legal and social responsibility for it's content. External parties do make LW responsible for the content it hosts to the extend that it's not explictely made clear that LW denounces it.
If only there was a way to quantify the LW community's approval or disapproval of a post submitted to it.
So, Kamerad, I notice you personally have been lax in denouncing writings you -- hopefully -- may not want to be associated with. I trust you understand the consequences of being in the presence of... wrong ideas and not denouncing them forcefully. It really would be for the best if you were to correct that oversight on your part and properly denounce what you want to stand apart from. Using proper legalese, too, so that the proper authorities do not make any mistakes. And speaking of proper authorities, I hope you have notified them? It is good that you understand you bear "legal and social responsibility" for what happens in your presence. Do not forget your responsibility to denounce all the enemies of the people. Denounce early and often!
Are you advancedatheist? (If you're not, this changes some things.)
Both accounts have been here for a long time and seem to have different posting styles to me (but I'm no stylometrist). The only commonality I see is interest in cryonics and incel, which doesn't seem likely to be a unique combination.
This post just doesn't really reflect real life. Well, not for all sides involved.
If anyone got to the pq-system part of GEB, can we get some various interpretations here? Because what I think the burning branches are, apart from crude violations of the laws of physics, are basically defeatism on the boy's part.
You might not like reading it but I ran a search and it seems like to only have been posted here and despite being a badly written story that doesn't really reflect reality I think that you have one thing going and that is story-writing and you should work on that and not dump it. Now for the part you won't like: I think you should start taking responsibility for yourself and your actions. I don't mean it in those stupid "you said bad things about women, go stand in the corner and think about elementary school" unhelpful rhetorical you're probably used to hear but because you're old enough to be able to do it. So let's try something better than putting you in a corner:
Can you think of an instance where you might be wrong? Can you think of something that, if it were to change a little, would affect your views drastically? Is there anything you think your view is missing?
In my experience, good parables seldom reflect real life. They reflect a distorted, amplified caricature, so as to better make a point that might be missed with a more realistic story.
Also, I think you're on the right track with defeatism and depression.
I don't think that it valid to hide politically incorrect thought on LW behind metaphars. If you want to make a point make it directly and hopefully cite statistics to back it up.
Why isn't there another forest that traps girls?
Why aren't there some people immune to falling branches?
Why can't some boys be freed by boys?
But more generally, why bend over backwards to invent some convoluted justification for rape?
The individual who wrote this is calling for help, I'll observe.
I don't have much in the way of charitability in me, and little patience for helping people, but I can't help but notice that where someone else would get sympathy (physically disabled people certainly get at least some measure of sympathy for this very complaint), this person belongs to a class of people who get nothing but scorn and derision instead.
Why would you interpret it this way, when there are more charitable and better fitting interpretations? Not everything has to be about gender.
It's a fable about sexual politics. Gender is inescapable to the discussion.
When I reverse the genders, or make the branch lifters those with blonde hair, the story still works. I disagree with your statement.
The story would be improved by making it about hair color, actually.
If any of those other scenarios were applicable, the fable wouldn't have been written in the first place.
Thanks for the fable. It was a nice reading!
I tried to pattern-match the metaphor against many things; I failed. Could you please provide the key to the metaphor, as I sense there's hidden meaning underneath this story?
I don't want to guess a false meaning.
It's clearly about credit card debt
The burning is the unsatisfied desire for sex, and lifting the branch is offering sex. At the end of the story, the boy goes to prison for attempted rape. I presume you were joking in saying that you did not recognize this, or that you simply intended to say that you consider it a bad analogy.
In any case, I agree that such an analogy is pointless, and that is why I downvoted the post.
Thanks ! I wasn't joking. Now that I read the whole thing once again, the metaphor should have been perfectly obvious, but I guess I wasn't in the right state of mind yesterday.
Well, now I understand, I wish there hadn't be any metaphor. Here it conceals the point rather than offering a new perspective on it.
Here's a hint. The magical forest is in Canada... or perhaps the UK, or France. The foreigner who agreed to free the boy was visiting from a village in the U.S., where the village chiefs were just starting to decry the high amounts of gold that were being traded for such heroic deeds...
Utterly absurd allegory--there's no actual parallel. Obviously a lot of involuntarily celibate people are unhappy, but prostitution does nothing to cure this. Their problem isn't lack of sexual release--they can always masturbate. The source of their unhappiness is the lack of emotional intimacy and requited love, which prostitution can't solve--it's just assisted masturbation.
<seriousness level="30%">The firefighters should just put out the fire.</seriousness>
I quite understand the point author is making or a feeling that he has, which could be described by this one sentence: It is so easy for women to give sex and so important for men to get sex, that for women not to give it to men is just plain cruel. Everything is OK with this reasoning except one thing - assumption that it is easy for women to give sex. It is actually hard. Now this might not be obvious or intuitive from a man point of view, but you can get to this conclusion if you consider evolution. When evolution took place, to have sex with a man for a women, with high probability meant, to carry and give birth to the child of that man. By choosing to whom to have sex with, women actually determined the faith of her own genes in the long term, which is like the most important thing in evolution. Given that, it is reasonable to believe, that rejecting sex for women is as primal as the desire to have sex for men. Better analogy in this story would be that girl can lift the burning branch, but by doing so she burns and loses her arm and she only have 3-5 arms.
Don't push this all on the girls! Any boy could dress up as a girl convincingly enough to fool the magic and lift the branch himself. The only reason they did not was because they would take a similar status hit as the girls would for giving away their magic for free.
(More practical advice from an unwillingly celibate lesbian who is as disgusted with the idea of getting touched by dudes as you: learn to masturbate, and/or seek ways to relieve or avoid other types of stress that exacerbate the problem.)
I mean, charitably speaking, I imagine that the second-to-last paragraph could easily have been an argument from consequences, rather than rape apology.
The parable doesn't really characterize the boy as right, rather as desperate. I don't think that it's unreasonable to make an argument that some rapists are desperate for sex, nor that if fewer men were desperate for sex, there'd be less rape. Not saying it's true necessarily, but that it's at least arguable. That doesn't mean women should be forced into sex, of course, but it could still be true at the same time that there would be less rape if men weren't so desperate.
Maybe it's because I identify with the boy to an extent, but I don't think that this is really a moral piece, rather an emotional piece. This is the boy's journey, his perception. I'm sure that it could describe many people reasonably accurately. I will note that the author narrates, but does not pass judgement through narration, only characters.
I think that some people here might be having so much trouble with this because they think that feeling bad for the boy means that women should be forced to have sex, and resent being forced to agree one way or the other. This is a wrong question.
You can feel sorry for the boy and not condone the second-to-last paragraph, whether it actually symbolized rape or not
You can feel sorry for the boy, even if you don't think it would be wrong for him to never "have the branch lifted"
You can feel sorry for the boy and still condemn any other part of this story
Reasonable responses:
"I wish you didn't have to feel that way."
"I feel sorry for you, but that doesn't mean I will have sex with you."
"I feel sorry for you, but that doesn't justify rape."
There are a lot of false dichotomies of blame to fall into here, especially given that this is a parable, and a highly charged one at that. Please try to avoid them.
To the people who suggest that one finds other ways of coping, I look forward to you putting your money where your mouth is and being celibate for 20-40 years to show us the way. While this is a decidedly less black and white topic than most minority disputes, the idea that a member of the outgroup should claim to know the experience of the ingroup better than the ingroup is one that is a very common (and incredibly rude) fallacy, so I should certainly hope that no one falls for that trap, especially if you are part of another minority.