Kind of just felt like sparking a discussion thread and thought this might be an interesting one.
For me personally, one of, if not, my most controversial takes is that I will associate with anyone. Regardless of their opinions of if I personally find their opinions to be disgusting or revolting. I will give anyone respect who gives me respect.
Another one which I’ve expressed here before is that I do not think someone simply being a pedophile automatically makes them a pure evil child abuser who can’t help but rape every child that they see. And that some people can have this affliction and not actively seek out abusive content or attempt abusive actions.
My opinions on loli/shota/cub are also fairly controversial, but I imagine those are mostly shared by the majority of people here.
That should probably get us started pretty good!
So, What’s a controversial take that you have that most people would disagree with?
Feel free to have peaceful discussions about other people’s responses.
Gatekeeping is a good thing. Once something gets popular it attracts more attention, and that’s very bad for a small culture. Not to mention once there’s capital in the water the suits show up and take over.
Humans are bad, and not (just) in a hippie kinda way. As a product of totally random processes we’re kinda cool, as an actual design the body is absolutely horrible. The brain is an amazing computer, but it takes down right bizarre shortcuts. We as a species need to be working towards fixing the failures of biology.
I think a few decades down the road, no offence pedophilia will be destigmatized like being gay was. There was an old stigma that being gay meant that you were the type of person who who go around raping males (homosexual was used much like pedophile is). I think that in a few decades, people will say it was morally unjust to do the things that are being done to the non-offenders of today.
The intellectual property system is the reason we can’t have nice things.
I definitely think the intellectual property system is super broken and is made to be abused rather than simply protecting creators/creative works.
You say that, but British company ARM designs the processors we use in all our mobile devices and successfully licences them out to companies like Samsung and Qualcomm. Also, Gilette invented the best razor in 1908 (the double edged safety razor), patented it and now the patent is in the public domain, still made today by anyone who wants to.
Copyright law is the one that causes all the problems, but copyright does not make up all of IP law.
The ARM example is kind of funny for me due to personal experience. There’s a game called ComPressure, which was originally designed by one of its employees as a recruiting tool. It’s complicated enough to crush Notch’s brain and make him feel dumb, and the developer extends job interview offers to anyone who completes it. The free demo contains the full game… and i’ve deliberately chosen not to finish it despite being the top player in one of its leaderboards.
Originally this was so i could focus on graduating first, but that still hasn’t happened several years later, during which SoftBank ordered a hiring freeze and tried to squeeze out more licensing fees from its customers, who immediately scrambled to RISC-V because they’ve realized the risk in sticking with licensing ARM.
As for razors - the double-edged safety razor was an obvious extension of the single edged safety razor design patented in 1880. Even though the patent expired, Gilette still tried to evergreen it. They got a patent for another improvement to that design (reinforcing the corners of its cap to reduce the likelihood of damage to them) and immediately used that to unsucessfully sue another blade manufacturer for trimming corner pieces of their blades so they could fit that design.
The ease of obtaining a patent, extending its duration with tangential improvements and drowning completely unrelated uses is enough of a problem to make a game developer realize spending multiple times the settlement cost in fighting the patent and making a documentary about it was cheaper in the long run.
Besides copyright and patent law, there’s also trademark law (which i believe may be used in the future to indefinitely extend copyright) and military law (mostly the red cross making illegal use of its trademarks equivalent to a war crime, but also used to supress inventions). The only way i’ve seen this skirted around successfully was with Kenneth Shoulders publishing a book disclosing his findings on ultrafast high-voltage electric discharges to random people he knew nothing about prior to filing a patent on that.
I think in particular, the US itself seems to be very anal about IP law. no other country really has the overprotectiveness of IP that allow people to sue each other for works that’s similar to each others like the US does. Fraud, sure- but looking and sounding similar? Only in the US.
The US gov is actually very lenient and respectful with Trump, he was given a lot of opportunities to not get in trouble, and the current indictments are only happening because Trump is an extraordinary moron. Nothing anyone else did recently with classified docs even compares. Trump did everything to provoke this and more.
Oh boy, I have a lot of them. Might as well dump them in a comment.
- Incest shouldn’t be a big deal as long as both parties consent. Sure, it’s not genetically ideal, but even having children with a sibling is for the most part safe, as long as the next generation doesn’t take part in inbreeding as well.
- I think being trans while saying gender is a spectrum is an ontological contradiction, because transitioning from male to female or vice-versa is embracing the view that there’s two well defined genders. I don’t dislike them as a group, but I find this cognitive dissonance very annoying.
- The environmental damage from cryptocurrencies is way overblown. Most of it involves green energy like solar-powered systems, and the whole thing is incredibly small when compared to heavy hitters like industrial complexes and heating/cooling. It may not be efficient compared to systems like that from Visa, but that’s to be expected when you use a decentralized platform.
- Gatekeeping is used incorrectly most of the time. Closing off a community by not allowing new members and creating an elitist secret club is gatekeeping. Telling people to read/play/watch whatever they’re supposed to be fans of and to do as the romans do whem in Rome, is not gatekeeping, but rather them (edit: the people being “gatekept”) acting like assholes.
- In an ideal world, sex would only be legal if you pass a test displaying yout knowledge of sex ed and maturity. Anyone, of any age, is allowed to take this test, and such you could see kids with a sex licence and adults without one. Well, that’s more of a dystopia than a real ideal world due to concerns with the rights of people, but the idea is that age of consent doesn’t really make sense and is more of a hack that barely solves a problem.
- Government scales poorly.
- I never understood mainstream beauty/uglyness standards. I think a lot of celebrities don’t look all that hot, and most of the people IRL I’ve been attracted to are rather plain looking, but I might be biased shen taking into consideration the fact that I know them personally (and that I have a thing for jimiko/mojo characters, apparently).
- I mean, it’s also entirely possible to just have a romantic & sexual relationship… without having kids.
- Isn’t “male” and “female” referring to different sides of one (possibly the only, I’m not super well-researched) axis of gender in that scenario? Like, you can both consider gender a spectrum… and want to be on the other side of/in another place on that spectrum. And I don’t think we have common words for anything more specific than splitting it into thirds (ish?) i.e. female, nonbinary, male (or something).
- I think this is a case of popular opinion trailing behind reality. As far as I know, at one point cryptocurrency mining had meaningful negative effects on the environment (or would have had them in the future if it didn’t change), but that has since changed.
- You’re missing another common usage of the term, wherein the individual being gatekept is reading/playing/watching whatever they’re supposed to be fans of but happen to have some side trait that the gatekeeper disagrees with (including such things as “has a different favorite work in the series”)
- Yes, 100% agreed. If such a test wouldn’t be a really powerful lever for any malicious individual or group to wield against people it would be ideal.
- I don’t really have any thoughts on this one.
- That’s not a controversial take, that’s a mundane opinion about your experience of beauty.
I mean, it’s also entirely possible to just have a romantic & sexual relationship… without having kids.
Given the genetic consequences of inbreeding are the main reason behind the taboo of incest, I think talking about it is important, and even that only really applies to direct relatives (siblings, parents, children), but I’m not well researched on that, so please don’t take my word as fact. Ignoring that, well duh, of course you should be free to date and/or have sex with absolutely anyone you like, as long as they consent and know what they’re doing (the test I mentioned would be very handy here, wouldn’t it?)
Isn’t “male” and “female” referring to different sides of one (possibly the only, I’m not super well-researched) axis of gender in that scenario? Like, you can both consider gender a spectrum… and want to be on the other side of/in another place on that spectrum
Yeah, I didn’t use the right terms, that’s on me. Rather than viewing gender as a spectrum, I was thinking of people who throw gender out of the window, stating it is a social construct and we should be questioning our identity. Maybe there’s way less people who think like that than those who see it as a spectrum, but as I see it, they’re both essentially ways to minimize the role of gender in our lives.
the individual being gatekept is reading/playing/watching whatever they’re supposed to be fans of but happen to have some side trait that the gatekeeper disagrees with (including such things as “has a different favorite work in the series”)
Such behavior is obnoxious, sure, but I don’t know if I’d call it “gatekeeping” when it feels more like a splinter among a larger community, especially when you’re able to ignore and block them. Well, I’ve rarely seen such behavior myself because I’m not really part of big communities where that’s common (non-anonymous ones, at least), so I’m not the best person to talk about this.