No, Cannibalism Is Obviously Not Being Normalized
Conservatives need to stop tilting at windmills
Samantha Gluck has an article titled Now the Psychos Are Pushing Cannibalism, that represents, I think, everything wrong with much of the conservative political ecosystem (before you ask, the problem is not its opposition to cannibalism). Gluck starts her article by comparing the supposed normalization of cannibalism to the normalization of pedophilia that she believes has occurred:
A jaunty anti-progressive website, Moonbattery.com, recently posted a piece about how Google AI, Gemini, defends pedophilia. And as you likely know, the Gemini digital thingy isn’t the only culprit. The liberal establishment — made up of humans fraught with a poverty of logic beyond imagination — has begun to insist we refer to dirty pedophiles as “minor attracted persons,” or MAPs.
Soon, it seems, disapproval of child rape will amount to a hate crime of the highest degree. And I don’t see anyone in high positions taking a firm and defiant stand against this latest abomination. Maybe there are people speaking against it and, if so, I’m unaware of them, so they’re clearly not making enough of a fuss. Capital punishment is the only proper response to those who destroy children in this way.
Pedophilia is the end of the proverbial road when it comes to promoting a practice that is clearly wrong, right? I wish it were, but there’s no end to the left’s desire to destroy all that is good, true, and beautiful.
Now, I’ve addressed this at some length before; the notion that abuse of children is being normalized by a woke left-wing so eager to be inclusive that they tolerate child rapists is a paranoid delusion supported by a small number of out-of-context quotes from random people with no power. Those who actually claim that child sex abuse should be legal and socially accepted number in the dozens and have no control over anything. The people who support the use of terms like minor attracted person are A) not in control of anything and B) right. They don’t claim that abusing children is fine, merely that those with sexual attraction to children—something that, like homosexuality, is not within one’s control—shouldn’t be regarded as despicable monsters and should instead be encouraged to seek help. Only when a person commits a crime should they be judged harshly; basic decency demands that we not regard people as despiccable monsters for things wholly outside of their control.
Yet you can see why belief in the widespread normalization of pedophilia has caught on and become a belief held among many conservatives online. It presses all the conservative buttons. There’s little that’s more revolting than sexual abuse of a child. If one, for instance, reads the comments below YouTube videos about those who have killed or beaten child abusers, they are uniformly positive in a way they’d be about no other crime, not even murder. Child sexual abuse is the single crime that produces the harshest condemnation.
Among gullible conservative audiences, a cottage industry has grown up describing the supposed left-wing destruction of sacred institutions and values, just as among gullible left-wing audiences, a similar industry has arisen to prop up fictitious stories about systemic injustice. One can predict, in advance, what conservatives will claim is being normalized by looking at the most hideous, revolting, and most of all disgusting things that we can imagine.
Gluck, speaking on pedophilia, declares “I don’t see anyone in high positions taking a firm and defiant stand against this latest abomination. Maybe there are people speaking against it and, if so, I’m unaware of them, so they’re clearly not making enough of a fuss.” The reason that major politicians have not spoken about the use of the term “minor attracted person” or the alleged mass destigmatization of pedophilia is that there is no such mass stigmatization anywhere beyond the paranoid conservative mind. If you spend your time reading conservative scare-mongering on Twitter or following James Cantor, you’ll hear about the terms a lot. If not, you won’t. Gluck takes the non-opposition from high-profile figures to the supposed normalization of pedophilia to show how pernicious the problem is, yet oddly neglects the fact that not a single high-profile figure has argued for destigmatization of pedophilia.
On cannibalism, Gluck boldly predicts that right after society becomes accepting of molesting children they’ll start supporting cannibalism too—perhaps even of children that have been molested (big if true!):
I can guess where this is going. Once they thoroughly normalize pedophilia, cannibalism normalization won’t be far behind. When it catches up, what’s to stop them from promoting the consumptions of flesh from children? A sort of spin off of molesting children and also eating them. They’ll claim it’s more tender than that of adults…you know, as veal is far more tender than cow meat. It’s cohesive (eye roll).
So to reiterate, Gluck claims that society will soon approve of eating people, including children shortly following their molestation. Cannibalism, currently regarded as unspeakably disgusting and horrifying, she predicts, will soon become normalized and socially acceptable. What’s the basis for Gluck’s guess? She presents two pieces of evidence:
New scientist released a clickbait article about cannibalism titled Is it time for a more subtle view on the ultimate taboo: cannibalism? In the article, they say we should maybe rethink our views on cannibalism because new archeological evidence shows it happened a lot in the past.
13 years ago, there was an article about two Dutch TV hosts who ate small chunks of each other.
Even Answers in Genesis has gotten in on the cannibalism bashing. Now, I’ll agree, the first article is pretty dumb, inferring striking normative conclusions from a trivial descriptive claim. Ken Ham thinks articles like this are indicative of the decline of religion in the West where everyone judges their own morality to be the ultimate standard. But clearly, the article is something written by one probably low-paid intern for New Scientist, numbering at only four paragraphs, deliberately intended to be provocative. An article titled “in the past, we believed that people ate each other only a bit, but recently we’ve learned they did it a lot,” would get no reads, so instead they give it a provocative title. As for the second article, well, I find it pretty gross, but I don’t see anything wrong with this type of voluntary cannibalism.
But let’s say you regard even this as an abomination. Well, there still isn’t the slightest reason to think that cannibalism is being normalized. The fact that you can find two articles talking about something, written 12 years apart, doesn’t mean it’s being normalized. Things that actually have been normalized like being gay (I’m in favor of that being normalized, to be clear) have many more than 1 article per decade written about them.
Notably, the evidence Gluck accepts as being indicative of rapid normalization of killing and eating people is the presence of two articles, written more than a decade apart, that don’t even advocate killing and eating people but instead advocate rethinking cannibalism in minor ways. These articles, supposedly indicative of a widespread and worrying trend, have been published at a much slower rate than people born on leap days have birthdays.
Especially tantalizing to the conservative mind is that this article discusses the notion that opposition to cannibalism might be about colonialism, wherein colonial countries judged native cannibalistic practices to be uncivilized. Now, this is a dumb point made by the New Scientist article. But the fact that one article makes a dumb point does not mean that this point is widespread or being normalized. And one can see why this makes a good story: liberals normalize killing and eating people in the name of social justice. It’s basically the conservative version of outrage porn.
And it’s frankly an embarrassment that much of the conservative media ecosystem believes things simply because they make good stories, without having a shred of truth. It’s an embarrassment that in an article that claims that liberals are rapidly destigmatizing having sex with and then eating children, out of 29 total comments, not a single one is skeptical. This is an epistemic error of truly gargantuan proportions.
Just as it’s bad when liberals claim falsely that there’s a mass epidemic of innocent people being shot by police, it’s bad when conservatives conjure up delusional fantasies about child-molesting cannibals coming for your children. It’s important to believe the truth, rather than just believing what happens to be narratively convenient. One of the most significant conservatives on the internet publishes totally predictable fake news because conservatives are willing to believe, en masse, anything that sounds terrifying and is supposedly being done by the left. Does anyone seriously believe that there’s a major movement among left-leaning people to destigmatize and legalize killing and eating children?
Having true beliefs is valuable so that one is not reduced to tilting at windmills and dementedly crowing about complete nonsense. And it’s disappointing that much of the conservative media ecosystem doesn’t take the task of reporting the truth remotely seriously. There are enough ridiculously gullible conservatives that conservative media can churn out complete garbage without facing any backlash.
Sincere thanks for keeping an eye on the ideologically insane, so that I don't have to. My tuppence worth, by way of analysis, is that because the Right lost the culture war, it is mostly just having a weird kind of fun by being openly stupid now.
To me this is symptom of a larger identity crisis of conservatism in general, which is completely lost in the semantic jungle of the culture war, because it has forgotten about its structural underpinning, which is the conservation of societal wealth. The culture war used to be a platform ensuring the necessary mobilization to pursue this goal, but it has long become the thing itself.
Just one example, the fight against global warming should be a textbook conservative goal, not only because it's conservation in the most literal sense - our ecosystem - but also because it is the biggest threat to societal wealth for the foreseeable future, whereas the position most prominent for non-climate-denying conservatives - market solutions and technological innovations - actually resembles a classic liberal position (even though this is not some cute reversal that generalizes to other domains, rather the liberal position suits very nicely as a way to ignore the problem altogether, so don't read too much into this).