Laura, 27, I love adventuring and people watching. Originally from CT, graduated from art school in Baltimore and have an affinity for wine, cats, growing things, and cooking.
as you get older, you realize that you’re not always right and there’s so many things you could’ve handled better, so many situations where you could’ve been kinder and all you can really do is forgive yourself and let your mistakes make you a better person.
not to be controversial but like……. there is literally no reason for any movie or show to have a rape scene in it. there is literally no reason to show that to anyone. and before you hit me with the “but it helps bring light to the subject!!!!! its better than being silent on the matter!!!!” find a better way. dont use a violent act such as that for shock value. there are way better ways to portray or shed light on that issue in media without forcing people to watch something so triggering.
The Lovely Bones movie adapation is a grade-A example of this(leaving out rape in movies) working. Peter Jackson says it really well.
“The key event in Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones is the rape and murder of 14-year-old Susie Salmon, but in adapting the book to film, director Peter Jackson had several reasons for toning down the violent incident that sets the story in motion.
In the movie, we do not see any rape, and the murder is mostly implied. “There are artistic and there are moral reasons and there are practical reasons,” Jackson said in a press conference over the weekend in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Among other things, depicting the violence would immediately get the film an R rating. “We wanted to make a film that teenagers could watch,” Jackson said. “[Co-writer and producer] Fran [Walsh] and I have a daughter who’s very similar to Susie’s age. We wanted Katie to be able to see this film. There are a lot of positive aspects of this film, and it’s not something that I think I wanted to shield our daughter from. So it was important for us to not go into an R-rated territory at all.”
Then there are the moral reasons for omitting the graphic crime. “It would frankly make it a film that I wouldn’t want to watch,” Jackson said. “I mean, I would have no interest in seeing that depicted on film, and I would not want to see the film. Every movie that I make is a film that I want to see. It’s very important. I make movies that I know I would enjoy seeing in the cinema, and that would not be one of them.–
But to do anything that depicted violence towards especially a young person in a way that was serious, to me, I would have no interest in filming it at all. It would be repulsive.”
Stanley Tucci, who plays the murderer, said it was a hard enough role to actually play and they didnt even shoot that horrible scene in the book.
In a separate interview, Peter Jackson talks about how disgusted even story-boarding the rape scene went and failed to make it in the film. Some of the crew walked out of the room. The cast and crew also didnt want to subject the two main actors, Saoirse Ronan (who plays 14 year-old Susie) and Stanley Tucci (who plays Mr. Harvey, a serial killer of little girls), to the scene. They didn’t want Saoirse to experience that scene and it obviously affected Stanley as well.
Reading a rape scene is really so much more different compared to people having to write it out, act it out, and really SEE it. I think the people involved in this movie did what I wish everyone did when handling this subject in just a graphic medium. And I would 100% recommend this book and movie. Both are equally powerful and it’s hard to describe.
Also : Fire Walk With Me is a walk through the life of a traumatized and abused Laura Palmer in the days before her murder and it manages to not have a single rape scene or shot of her sexual abuse in it. Instead we get to know the victim as a human being. I don’t think it’s confirmed but i strongly suspect this is thanks to the influence of David Lynch’s daughter, who wrote The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer and is usually credited with bringing a LOT of humanity to someone who in any other work would just be considered the “dead girl” that inspires the male characters with her suffering.
all the alexa/google home shit feels like a dystopian nightmare and everytime someone mentions having one in their home i have a sudden urge to break into thier house and destroy it
Pretend, for a moment, that you’re an 18-year-old teenager from a family living below the poverty line.
One day, you make a silly mistake and get a ticket for it. Nothing major - maybe you rode the subway without a ticket or smoked too close to the entrance of a building. Maybe you were loitering. Either way, one thing is for sure: you definitely don’t have the money to pay the ticket.
So you don’t.
Eventually, you miss the deadline to pay your ticket, and you get a letter in the mail that says you have to go to court. But your life is chaotic, and a court date for a missed ticket is the least of your concerns. Your family moves constantly, which disrupts your life and puts you behind in school. You have one disabled parent and one parent who is always working, leaving you to raise your younger siblings by yourself. You have no means of transportation. There is rarely any food in the cupboards. The utilities are constantly getting shut off. The week that you were supposed to go to court, your family gets another eviction notice, your cousin ends up in the hospital, and your parent finds out that their disability payments are being reduced.
So you miss your court date.
Since you missed the court date, you automatically lose your case - now you have no hope of arguing your way out of the ticket, which you still can’t afford to pay. You can do community service hours instead of paying, but you don’t have time to do that, now that you have to work part-time and odd jobs on top of everything else to keep your parents off the streets and your siblings out of foster care. You know that you probably won’t finish high school on time, let alone fulfill your hours. You might be able to explain your circumstances to the judge, but you have no idea how to go about doing that now that you’ve missed your court date, your literacy skills are years behind thanks to your constant game of school roulette, and even though legal help is available to you, you don’t know how to access it or if you can afford to do so. But that’s still the least of your concerns - since you missed your court date, the judge has also charged you with failure to appear.
Which means you now have an active warrant out for your arrest.
And just like that, you’re now a part of the criminal justice system. A silly mistake that a middle-class teenager could have solved with Mommy and Daddy’s chequebook in a single afternoon has caused you weeks or months of stress and headaches over a process you don’t fully understand, and has ended in criminal charges. Instead of having a funny story to tell over dinner when you come home from college next Thanksgiving, you are now facing additional fines (that you still can’t pay), the possibility of a couple of nights in jail, the possible suspension of your driver’s license, and the possibility of being taken into custody any time you interact with the police. The next time your parent comes home drunk and violent, or someone breaks into the house, you think twice about calling the cops - you now have to decide if every emergency is “worth” the possibility of being hauled off to jail. And in the meantime, the circumstances that caused that first mistake haven’t gone away - you still don’t have the money to pay for the subway, you are still more likely to live in a house filled with smokers, you still can’t afford quit-smoking aids, you still live in a chaotic household that deeply affects your mental health, and you still don’t understand the legal system or who you’re supposed to talk to for information and resources.
So while those other teenagers get to go through life believing that they were “good kids who sometimes made silly mistakes”, you now get to go through life thinking of yourself as a criminal. And that might be the most damaging thing of all.
When I worked with homeless teenagers and young adults, I saw this process play out again and again and again and again. The kids often considered themselves “criminals” or “bad kids” because they had arrest warrants and criminal records, but few of them had ever actually committed a serious or violent crime - the vast majority were simply unlucky kids who did something stupid and didn’t have the skills or resources (or wealthy parents) required to get them off the hook. I had classmates in my upper-middle-class high school who did far worse things with far fewer consequences, because Mommy was a lawyer or Daddy was an RCMP officer, and some of those kids grew up to be lawyers or police officers themselves. The kids I worked with never got that opportunity. Second chances cost money, and the difference between a “crime” and a “mistake” has less to do with the offense, and more to do with the circumstances you were born into.
So when we’re talking about crime, punishment and who is “worthy” of being helped, maybe keep that in mind.
Y’all act like this is some kind of hypothetical but if I don’t give my county $228 by Monday they’ll issue a warrant for my arrest.
If you’re poor it is SO SO SO easy to become a “criminal” for it. And we know this overlaps with many other forms of oppression.
Where’s that post that explains this succinctly? Oh right:
Research has shown that pleasure affects nutrient absorption. In a 1970s study of Swedish and Thai women, it was found that when the Thai women were eating their own (preferred) cuisine, they absorbed about 50% more iron from the meal than they did from eating the unfamiliar Swedish food. And the same was true in the reverse for the Swedish women. When both groups were split internally and one group given a paste made from the exact same meal and the other was given the meal itself, those eating the paste absorbed 70% less iron than those eating the food in its normal state.
it’s racist to criticize other cultures for consuming an animal that white people arbitrarily decided shouldn’t be eaten. asserting that white culture and white norms are superior to those of poc is white supremacy.
Broke: no animals are food
Woke: all animals are food
I’ve been vegan for 7 years
Even sadder lmao
Why are ppl treating vegans as if their decision is the sad one? I am not a vegan myself but can recognise that they have more morality than I do
I’m not vegan either (vegetarian) and what i meant was that it’s just sad that op is basically defending meat consumption in other parts of the world because she feels white guilt and the need to virtue signal about it lmao. I’m against the consumption of animal meat everywhere not just in the west.
Ah ok i didn’t understand it that way, thanks for the clarification (i’m a vegetarian too)
I’m vegan and would prefer if no animals were eaten, but I do think it’s massively hypocritical when westerners act like it’s horrible that in other cultures people eat animals like dogs and horses when they eat animals like pigs and cows. Pointing that out is not the same as defending meat consumption.
This entire thread is a mess. Eating animal products is not immoral. In order for you believe it is, your morality must be based on sentient life intentionally killed rather than sentient life lost in pursuit of nonsentient food (plants). Veganism is predicated on the morality that killing a being to eat it is worse that killing a being in pursuit of growing a crop. You cannot will this view of the world onto others.
A broccoli field is a biodiversity disaster. The microbiology of the soil has been burned to death. The fungal network has been destroyed. Pesticides and herbicides kill thousands of bugs, rodents, and amphibians. During the winter and spring the topsoil washes away, destroying the water habitat of beings that live in them. This gets to be called a cruelty free, moral diet.
Meanwhile I get castigated for eating a steak from a cow raised on pasture which is a food source for other native animals, like deer. No plowing means no destruction of the fungal network. No artificial nitrogen means soil microbes aren’t burned. Permanent grass means no significant topsoil erosion. Insects thrive. Rodents thrive. Bird populations are higher. Because the cow is intentionally killed, this is considered a cruel diet.
And before people come at me about CAFO cows and corn, remember that’s not the ideal method of cattle growing and in fact it’s changing. Even a CAFO cow spends most of its life on pasture. But that broccoli field cannot stop being a broccoli field. You can increase the biodiversity a little by inter planting other vegetables. Maybe some carrots and zucchini or something. But the nitrogen issue remains. So does tilling. And topsoil. Why is the growing of almonds not considered cruel? Or coffee? But me milking some sheep on land too rocky, too cold for crops is cruel and immoral?
And how does anyone who believes eating animal products to be immoral suggest we grow all those plants and distribute them to people? Do you expect to fly produce to northern peoples in Alaska and Canada? What do we do for the chronically anemic? The chronically B12 deficient? Vitamin A deficient? D? What about the diabetic and insulin resistant? Vegan diets have a greater proportion of carbs.
Why is it not immoral to demand the destruction of almost all cultural foodways in the world? Will you be the one to say to the Maasai they are immoral? To the Swiss? Since cropping prevents nomadism, will you tell nomadic peoples they must settle down? Humanity is approaching Peak Phosphorus- where do you believe we should get more since we cannot recycle nutrients through animals?
In a world where women have been denied access to nutrition by men, why do you seek to limit access to nutritionally dense foods now by marking their consumption as immoral?
Cropped agriculture is highly mechanized. Are we ok with our food being produced by only a few people? Where do you suggest people find new jobs? Mexico City is wracked by the fallout of NAFTA, where agricultural workers have been left with less than nothing and have migrated to the city and found a greatly reduced quality of life. This would happen if humanity went singly vegan. Is this not cruelty too?
There is no moral high ground for any given diet. Intention vs consequences is a morality debate that has been waged for ages. Be vegan. But don’t demand everyone else adopt your perspective on intention vs causality. The trolley problem has no right answer.
