Re: Facebook is evil, why it must be eradicated [was: Wikileaks?]

On Dec 7, 2010, at 5:44 AM, Alberto Monteiro wrote:

> Why do people join Facebook, when it's owned
> by sociopaths and perverts?

and then wrote:

> It's not the people that join that are sociopaths
> and perverts, it's the people that control the site
> that are sociopaths and perverts.
>
> Only a sociopath and pervert can think that
> breastfeeding is pornography. It's disrespectful
> to breastfeeding (and to pornography too, but wfc?)
>
> All the billions that g*vernments invest all the
> time to make mothers breastfeed, and those sociopaths
> and perverts create a Social Network that criminalizes
> it. They should be exiled to Antarctica.

It seemed to me that the initial post could have been an excellent  
illustration of a trap question in the mold of "Have you stopped  
beating your wife?", and left it alone, admiring the complex twists of  
it semantic seductiveness.

But this seems to be a much better question to answer in the real world.

The answer is that the culture at large has some very unhealthy and  
dysfunctional ideas about nudity and sex, and tends to perceive  
women's exposed breasts (regardless of the reasons why they're  
exposed) as a sexualized image.  I don't know if this is more so, or  
less so, in Brazil than it is in the USA (I've heard widely  
conflicting reports), but with only limited exceptions in some more  
open-minded areas of the country, people are taught to consider  
exposed female breasts a moral threat of sorts (under the guise of  
"protecting children") and some websites run by people who adhere to  
that belief system tend to discriminate in that way rather, er,  
indiscriminately.

I don't like the paradigm, I strongly feel that the value system that  
underlies it is ultimately more destructive and unhealthy than  
anything else, but it's a very deep-rooted paradigm that would require  
far more than my own meager efforts to shift.  And whether I happen to  
like it or not, Facebook is likely to continue this behavior for the  
foreseeable future.  I wouldn't necessarily call the attitudes driving  
it sociopathic, but I suppose I could call some of them perverted, for  
a fairly loose definition of perversion.

(A similar definition exists in a more extreme form in parts of the  
Arab world where women are forced to wrap themselves in clothing to  
the extent that they can barely even see, supposedly to avoid tempting  
nearby men into acts of lust.  Both are a form of blaming the victim,  
and I think men who believe this about women need to work on impulse  
control more than they need to harass the womenfolk into covering  
themselves up, but that may just be me.)

“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians  
are so unlike your Christ.” -- Mahatma Gandhi