[0887] Second Circle Consulting
└ posted on Thursday, 18 May 2017, by Novil
- Cloud: I can’t give Sandra sexy lingerie for her birthday!
- Larisa: Of course you can, Cloud! You just have to go step by step, then it’s quite simple!
- Cloud: She’d think I’m a pervert if I gave her panties like these!
- Larisa: Correct. Only this product will meet the needs of the client.
- Cloud: The store wouldn’t sell me such scandalous clothes anyway….
- Larisa: A clerk who hasn’t yet met his sales quota can become your best ally!
- Cloud: You bewitched me, nefarious demon!
- Larisa: We from Second Circle Consulting prefer to speak of “reorganizing deep neural networks by supervised training.”
![[0887] Second Circle Consulting](/comics/2017-05-18-0887-second-circle-consulting.png "[0887] Second Circle Consulting")
@ Tom West:
I can’t say I can agree with your conclusion of harm here. In your speeding example for instance, you failed to demonstrate actual harm for one to be aware on. Risk was identified, yes, but not actual harm. Had your speeding caused an accident, there would be harm.
It seems both with the example and the comment that you’re equating those: risk and harm. Further you’re suggesting that the content creates some real risk that wouldn’t or doesn’t otherwise exist. That or you’re suggesting some perpetual borderline mentality pervasive and unstable enough for the mere idea of appropriate and real teenage sexuality, and the fetishization thereof, is culturally scarce enough for this media to be a significant factor.
I just don’t buy that set of circumstances to be true for this subject more than any other leveraged for humor here. It instead reaks of unfounded alarmism.
Tom West wrote:
It’s not purely a matter of adult males.
Or have you missed the female high-school teachers who’ve had affairs with their students?
CoMa wrote:
A pubescent ‘succubus’ trying to entice a young boy into buying sexy lingerie is not tackling the complex issues of youth and first love (and first sexual feelings). It’s trying to get a chuckle out of the audience.
The comic is not aimed at 13 year-olds (although they might well enjoy it), it is aimed at adults. The fictional children portrayed are for the benefit of *adult* sensibilities. This is not about education. It’s more along the lines of a suggestive joke by a comedian.
Let’s get rid of blaming altogether. Let’s simply say that we can reduce sexual predation on children by various measures, many of which are not worth the cost.
While there will always be sexual behaviour in children which incites some adults to abuse, I don’t think the cost is particularly worth the benefit.
However, there’s a large amount of *adults* sexualizing children in media and in marketing that I don’t think benefits children in any way, while (at least on the margins) it increases predation.
Sure, the “wrong in the head” are to blame, but “wrong in the head” is cultural, not axiomatic, and probably not biological. In much of human history, children were fair game for adults.
So, as someone who has children, I’m a fairly big fan of the continuance of the fairly deep social conditioning that makes us feel viscerally that adult sexual attention on children is “wrong”. And this is heavily done by invoking the disgust reflex when linking adults with childhood sexuality.
Media that invite adult interest (as readers) in the childhood sexuality (in the media we’re offered) help break that taboo by normalizing the interest.
Again, this is all fairly mild – this arc is no Calvin Klein commercial with Brooke whatever-her-name-was, but it does push against a taboo that I feel should only be crossed when there’s something bigger at stake than a chuckle.
Tom West wrote:
Except problematically for the crux of the argument, the comic isn’t pushing a taboo. You’re forcing the context of the comic into a taboo, or at least trying to. The facet of adolescence being explored is factual and expected to be known. That fact does not innapropriately sexualize teens to adults, else it would be socially acceptable to do so or require ignorance of that fact to avoid acceptability.
You’re really overselling the idea of an environmental normalization here since it has to predicate on post adolescent ignorance.
Derf wrote:
Risk *is* harm, in non-integral amounts. And this is recognized by society and, I am sure, by you.
To take the most obvious example. If I put one bullet in the chamber of a gun and aim it at someone and pull the trigger, I have done a great harm, simply by taking a risk, and will go to jail, even if no shot occurred.
It’s why we have laws against pollution – it’s almost impossible to say “pollution killed this man”, but we can look at aggregate results to say more people die with pollution. We unequivocally consider risk a harm.
Understanding that almost every choice we make inflicts harm to some degree is vital in order to understand that almost everything is a trade-off between its harms and its benefits.
In my speeding example, I am increasing the level of harm that I cause as I increase my speed, and my control and my momentum decrease. That doesn’t start at the speed limit. The moment I step into my car, I am increasing pollution levels. Driving at the speed limit is certainly inflicting risk (and thus harm) on all around me. But we, as a society, have negotiated a point where we feel the risk outweighs the benefits accrued to me – it’s called the speed limit.
And yet I choose, on occasion, to increase the risk/harm to others for my own personal benefit. We all do. But if I’m not even perceiving the risk I’m inflicting on others as harm, then there is no limiting factor to my speed. If we all do that, then suddenly a lot more people are dying despite the fact that only a few of us are committing harm…
Yes I am. The fact that it is a *small* risk (will it cause one extra assault, probably not. Maybe a “milli-assault”. Obviously, it is not easily measured, but I think we have a responsibility to think about the harm we cause, even if it’s nebulous.
First, the only reason that such mentality is borderline or unstable is *because* of the cultural conditioning we’ve put in place. Or have you not noticed the ads by various organizations trying to stop child marriage that exists in much of the world *right now*. The idea of children being suitable sexual partners for adults barely raised an eyebrow 500 years ago and is still not uncommon today in much of the world.
The reason that we rightfully consider such a personality borderline or unstable is that they’ve failed to be sufficiently swayed by the cultural conditioning that we put it place.
As for the “Its okay for me to throw my trash on the side of the road because there’s already lots there” argument is, as my analogy indicates, a falsehood. Yes, this comic’s contribution to the problem is minuscule compared to media attempts to sexualize children. That doesn’t mean it’s absent.
It is *a* factor, yes. Sure, I can dump my trash on the side of the road because it’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the trash that’s already there. The moral person Killjoy wrote:
It is a tragedy that child victimization occurs in *any* context, but the fact that female predators occur so rarely that they make national news when they’re caught is a clear indication that it is *extremely* rare.
generalize
Tom West wrote:
Oops. You can delete that paragraph, although I like the idea of “the moral person Killjoy wrote”…
@ Tom West:
No, once again you’ve mistaken risk and harm. You’re new scenario does harm not based on the fact that pulling the trigger has an uncertain outcome, but the fact that you chose to pull a weapon in threat to another person. Has nothing to do with being loaded since the person you’re pointing it at doesn’t know.
And no, we don’t have laws against polution based on risk either. Cause of death is not the only factor worth consideration, something both of those examples miss. Polution has cumulative, known certain affects on a human population and its surrounding environment. The point of limiting it is to reduce the damage it causes to both, not simply lessen direct attributions.
All of the above really reinforce the idea you’re conflating concepts while still being unable to remotely even quantify any real harm. You’ve suggested a possibility, and poorly supported it, then pointed the responsibility of an unquantifiably low risk, not harm but very low risk, at the creators here.
That seems rather irresponsible from any reasonable perspective as you’re either ignoring parallels to other crimes more directly referenced as jokes or placing this one on such a pedistal that censorship of common knowledge is the only possible reasonable reaction.
As to social conditioning, material objectionable to that accepted norm is common in all areas, pointing to the outliers doesn’t deny the fact, nor does a non-outlier become an outlier for the same reason.
As far as killjoys observation, that’s proof of reality being a factor extremely in access of this comic, thus mitigating the arguments of it’s effects and supporting the nature of the content as not particularly inappropriate or exaggerated. You have and example or harm contrasting the expression of a norm in art rather than the latter supporting the former.
@ Tom West:
Thanks for your insightful comments! That helped me to understand why I was also feeling uncomfortable with this arc (and maybe one or two before). – It is a pity that the storyline seems to go into this direction, because usually I like this comic and I wouldn’t like it to turn into fantasies for old men… (Overexaggerating a bit here, but I hope you get the idea.)
Derf wrote:
You go to jail even if the victim never knew you took a chance with their life.
Look, this is probably a matter of semantics here. If the law only punishes harm, then it certainly evaluates as x . It punishes or intervenes when goes above a certain threshold, even if no harm occurred.
It’s why we have speed limits. Both and go up as speed increases until we reach a spot where the society intervenes because is too high, even if no-one is injured. It’s why we have drunk-driving laws even if you’ve never been in an accident. Why you go to jail if you play Russian roulette with someone and they’re not even aware you were aiming at them, etc. etc.
From a legal and social perspective, that ship has long sailed.
What I am pointing out is that the part of the equation exists even when the the values are small. The moment I turn the keys on the car engine, I am taking action that increase both and and it is my moral obligation to recognize that. That increases as my speed increases (without getting pedantic) until at some point I reach a social agreement that my is no longer worth the benefit it brings me – the speed limit.
There isn’t a magical “over this speed there’s and below it there’s not”. It’s simply where we as a society put the trade-off between the good and the ill that driving brings.
So, just because an action causes does NOT mean that I am morally obligated to avoid that. I’ve been causing since the moment I was conceived and I cannot continue exist without continuing to cause harm to others.
But if I refuse to recognize that anything I do has > 0 until I exceed a certain legal threshold, I’m a pretty wretched human being. I will do nothing to mitigate the produced because I refuse to acknowledge that a trade-off between the and a the good of an action even exists.
All I am hoping here is that upon the next arc, the author make that evaluation for himself, congniscent of both the and the good that the arc brings.
(Or do you not acknowledge the other side of the equation as well. That an act that only has a chance of doing a demonstrable good isn’t good, in which case, I meant .)
@ Tom West:
Oops. My previous post used angle brackets all over the place, which were interpreted as tags… Doh.
You go to jail even if the victim never knew you took a chance with their life.
Look, this is probably a matter of semantics here. If the law only punishes harm, then it certainly evaluates [harm] as [chance-action-causes-harm] x [amount-of-harm-action-could-cause]. It then punishes or intervenes when [harm] goes above a certain threshold, even if no actual harm occurred.
It’s why we have speed limits. Both [chance-action-causes-harm] and [amount-of-harm-action-could-cause] go up as speed increases until we reach a spot where the society intervenes because [harm] is too high, even if no-one is injured. It’s also why we have drunk-driving laws even if you’ve never been in an accident. Its also why you go to jail if you play Russian roulette with someone and they’re not even aware you were aiming at them, etc. etc.
From a legal and social perspective, that ship has long sailed.
What I am pointing out is that the [harm] part of the equation exists even when the the value of [chance-action-causes-harm] is small. The moment I turn the keys on the car engine, I am taking action that increase both [chance-action-causes-harm] and [amount-of-harm-action-could-cause] and it is my moral obligation to recognize that. That [harm] increases as my speed increases (without getting pedantic) until at some point we reach a social agreement that the [harm] is no longer worth the benefit it brings me – the speed limit.
There isn’t a magical “over this speed there’s [harm] and below it there’s not”. It’s simply where we as a society put the trade-off between the good and the ill that driving brings.
So, just because an action causes [harm] does NOT mean that I am morally obligated to avoid that action. I’ve been causing [harm] since the moment I was conceived and I cannot continue exist without continuing to cause [harm] to others.
But if I refuse to recognize that anything I do has [harm] > 0 until I exceed a certain legal threshold, I’m a pretty wretched human being. I will do nothing to mitigate the [harm] produced because I refuse to acknowledge that a trade-off between the [harm] and a the good of an action even exists.
All I am hoping here is that upon the next arc, the author make that evaluation for himself, congniscent of both the [harm] and the good that the arc brings.
(Or do you not acknowledge the other side of the equation as well. That an act that only has a chance of doing a demonstrable good isn’t good, in which case, I meant [good] :-).)
@ Thisguy:
Perhaps Minnie May Hopkins is another regular.