Comment by benj111
3 days ago
I don't particularly agree with the OP but from my European pov, male circumcision doesn't seem to have negative connotations, certainly not in the US.
Negative connotations and actual negativity are two separate things. Alcohol tends not to have negative connotations whereas things that are better for your health and less addictive, cannabis, magic mushrooms, have negative connotations.
What? That practice is absolutely terrible. Many people just have no idea about it, and then their offspring might grow up with terrible shame or something if they ever learn what was taken from them.
Alcohol is also terrible. Nicotine is terrible. Even caffeine can be terrible if you become too dependent on it without realizing. Harm reduction is a thing that can make things less terrible but most users don't practice it. That's the real terror IMO.
> Negative connotations and actual negativity are two separate things. Alcohol tends not to have negative connotations whereas things that are better for your health and less addictive, cannabis, magic mushrooms, have negative connotations.
This is just legal vs illegal. Which is pretty much how morals are decided these days, especially for the non-autistic / "neurotypical" population
> Which is pretty much how morals are decided these days, especially for the non-autistic / "neurotypical" population
Give it a break. Nothing isolates "neurodivergent" people from the rest of society faster than treating neurotypical people as a morally inferior out-group.
I don't know where you got inferiority from that, but it's a well-documented phenomenon that autistic people are more likely to go against the norm than non-autistic people. It's called "positive non-conformity". This suggests non-autistic people are more likely than autistic people to accept how things are and perpetuate it.
While I have many autistic friends from abusive living situations that were forced to accept how things were, I find that the autistic people I meet still tend to be much more varied than the non-autistic. Though I don't know for sure whether this is a side effect of their neurotype or of their societal treatment.
Your first 2 paragraphs missing the point that negative connotations are not the same as actually negative.
My view is that circumcision is negative. I disagree that it has negative connotations though.
Do we have different understandings of what connotation means? I would say in most of the western population having a glass of wine in the evening would be seen neutrally. Having a joint less so. I'm not saying having a joint is bad. But connotations are about the unspoken things, I'm not saying it, it's inserted by people based on their biases.
I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Things that society decides are immoral become illegal and visa versa.
Fwiw I'm Autistic, so I don't know if the last comment was aimed at me, and whether I should class it as a compliment.
> Your first 2 paragraphs missing the point that negative connotations are not the same as actually negative.
> My view is that circumcision is negative. I disagree that it has negative connotations though.
It certainly has negative connotations for me. But, if you are saying it does not have negative connotations in general because it is still widely practiced rather than widely condemned, then I would be inclined to agree. But the wording of your comment implied there is essentially no contest whatsoever, which is why I wrote to clarify that IME it's only "most" people who don't have an opinion on it (or maybe even support it), and that I and many I know do have strong opinions against it.
> I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Things that society decides are immoral become illegal and visa versa.
That is absolutely not how e.g. the war on drugs started. For example, LSD can be fairly safe when used responsibly (and basically won't directly kill you), however when the wrong people were having fun with it, it was made illegal to target them. I don't think "society" made this determination; just the then-president. Research into psychedelics is finally starting to carve out specific paths to limited legalization, but I honestly think that safe psychedelics should be OTC, and harm reduction should be an encouraged practice, rather than sort of black-market knowledge that is only discoverable by the savviest users.
> Fwiw I'm Autistic, so I don't know if the last comment was aimed at me, and whether I should class it as a compliment.
Honestly it was mostly aimed at my friend group. I've found it difficult to connect with non-autistics because I primarily deal well with explicit logic. It could be that similar intellects are just formatted differently, but I've been unable to tell if a lack of struggle / lack of awareness of struggle actually equates to comparable skill because I can't seem to interrogate them properly. They're all-but inscrutable to me. And as far as I know, they're the source of most of the surface-level generally-accepted stereotypes that quickly break down or are flat-out wrong. I don't know that they're inferior in any way, but they rarely seem to have anything interesting for me (as that would usually make them neurodivergent).