it's whats for dinner

A brief history of cannibalism

"....they failed to draw lots to decide on the victim. Instead of doing so, they killed the weakest of their number" - reason for a conviction of manslaughter for 3 ocean stranded men who killed and ate a fourth.

After reading Swift's Modest Proposal (and the modern take on it) or seeing Silence of the Lambs, it's not intellectually shocking to contemplate cannibalism in theory, particularly as a presence of mind to survive under horrific circumstances. But the actual practice is brutally savage. These are also reasons why killing, murdering, and even eating other people doesn't strike me as horrific or terrible an atrocity as forcing sexual relations upon someone else through rape. Certainly there are ways in which one can be particularly cruel in the nature of killing or consuming another person. But these are in the main, not particularly common.

Torture, despite what our previous administration did, is not a very functional way to kill other people and its interest diminishes quickly from a passionate air toward violent assault on another person. Even a murderous rage does not generally beget such action, but instead such a cruelty is calculated and inflicted with indifference. Only rape measures up in a form of vile cruelty likewise afflicted with a measure of unconcern and callousness for a decency of other human beings.

This line was also peculiarly amusing: Hume speaks of a Turkish prisoner under questioning, who had converted to Christianity: ‘How many gods are there?’ he was asked. To which he replied: ‘None at all . . . You have told me all along that there is but one God: and yesterday I ate him.’