(no subject)

[inahandbasket]

bug chasers

i... but...
feh...
</words>


Suicide is one thing, but this?
Just plain fucked up.
It takes a lot for me to say that about a subculture.

Comments

[djluminal.livejournal.com]

Consider sexual fetishes, the average mainstream person things that even those with mundane fetishes (face it, most people don't know about the really interesting ones) are "hopelessly disturbed." Heck, one of my female coworkers the other day was ranting to me about how disgusting lesbianism is, and how "people like that" squick her mightily.

Sexual fetishes, even extreme ones, do not involve murder. Intentionally infecting someone with a terminal immune-deficiency for which there is no known cure? Sounds like murder. Even the guy who answered the ad from a man in Germany asking to be killed and eaten was prosecuted after killing and eating said human, so the argument about "well these people *want* to be infected, so you can't prosecute their infectors" doesn't work. even if it ends up being classified as manslaughter and not murder in the first, it's still killing. "Carlos" even admits it...

"I'm murdering him in a sense, killing him slowly, and that's sort of, as sick as it sounds, exciting to me"

The fetish/BDSM scene (or at least its core constituency - not the "tourists" experimenting without a clue of the scene's code of behavior) subscribes to "Safe, Sane, and Consensual" as a mantra for any activities involving rough play. The only tenet applicable in the case of these "bug chasers" is "Consensual" and even that is stretching it a bit. This is neither safe nor sane.

A person participating in rough play can call a safeword if they feel they are in a situation which compromises their safety. You can't call out "kiwi bird" and make AIDS go away the way you can, say, cause someone to stop flogging you, piercing you, cutting you, or even (since you brought up scat) unleashing large piles of dung onto you.

To address the dialogue between you and Bill: Yes, the value of one's own life is essentially up to that person to determine, but if you feel that life is worthless, then commit suicide by yourself. Don't hand someone a gun and ask them to shoot you, even if they *want* to shoot you -- because then that is no longer suicide, it is murder.

And I realize that statement brings up the argument of "well, then what about disconnecting life-support machines? is that murder too?", and to that I'd reply that in those cases, the person being disconnected has made their wishes clear in a legally binding document, and fully informed consent has been provided to disconnect *IF* it becomes apparent that the patient's contnued life is contingent upon connection to such machines and chances for recovery are nonexistent or slim. the people being deliberately infected with HIV are in no such dire condition, and are thoroughly capable of ending their own lives, unlike a patient in a persistive vegetative state.