What the fuck. I keep re-reading it and it’s crazier each time.
İsn’t this necrophilia? İsn’t this incest? I didn’t even know it was possible?
WHY???
Haim now faces an uphill battle to get approval to use his sperm to produce a grandchild. If she succeeds, her next challenge would be to find a woman to carry the child and raise it.
OK, that’s slightly less bad than the headline made it sound, but still
carry the child and raise it
Not to give her advice but I think she’d have an easier time if she said she wanted an egg donor (so no inbreeding) but would carry the pregnancy herself. And obviously not wanting to raise the grandkid is insane.
The IDF conscripts women too, so maybe she could find a cadaver whose ovaries are still viable. Why should reproductive necromancy only benefit the patriarchy?
Yeah I wonder if you can harvest viable eggs from a corpse. I’ve been through egg retrieval myself and it’s a pretty involved process; you have to inject yourself with hormones to stimulate follicle growth and align things with your cycle. Compared to getting sperm which afaik just involves jacking off into a cup.
SHE’S NOT EVEN GOING TO RAISE IT HERSELF???
It’s a decent bit worse than how I read it because I assumed this was on behalf of a daughter-in-law, rather than hey ladies, would you be interested in my deceased son’s semen? You look like the kind of woman who my son would have loved to posthumously impregnate. No, it’s not what it sounds like at all - I already filled out all the paperwork to get the approval! All the legwork is already taken care of! All you need to do is conceive the child and raise it.
Yeah, I was concerned this was going a different way but I wouldn’t have been surprised
OMG I see what you mean 😐
What a headline lol
seriously, that is 100% how I took it and was dying inside, because purposely high kinship linebreeding to “keep the lineage pure” I’m pretty sure went out of fashion a few millenia ago and I was getting the impression this person saw the antagonists of the X-Files episode “Home” as aspirational.
Your son is a loser and his genes deserve to die with him.
I can’t fucking believe western media wrote “harvested sperm” without thinking about how fucking psychotic that sounds. It could be described in so many other ways that make it sound less horrible but they really went for “harvesting” something from a corpse.
Israelis would rather have a racially pure child from corpse sperm than adopt any one of the millions of orphan children around the world
Don’t give them ideas. Those orphans deserve better than to end up as zionists.
I would rather they don’t have kids AND don’t adopt them
uh what’s the “sane” (for lack of a better term) way to describe getting sperm out of a dead body for the purpose of conception?
Jacking
Siphoning
oh no
Collecting or rescuing probably
rescuing is solid. thanks i hate it.
Wrestling
I personally feel like you shouldn’t judge something based on how it’s phrased. That seems a bit tone policy/civility brained.
My point is that the western media constantly picks its words very carefully to dehumanise its enemies and frame its allies as moral and upstanding. “Harvesting” is anti regime language with negative connotations in people’s minds when it comes from organ harvesting.
It’s just surprising that nobody in the western media has realised how fucking freaky they’re making it sound with this language. They usually wouldn’t use language that has a negative vibe for their allies.
when you can’t find a good passive voice for cumjacking dead nazis so you have to forget years of anti-china rhetoric lmao
“IDF-involved cumming”
You mean h3h3 having kids?
Ah mb, sorry for misunderstanding.
The journos might honestly find this revolting. Current western culture is extremely prissy about death and funerary stuff. See like genocides over funerary cannibalism and shit :l, all the bonkers laws about specifically how corpse destruction/burial has to happen.
Medical language is also extremely clinical, you do harvest organs for transplantation etc. Harvesting itself is sort of euphemistic, you butcher the innocent cow you harvest material from the cadaver. Could be that.
It’s not like milked or secreted sperm sound better haha.
TBH the anthropology enthusiast in me finds this grotesque and fascinating. What a fucking trip to have your mum looking to objectify a woman so she can have little youlings to grieve over.
It’s not like milked or secreted sperm sound better haha.
They could have said “salvaged”
Kinda makes him sound like bicentennial man.
necronatalism is wild
Someone needs to larp in the anti natalist spaces as a necronatalist.
You know what else has a drive to keep growing? Cancer.
mistakenly identified as a terrorist
Yeah, they saw that he was unarmed and incapable of fighting back which is the #1 way an Israeli soldier identifies a “valid” target
To mitigate these issues, Savitsky believes that young men should be asked whether they would want their sperm to be posthumously retrieved before they enter army service, but said the ministry of defense may be wary of implementing this as it could dent troop morale.
Lmao fucking cult ass society, in a league of their own.
Why not just humously get a sperm sample?
You’ll put the Kum Kollection Korps out of work
Not sick enough.
This is literally the 40k meme of extracting the sacred balls of fallen space marines
ahh progenoid glands, one is in the neck you know
Deeply deeply sick society and culture
In Israel, extracting sperm from a dead body is permitted, but there is no law that clearly defines the process of using the sperm for the purpose of producing offspring.
“In Israeli law, we don’t have a law for this procedure,” Nily Shatz, Haim’s lawyer, said, adding that family courts have only approved posthumous use of sperm by parents of the deceased to produce a child twice in the past; however, the second case was later overturned after an appeal brought by the state. “All the other cases were rejected.”
What. The. Fuck!? They take the sperm, but have no laws to allow it to be used!? THEY TAKE THE SPERM AND HAVE NO LEGAL USE FOR IT!?!?
WHY THE FUCK DO THEY TAKE THE SPERM THEN!!??
The love of the game
SHOTS
SHOTS
SHOTS
Caviar is becoming rarer and there are increasing ethical objections. However molecular gastronomy and cold oil spherification techniques have advanced significantly.
Didn’t they find some way of making caviar cheaply in China a few years ago?
I fucking hope not unless it is spherified cum.
Cheaply in animal ag just means suffering turned up to 11. Animal products being unaffordable is good, I wish the entire industry a great big fuck off.
It really is just fish cum. The reason China managed to make caviar cheap is because they are extracting it without killing the fish, and caviar itself is actually fish eggs from sturgeon. Since you don’t have to kill the fish to extract the caviar, a single female can produce way more over her lifetime, leading to a drop in prices.
Still evil. People that eat animal products are doing evil and people working in the industry are doing evil for money.
Oh so that’s why Sabra tastes so weird
i must assume people are just going for it rather than seeking approval?
Children of the dead seed let’s fucking goooo.
TBH while I think it’s a bit ghoulish I could see why someone might want to do this if their SO died before they had a chance to breed if that’s what they both wanted prior. It could almost be sweet I suppose.
Harvesting the sperm of your child and then hunting for a willing mother is kinda fucked up though, there have to be healthier ways to grieve than this.
Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words
Did you know that we too left civilization behind? The scribblers were closing in on all sides, you see. The clerks with their purple tongues and darting eyes, their shuffling feet and sloped shoulders, their bloodless lists. Oh, measure it all out! Acceptable levels of misery and suffering!’ The cane swung down, thumped hard on the ground. ‘Acceptable? Who the fuck says any level is acceptable? What sort of mind thinks that?’ Karsa grinned. ‘Why, a civilized one.’
legit the mbotf is a masterwork and Ericson’s unending compassion for people that comes through was a significant for me developing a healthier view on human foibles.
Preaching to the choir. Unfortunately I have little success rate with getting friends to convert to Malazan.
Yeah same. I’ve met one other enjoyer in meatspace. My wife refuses to read it because “You talk about how good it is so much I’m worried I wont enjoy 40k books afterwards” which is… an opinion :p maybe I should moderate my praise.
It’s the only series I’ve read that has had me just bawl my eyes out or laugh aloud like a maniac in public. Beautiful work. Also deeply silly, which I think is important too because being serious all the time is exhausting.
Your wife’s opinion is valid, I’ve heard others don’t enjoy fantasy as much after Malazan. I got one friend through Deadhouse but he’s been reading lots of shorter books since. Probably gonna have to buy him Memories to guilt him, but then he should be hooked.
Memories did hook me into the series this is true, so it might work.
I dunno I can still enjoy slop though, if all you ever eat is 5 stars you stop appreciating it.
I still enjoy slop too. Recently been reading old pulp sff between arty litfic.
I have become more particular about the slop I enjoy, but I think that’s just getting more familiar with myself.
I find it a strange attitude because it’s not like going to an art gallery stops you admiring cool graffiti. Popcorn page turners drenched in cliche are doing something else, nobody opens a Conan the barbarian book and sits down ready to have their worldview shattered, and nobody picks up house of leaves expecting a jolly romp through an unchallenging and familiar setting.
Serious question, and despite my tone, I mean this in a genuinely good-faith and non-hostile way: what do you like about the Malazan books? I read the first two at the suggestion of my coworkers, but I wasn’t a fan and neither of them were able to articulate why they enjoyed the series particularly well.
Like, Deadhouse kinda lingered on the whole “indigenous uprising is brutally murdering our perfect colonizers” and I was struggling to understand why I was supposed to care about the colonizers in that situation. Made it hard to sympathize with Coltaine et al.
I’ll address two different questions. I love the Malazan books because it’s an incredibly creative world with great characters who represent themes of compassion and sympathy in a world that is pointlessly cruel. Erikson uses a fantasy setting to explore humanity often using very inhumane creatures. Plus you get some awesome shit like sword guys fighting wizards and dragon demons. It’s also written by an archaeologist which shows when fantasy cultures are depicted with realistic depth.
Like, Deadhouse kinda lingered on the whole “indigenous uprising is brutally murdering our perfect colonizers”
Interestingly I had a very different interpretation of the Whirldwind. My thoughts were “of course the people of Seven Cities are being so violent, they’re responding to the violence of empire.” Real world indigenous struggles are not so clean either. At this point the Empire has also been shown to be cruel.
We had such a different reactions because Erikson narrates things like violence, genocide, and SA in a neutral light and expects the reader to form their own opinion. As a writer in general, he doesn’t spell things out for yon. In other fantasy series, I would expect the characters we are following (in this case imperial soldiers) to be presented as the good guys fighting bad guys, which would lead to your interpretation. In Malazan, he forgoes good and bad people and tells a story where people navigate a violent and cruel world. Sometimes they make selfish choices, sometimes they make selfless choices.
It’s also not a series for everyone. If you go into Memories of Ice with an open mind, you might start to enjoy it. That’s where he really starts getting mileage out of his best themes. But if that book doesn’t hook you, it might not be for you.
plot spoilers
The colonising capitalist empire that ends up consumed by the undying mad corpse of one of their colonial subjects. Who is literally encased in golden coins that fall off him as he moves is probably the least subtle he could get in condemnation.
But even then the authorial voice is always distant and academic. He plays both sides really, setting up the scenarios he wants to criticise but never making it explicit, always dispassionately describing the events as they fall while he’s got a thumb on the scale.
I think you can actually track his own views by how distant the narrator gets from the action. Like in those horrific torture scenes they are basically described by a person backed so far into the corner of the room they’re breaking ribs.
Yes while his narration is academic as you said, Erikson really makes it obvious where he stands by book 5. He does his philosophizing through his characters, who don’t hide their displeasure with the world.
It’s been years but I don’t think you’re supposed to be picking sides exactly.
The malazan empire is explicitly corrupt and the invasion of continent a pointless and cruel disaster. The whirlwind in extrodinarily unnecessarily violent and doesn’t represent some unified purpose but one extreme faction rising to prominence. The chain of dogs could have been entirely avoided with an orderly evacuation but greed and cowardice + political scheming means a heart rending amount of suffering is going to take place.
In this backdrop a bunch of imperfect people are trying to do their best. The wickains are facing their own annihilation as the malazan empire subsumes them, but perhaps military performance can win them some freedom, a group of people set out to try kill the person they hold responsible but get tangled in a giant mess and end up maybe making things worse or perhaps not, a shithead becomes a broken girl but maybe also hope for tempering the uprising and wresting control from a corrupt and sexually perverted elite.
It’s just messy, and what drives it is people trying to do their best and often on different sides. You confront how good intentions can make mortal enemies and sometimes mortal enemies can become something else through recognition of common humanity.
The whole series is basically a meditation on the corrupting influence of empire, the momentum of historical events, the fundamental goodness in ordinary people, and how compassion can win something kinder from the ashes and blood left behind by imperial ambition.
Oh also without spoilers the series later goes into absolutely scathing criticism of colonialism and capitalism. At points the characters basically turn to the reader and go “Holy fuck shit I cannot even fathom what sort of imbecile, what absolute cretin, would organise society this way” so it is worth approaching the books in good faith.
The author is an anthropologist and so I think overall he is trying to present a nuanced, almost anti-fantasy world. There aren’t really good vs evil conflicts and tribal cultures that the books take the side of against empire are shown to have absolutely hideous punishments applied incorrectly while the glorious empire with its plumbing and cities rounds up and executes children in case they become politically inconvenient while sending thousands into pointless meat grinders.
I mean, I don’t give it long before the mothers become the mothers.
I literally thought that’s what the article was describing—the guys mother wanting to get his semen and carry her own grandchild. I guess she intends to find a surrogate, but when the story starts by covering the topic of post-death semen extraction for making new children, anything seems “reasonable”
Side note: if they’re all so concerned about continuing lineages and such, why not make semen donation a required part of the entry physical or something. Surely that would be less weird and dangerous than having dedicated post-death semen extraction services?
No, don’t give them ideas, that would ruin our memes. And this way there’s a possibility of the sperm being lost, which is good!
Besides, I think part of them has a fetish for this shit or something.
Yeah was gonna say, since you could deal with this in a normal way and they didn’t, they obviously like this whole dead-sperm retrieval thing, there is definitely some psycho-sexual thing going on. Whole thing is creepy/necrophilia coded.
The colonial situation dehumanizes the colonizer, example number 1000000
I know it’s beside the point, but it’s wild that forensic examination of bodies is considered to be desecrating a corpse, but you can just do this. Like, how can you possibly tell me that this is more in line with the Torah than even a superficial examination to determine the cause of death of a murder victim? Especially if there is no prior consent on the part of the recently deceased.
