| > How do we know it wasn't a placenta in delicate wine sauce? I've never seen a placenta described as an "inch-thick steak" by people who have eaten steaks many times before. It is not a thick muscle, and none of the anthropological accounts of disposing placentas mention it tasting like a steak (it is usually prepared in a non-steak fashion), and checking now accounts of it like https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a8465402/american-aft... confirms that it tastes rather unlike a thick beefsteak. Also, this question is a good example of irrationality in insisting on evaluating pieces of evidence in isolation, rather than as a whole. You see this kind of motivated reasoning a lot in scandals and coverups. The point the story makes is that there are two possible worlds: one in which there is no slavery, and the various anomalies the visitors observe are simply anomalies (eg. those itinerant fieldworkers really did just happen to have moved on to the next town already); and one in which there is and the local authorities are making every effort to cover it up as part of a systematic, planned campaign of deception and lies. And the visitors are trying to figure out which world they live in. If they lived in the first world, perhaps it really is just a human placenta, somehow (maybe there's a clever way to prepare it), and it is cannibalism of one of the most harmless sort, or it is some sort of very well-developed vegetarian meat substitute; but combine that with all the other anomalies, and it is immediately obvious they lived in the second world, where it is exactly what it seems - a thick meaty steak from the only adult mammal they have observed on the planet, indicative of an entire social structure gone horribly wrong for a millennium and unfixable without centuries of reconstruction, which is actively manipulating & deceiving them and everything from it should be regarded as further lies & attacks, and it is pointless to do any further inspections or reveal to them what the misteak was. Insisting on interpreting each point in isolation will yield the wrong answer. "How do you know the fieldworkers are slaves? Can you prove it?" "How do you know it was a steak and not a placenta - prove it!" etc. > The story is that they had quite the hard time surviving on their planet. If people die trying to survive and there is no other food. Should one chose to die from starvation? Should I be the one to judge here? To point out the obvious, cannibalizing humans as a normal state of affairs cannot have starvation as an excuse - if you're a human. Because you could just eat what they were eating. You can starve to death in a field of cows because you can't eat grass, and have necessity as a justification, but not in a field of fellow humans eating grapes or wheat or all the other crops implied to be raised successfully and maintain a stable population there... And given trophic efficiency, if starvation were an actual concern, you would feed more humans by not raising any for cannibalism. |