Haha, I sunk your battleship. No judgement is implied, and none would be inferred if I was wrong.

I think most of the trolling is because you expect people to go watch a 9 min video and then come back here and post. You'd be much better off writing up a concise summary of the arguments (which would save us from listening to hacking coughs and wondering how bad that chair smells) and people could take it from there. As it is, you posted a youtube link with no explanation at all, including failing to mention that you were actually involved in the production. Most of the people that post youtube links without their own comments are just trying to get other people to think for them.

Really? God knows I'm happy without others thinking for me. People were trolling?

Viva la cinema....

Cliffs cliffs: Feel free to only respond and read the sentences that are bolded. To make this easier for you, here they are again: "yes, you're right, but that isn't the reason incest should be illegal." and "How does his criticism of the incest taboo, if acted upon, have any effect? "

Cliffs:
The OP is correct regarding that anti-incest laws, when enforced upon consenting rational adults, are anachronistic and an unlawful. However, he doesn't show any examples of how this matters, as it appears he would agree that most illegal incestuous relationships should be illegal because they are almost always rape.
My post provides evidence that the OP is right about the law's effect on the genetic robustness of the population, and while the OP is right about this being obviated by birth control, there is no evidence that this goal has existed in the post-Hitler West. Furthermore, there are relevant examples in reproductive law. In other words: "yes, you're right, but that isn't the reason incest is illegal."

War and Peace Length:

The argument's conclusion in the video is correct with regard to fringe cases.
I must timidly admit the OP argument is technically correct. However, he doesn't show how it's relevant. How does his criticism of the incest taboo, if acted upon, have any effect? (In other words, what relations ARE prohibited that should have been prohibited).

He provides a reasonable and powerful proof that this statement is correct: "Laws prohibiting incest are based on preventing a potential side effect which is now easy to prevent."

This argument ignores the standard conservative utilitarian response - frequently an irrational, incorrect, or obviated basis for a law has little to do with the law's outcome. An obvious example would be Brown v. Board of Education, where a great deal of the anti-segregationists' argument was based on faulty psychology regarding black self image (for instance, evidence such as black children using negative adjectives to describe black dolls and positive adjectives to describe white dolls was incorrectly accepted as evidence of segregation's harm).

There currently are NO laws in the US which prohibit any sort of human breeding or genetic selection. If you want, you can get a designer baby with super-potent Huntington's and there are no laws against it. This sort of human freedom to generate babies is, as far as I know, universal in the West. The closest to a restriction that I know of is it is illegal to select for an embryo with a genetic disorder when doing in vitro in Britain (a far cry from dangerous mating). Obviously, you can get around it in any area where abortion is legal (yes, I realize how unfeasible this is).

These lack of restrictions (or restrictions) to embryo-selection are not irrelevant, and is illustrated with the deaf community. Most deaf parents would prefer having deaf children, and many in the US select for this. It has recently become illegal in Britain to select for deaf embryos, and there is a movement against it, albeit small. The issue of deafness and civil rights is very complicated, and although restricting the creation of deaf children might appear obvious, it most certainly is not. Furthermore, the compelling argument to preserve the deaf's right to reproduce applies to a host of other disorders (most notably dwarfism).

Although incest is clearly genetically inferior to random mating, it's very easy to generate examples of non-incestuous mating which is inferior to incestuous mating - it is trivially easy to show that the average child which would be generated by a randomly selected incestuous pair is better than the worst 1% of pairings (simply observe the incidence of autosomal recessive genetic disorders). Although I'm not comfortable setting a number, it is obviously much higher than ~2.66% (1 incident / 1.5 children per couple *4). If there is a rights-based rationale for protecting potential children of incest, it must apply to these people as well. The percentage of dangerous pairings is too high to give reproductive carte blanche to the unrelated while restricting the related. Put another way: if you want to use the argument of genetic risk, get ready to arrest 4.5 million married Americans.

Are there utilitarian arguments for restricting incest? The answer is an obvious "no." The cost of detecting dangerous pairings has fallen so low that any sort of utilitarian argument fails on a cost-benefit analysis. The only form of the argument which would make sense is "we would like to restrict many reproductive pairings, but hey, it's really hard to get people to agree to that because it looks like Hitler's Germany. So we'll settle with keeping incest illegal." Normally I wouldn't have to concede this point due to the social stigma, but hey, this is 2+2 and there are some very logical posters with some very big balls.

So yes, the OP is right that the anti-incest lobby (a fearsome force indeed) frequently employs a completely invalid argument, and yes, the genesis of this law may have some utilitarian component. However, this positive effect is not valued by our society. Furthermore, there are other positive effects. Lastly, he does not show any cases where incest laws have a negative effect.

From the looks of it, I don't think you sunk my battleship....

Yeah, nothing says 'clear miss' like multiple responses to the same post...

I'm guessing you aren't gettin my drift.

I see this subject interests you. Did you watch the whole film?

I get it. You guys are the same muppets that limp/snap call shoves in my sngs with J2o. I wondered where you all came from, but here you are. All meeting up in one place sharing your crippled brain functions.

A+ thread. Keep up the good work.

you just might be on to something.

Yes of course!
If you're referring to the incredulity you expressed when considering a defense of incest, well, this is SM&P. There is a reason I am sitting here thinking about things no one would dare defend when I could be making money.

I'm just gonna go out on a limb and assume you tards all have hot sisters. Just forward me their name and phone number in a pm, and I'll bang them on video and sell you the vids.

No need for you guys to try and justify doing it yourselves.

Grunch. Aside from genetic issues, the real fear with incest is that families will not feel like safe harbors from sexual tension. Most people are unable to relax and be comfortable when they are looking for a mate; they are like strutting peacocks. Think of what obnoxious dicks some people are when they thing there is anything greater than a 0% chance that they could score with someone in the room, and the utterly stupid and heartless things they do to one another to try and get it.

I honestly don't know how realistic a threat this is, but the fear is that super horny teenagers will pester their siblings (or parents), and that has the potential to tear apart a family. After all, that tears apart a lot of marriages, and these are between people who chose each other and decided to live together and have sex with each other.

Edit: But isolated incidents with mutual consent don't bother me at all. Still, without the taboo, it might become wide spread, and that might lead to the complications I mentioned above.

Good, cogent explanation.

Vive la Revolution!

Having sex with a relative is gross, no scientific reasoning is needed

Our instinctive reaction towards incest, however, is not what is being discussed ITT.

edit: well, I guess it is now but it wasnt before I made this post in response to yours

Although I feel like I need to qualify and say that this is not as absolute as I made it sound and is probably up for debate.

I think Pokerbrute has made the only intelligent post in this thread.

So yours are all dumb as a sack of hammers, then?

Pretty much.

Wow, OP you are so utterly lame that you actually pissed me off.

Why did I piss you off sir?

For me, it's because you started a thread in SMP by posting a link to a youtube vid with no discussion by you, then spent the rest of the thread trading juvenile one-liners with whoever was up for it, while failing to engage with any of the meaningful discussion that has been posted.

So what the hell are you here for? To help troll your own thread?