It's pretty plainly a training ground for torture and bondage serial killers.
While there might be one or two participants on that site with actual violent potential it's a safe bet the majority are harmless B&D onanists who lead Walter Mitty lives.
I'm sure it is a safe bet for you.
It's
not a safe bet for any of the pretty young things here. I doubt any of our fellow female posters would care to date a man who spends his spare time on a cannibal forum.
I think [using real names]would be counterproductively stifling. Using one's true identity, even on a politically oriented website such as this, could expose one to all sorts of crazies. I have almost fifty names on my Ignore list. Most are belligerent, disruptive adolescents, some are repressed personalities who sublimate their frustration by cursing at others via keyboard. But at least ten of those pseudonyms belong to individuals whom I believe could be potentially dangerous. [...]So a requirement to submit one's true identity would drive 99% of Internet forum participants (including me) away.
You made me look ---- I'm only up to 17, you must have been here longer. This is an unusually uncontrolled forum, however. Not this section but the others: I've never seen one so given to verbal abuse. And bad posts drive out good posts and a forum quickly descends to the lowest common denominator.
Still, I don't disagree with you: sure, it would be a WHOLE lot more dangerous for individuals if we use real names, and most especially for women, obviously. So that would tend to drive people right off the Internet, or more likely start controls more like RealLife ----- we carefully isolate and exclude crazies and criminals and even lower classes in RealLife, after all. The amazing thing about the Internet is that completely incompatible classes of people are all mixed up together. This cannot last. It should not last. It isn't good for society, for one thing: this cannibal business is just one example of how anonymity is bad for the culture.
I know people wouldn't be able to say what they really think anymore; I wouldn't either. But I look around and I wonder, well ---
should they say what they think? If what they think is that it would be great to tie up young women and cook and eat them, do we really need people to have that kind of freedom? No, and it turns out not to be real good for those losers on the cannibal forum, either. People are grossly harmful to each other on the Internet, in forums, for instance, and I am thinking finally that we took a wrong turn early on, going with anonymity. We should have gone with real names on the Internet from the beginning.
Anonymity has the same exact problems as privacy rights: it always, always favors the criminals and bad people.
Because it doesn't take much to infuriate a delusional paranoiac who could perceive "Have a nice day!" to be a grave but subtle insult.
If you believe this, I don't see how you can be so sure the cannibal crew isn't practicing the fantasies they drool over. My default is to assume people mean exactly what they say. Why not? They certainly usually seem to mean what they say.