Yeet_far
5d ago
You said "Nor do I ever remember hearing anything like that until gay activism started becoming a thing". The 1950s ones are the incidents that happened before gay activism started becoming a thing.
The 1950 to 1970s incidents are why gay activism started becoming a thing.
The wikipedia page has incidents up through 2025, which you would know if you had taken a look at it?
Yeet_far
5d ago
Re: violence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_violence_against_LGBTQ_people_in_the_United_States (see incidents section)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavender_Scare
https://www.petertatchellfoundation.org/alan-turing-the-medical-abuse-of-gay-men/
Just because you weren't aware of it doesn't mean it didn't happen. While straight-up murder was not super common, being cancelled for the crime of existing-while-gay was quite common. Or, in Turing's case, being sentenced by the state to chemical castration.
Just because you didn't see the supression (and why would you?) doesn't mean it wasn't there. If you do any basic research instead of relying on remembered vibes from 50 years ago, it's very well documented.
The hospitals thing isn't gay-exclusive, it's basic HIPPA -- if someone is incapacitated in a hospital, if someone with no paper-trail relationship with them wants to visit them, they can't by default. They particulalry can't if the person's relatives don't want them to, and since gay relationships were either secret (relatives wouldn't know who this person is) or were unapproved by relatives... there were a lot of (fully adult, btw) instances of spouses dying alone. Marriage adds the spouse to the list of allowed visitors by default. Less glamerous, but very important.
Yeet_far
5d ago
Gay marriage, specifically, was about equal rights -- gay couples wanted to be able to, say, hold hands in the street without getting beaten up. Or visit each other in the hospital. Or file taxes jointly. Etc.
The whole point of gay rights was that they didn't want to have to keep in behind closed doors, the same way straight couples don't have to keep it behind closed doors.
They didn't want to have to keep a large chunk of their lives secret.
Pressuring churches to fly rainbow flags isn't really the same thing and I largely agree is overreach. On the other hand, a lot of chuches fly rainbow flags because their congragants actually think that gay rights are good, and that's their right as well.
Yeet_far
7d ago
This is based on a never-published paper which was wrong. If you want a deep dive, see https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/
Yeet_far
29d ago
I'm totally agreed with "Humans do have an enormous capacity for learned associations and behaviours, but only so long as etc." -- not everyone has the same capacity for the same worldview.
But for any given person, there are tons of people (some which are closely related and some which are not) who do have that capacity. And within that group, memetic effects are far stronger than genetic ones.
But yeah, happy to pick this up again in a few sections/weeks!
Yeet_far
30d ago
I dunno -- I think the bit about "But the less-closely related you are to someone genetically, the stranger his world would seem to you" is just really not ... true? Totally begging the question?
I am sure on average you are going to have a more similar internal world to your family than a random stranger. But it has absolutely not been the case for me that my family "gets me" more than my friends do.
Like.
I love my family.
There are certain things I have in common with them, sure.
But I haven't lived at home in fifteen years. I have been with my wife for twelve of those. Whenever we go visit my family, it's a bit weird. I don't have nearly as much in common with them as I did when I was a child. My wife's (or, for that matter, by friends in the city I live in's) world is far closer to mine than my family's is, because we have grown together over the years.
It seems like the only way you could write that is if you've never left home (or at least did not stay away if you did). Or just have done a much better job of staying in close contact with your family than I have, I guess?
But regardless, you're conflating shared history and experience (memetic closeness) with genetic closeness.
I really hope this isn't a load-bearing part of your thesis in later chapters, but I guess I'll find out...
Yeet_far
1mo ago
If you have the chance to go back, get the soup dumplings and the garlic green beans. The soup dumplings in particular are 10/10
Yeet_far
2mo ago
The only way any of those would be relevant would be if parents treat fraternal and identical twins very differently, and in the linked article, Scott discusses why that's probably not the case.
Did you read the linked article?
How do you think a twin study works? How would economic status have any effect on a twin study?
Personal anecdote, but:
Dyslexia is absolutely a real thing, distinct from generally being bad at reading/verbal reasoning/whatever.
I have mild dyslexia. I have never had any problems in school because of it (I was very good in school in general) except specifically with spelling -- if I mix up an i-before-e or something like that, I simply cannot see it.
This was true in school, and it's still true now, many years later. I work as a programmer, and before I installed a spellcheck in my coding enviroment, I had repeated issues with pull requests where I would misspell a variable name, use it hundreds of times (including in comments and documentation where there wasn't autofill or anything), and never notice. The code would work just fine, but my PR would inevitably have a comment to the effect of "this looks good, but you misspelled name everywhere".
If it's pointed out to me, I still can't see it until I stare at it for a few minutes, at which point the letters will almost physically rearange themselves in my perception and all of a sudden it's obvious.
Note that my dyslexia was never so bad as to make reading difficult -- I only ever swap one or two letters at once in the middle of words, and that doesn't really effect reading, but the 'letters physically rearange themselves in my perception' is definitely a real thing, and I can imagine a much higher degree of rearangement would make a lot of school really hard.
So, domestic partnerships really aren't the same thing; they're not recognized by the Federal Government, so they don't give a lot of rights. I've had a domestic partnership as a straight couple, and it's not really anything like marriage. You do get some rights! But hardly 'equal'. You only get health insurance from your spouse if their company is nice and allows it, for instance. It's not required.
Theoretically Civil Unions should have actually been "marriage minus the religious aspect". However, that was never really the case in practice: Civil Unions were never recognized by the Federal Government either. This meant that (for example) you can't get a spouse visa with a Civil Union. And still can't file taxes jointly. And if you ended up hospitalized in a state that didn't honor your civil union, you were just as boned as if you didn't have one.
Theoretically if there had been federally recognized Civil Unions that actually had all of the same benefits as marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges would probably have gone very differently. If the anti-gay-marriage people really wanted to preserve marriage for straight couples only, they really ought to have pushed for this, but clearly they didn't.
I strongly suspect if proper, recognized-by-the-federal-government-and-all-states Civil Unions had existed in the 90s (to be clear: Civil Unions have never been recognized by the Federal Government or all states. Not then and not now), we wouldn't have gay marriage today.
As for the religious aspect, there's the simple matter of religious freedom. I am fully on board saying that churches that don't want to marry gay couples shouldn't have to. However, that goes both ways -- churches that do want to marry gay couples should have the right to do so.
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