HonoriaWinchester
No bio...
User ID: 3468
HonoriaWinchester
6hr ago
I do see your point (see my other comment) but I want to point out that that's not originally a "poem," it's originally Pastor Niemoller's description of his actual experiences with the Nazis. It's valuable information from another time.
HonoriaWinchester
6hr ago
Friend, I was one of those who tried.
But yeah I have had the experience Steve mentioned (well, steps 1 and 2). Because IDK how "the left," which I was raised was "our side," managed to end up totally abandoning that principle, but my experience is that it really seems like it has.
For a while there I was able to say, "Hey! 'We on the left do not blacklist,' remember?" Then I started having to remind people what that was about (McCarthyism). Then they started in with "McCarthyism did it to us so we should do it to them now."
HonoriaWinchester
6hr ago
It's not a matter of flipping people who were firmly against it, it's a matter of advising, and/or addressing the concerns of, open-minded people and/or fencesitters. For example, I have a sincere interest in the topic (fewer children than I or my husband wanted, considering how to raise and advise the offspring we do have) and from my vague memories of @Terracotta 's other comments, I suspect she does too.
I want the best for my daughter. You have an opportunity to suggest to me what is best for her.
HonoriaWinchester
6hr ago
Do you remember the '80s? That "since they're gays and addicts, let's just let them die" appeared to have been the Reagan administration's policy / is often how it's characterized, thus the title of the famous history of the early years of the epidemic, And the Band Played On.
My first thought is, there's the issue of HIV in the blood supply. Discussion of the risk of HIV from blood transfusion. "Most of the current risk from HIV in blood transfusion relates to the possibility of blood donation during the preantibody phase of HIV infection. This emphasizes the importance of self-selection by potential donors to eliminate those who have engaged in high-risk behaviors." Even now there are those who claim they still do (donate regardless), saying they feel justified due to homophobia (have personally heard people say this in the past). (See also a case: "A blood center in Missouri discovered that blood components from a donation in November 2008 tested positive for HIV infection. A lookback investigation determined that this donor had last donated in June 2008, at which time he incorrectly reported no HIV risk factors and his donation tested negative for the presence of HIV. One of the two recipients of blood components from this donation, a patient undergoing kidney transplantation, was found to be HIV infected, and an investigation determined that the patient's infection was acquired from the donor's blood products [the other recipient had died despite the transfusion].... Initially, the donor declined repeated contacts by MDHSS to be interviewed. In April 2009, he agreed to a brief interview with MDHSS, and an OraQuick rapid HIV test...was performed. This test was reactive and confirmed by a positive Western blot at MDHSS. During his interview, the donor reported he was married but had sex with both men and women outside of his marriage, including just before his June 2008 donation. He indicated that the sex often was anonymous and occurred while he was intoxicated.... The sequence of events in this case is consistent with transmission by transfusion of HIV-contaminated plasma collected from a donor during the eclipse period of acute infection (i.e., the interval between infection and the development of detectable concentrations of HIV RNA in plasma).") An explicit policy of "just let them die" seems likely to vastly increase the incidence of this.
Then...I'll type in this quote from Maggie Kneip's memoir Now Everyone Will Know because it shows the kind of experience "upstanding citizens" who lived near gay enclaves, and/or worked in professions where a lot of gay men also worked, had with AIDS in the '80s (my parents had gay friends too):
Chris and his boyfriend, Steve, had lived on a charming little stretch of West 13th Street in the Village. Chris and I sang and waited tables together, wearing marinara-stained aprons printed with "Make a cow happy, eat fish today!" After our shifts, we'd close down the place, drinking cheap wine and smoking pot. When I was eventually cast in a regional dinner theater production and Chris was cast as the lead in a national tour of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, we saw less of each other. I did summer stock, met John, and got married; Chris continued his life on the road. Once in a while, I'd get a letter. "Miss you," he'd write.
One chilly April day in 1988, just after [my daughter] Caroline was born, Chris came by to meet her. His normally glowing face was ghostly and he stifled a cough.
"It's just a cold," Chris protested when I expressed concern. He was full of his usual energy and his warm brown eyes shone, especially while he was holding my child. What a sweetheart he was.
Soon afterward, Chris landed an overseas tour of South Pacific while I became consumed with mothering and domesticity. We lost touch.
Two years later, pregnant again, I was reclining on the living room couch, my swollen feet propped up on the coffee table, when the phone rang. It was Steve. "Chris is in the hospital," he said, "and he doesn't have long." It was AIDS....
In the room that was supposed to be Chris's, there was a shriveled old man shivering in one of the beds. "Chris?" I ventured. He slowly turned his head and focused his alert, beautiful brown eyes on mine....
I hugged his sack of bones and sat with him, holding a cup to his cracked lip. His face was burning hot but his stiff little hands were ice cold. I'd never seen anyone that ill.
After a few minutes, I ran out of things to tell him about my absurdly carefree existence. I was swollen with life, while he, at just twenty-seven, was at the end of his. I stood up to leave and leaned over to kiss his lined, sweaty forehead. "I love you," I said.
"I love you, too," he whispered, closing his eyes.
Big as I was, I bolted for the elevator and nearly broke the down button, pounding on it until the doors opened to take me to the lobby. I rammed every pound of my swollen might against the revolving door and burst out into the fresh spring air, gasping. John was there, waiting in the car where I'd left him.
"How was he?" he asked.
"Awful! He--it--was awful," I reported, shaking, unable to make sense of the ghoulish transformation of my once vibrant, magnificent friend.
3 months later, her husband John was diagnosed with AIDS. He remained closeted about being bi right up until he died; he only admitted to her once that he'd ever had sex with men. (Before he met her, he said. When he was diagnosed, 6 years after they'd met, the doctors estimated he'd had it for 7-8 years or more.)
And:
From the moment of his diagnosis, he never once mentioned or acknowledged that he had AIDS. The closet was where he would steadfastly remain. Four times during the course of his illness, John was hospitalized for infections and placed in the hospital's AIDS cluster. And every single time, he demanded to be relocated. "I don't belong here," he'd say.
It seems he was so ashamed of his attraction to men that he was almost incapable of admitting it even to himself; it seems that's what happens in a culture like we had back then where it's considered shameful.
So whaddaya think: Guy is attracted to men, guy has sex with men when young and single, guy decides to settle down and marry a woman and have kids...guy (possibly also unsuspecting wife and minor children) dies of AIDS? Is this...OK? Regrettable but a rounding error? Bad? Unavoidable? Possibly unavoidable but we should still try? Or what do you think?
Kneip was lucky: Her husband also had herpes and was responsible about it, so they often used condoms. So she and the kids didn't get AIDS. (A New Haven doctor OTOH in his summary of his years caring for AIDS babies mentioned that about half the mothers were drug addicts--the other half had gotten it through sex. And the babies caught it not in utero but from the birth or breastfeeding. Like the "Starsky & Hutch" actor's daughter, if you remember that--the guy who played Starsky (who I remember better for being Perchik in Fiddler on the Roof) lost his wife and daughter because his wife got AIDS from a blood transfusion at the birth, then gave it to their daughter through breastfeeding.)
So anyway, in personal instinctive reaction I do agree with many who learn in clear detail about the sexual practices that developed in gay enclaves in the '60s and '70s, that these were completely disgusting and repulsive, that they were behaviors no human being anywhere should ever have engaged in. (Gay Men's Health Crisis co-founder Larry Kramer famously pointed that out himself in his 1978 novel Faggots.) But someone's sexual practices aren't something you normally ever discuss with them, let alone the first thing you know about them. You make a friend because of their good qualities, and aside from their good qualities you have no reason to assume they're particularly disgusting in any way because why would you?
And the Band Played On:
[Describing the experiences of Dr. Selma Dritz, the new assistant director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health's Bureau of Communicable Disease Control] Normally, five or perhaps ten cases of amebic dysentery a year crossed her desk, and they were usually from a day-care center or restaurant. Now [1967] doctors were reporting that many a week. She checked the figures again. Nearly all the cases involved young single men, and an inordinate number were diagnosed at the Davies Medical Center on Castro Street. She mentioned to another health department staffer that it was odd because she hadn't heard any complaints about neighborhood restaurants. Her colleague took Dritz aside to explain that the cases were concentrated among gay men. Dritz didn't understand the relevance of the observation.
"It's oral-anal contact," he said.
"It's what?"
They didn't teach these things when Selma was in medical school in the 1940s, but she quickly learned the down-and-dirty realities about enteric diseases. Gay doctors had long recognized that parasitic diseases like amebiasis, giardiasis, and shigellosis were simply a health hazard of being gay. The problems grew with the new popularity of anal sex, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, because it was nearly impossible to avoid contact with fecal matter during that act. As sexual tastes grew more exotic and rimming became fashionable, the problem exploded. There wasn't a much more efficient way to get a dose of parasite spoor than by such direct ingestion.
Although all this was common knowledge among gay physicians, the awareness had evaded the public health profession. Earnest health officials at one point dispatched inspectors to Greenwich Village to test water after detecting unusual outbreaks of amoebas in the neighborhood.
If even public health officials don't know, what hope has the average "upstanding citizen"?
By the time you find out how unbelievably, vomit-inducingly terrible their behavior has been, you've been friends for years and possibly even already watched them die horribly. You've likely thought and said that "nothing" could justify the terrible suffering you've seen them experience. That's the reality of how this went down.
Personally, because I was a child in the '80s, I saw the illness decades before I happened upon a description of the subcultural sexual practices online.
(With quotes from Faggots. As Wikipedia says: "Reviewers found it difficult to believe that Kramer's accounts of gay relationships were accurate; both the gay and mainstream press panned the book. On the reception of the novel Kramer said: 'The straight world thought I was repulsive, and the gay world treated me like a traitor. People would literally turn their back when I walked by. You know what my real crime was? I put the truth in writing.'" Because yeah. A subculture did evolve of engaging in such behaviors, and generally speaking most people who learn of such behaviors find them unbelievable and repulsive.
Also. A bit after I first read about it online, I mentioned it to my parents--and they dismissed it as a stereotyped myth. As for me, I later read And the Band Played On, which confirms the truth of it. I said "most people" above and not "straight people" because And the Band Played On quotes gay men too who had the same reaction upon encountering that subculture. Anyway the fact remains that my parents still don't know what their friends (or those friends' sex partners) did in the '70s that led to their deaths. BTW they don't know about Rotherham either, same reason, I tried to mention it to them and they just pattern-matched it to "blood libel type things.")
From And the Band Played On:
Most of [New York] city's AIDS babies were born to drug-using parents, and virtually all the cases of heterosexual transmission were among the female sexual partners of minority drug users.... Dr. Arye Rubinstein [pediatric immunologist who had seen many AIDS babies] was afraid that the virus would spread from addicts into high schools, where it could proliferate among sexually active teens.
Dr. Rubinstein is mentioned earlier in the book when he cited 3 patients, all children of the same prostitute, and pointed out that this illness did not fit the pattern of a genetic disease as other pediatric immunologists were assuming, because these children had 3 different fathers.
OK, don't use prostitutes, don't be creating damaged children you never even tried to know about, etc.... Some will, though. Rubinstein had a point that teens are more likely to make bad decisions.
From the New Haven doctor's article linked above:
Among a series of impediments, we faced one insurmountable problem: we were not able to discharge HIV-exposed babies to the care of mothers still battling addiction; and experienced foster parents refused to take “AIDS babies” into their homes for fear of infection. There was only one alternative—the nurses, doctors, and social workers became their de facto guardians. The babies stayed in the hospital for months, sometimes for more than a year....
the hospital was carrying a heavy burden and...babies and toddlers were beginning to fill isolettes in the nurseries and cribs on the wards.... [so they set up an AIDS-focused treatment center]
Connecticut Public Act No. 99-2 [making AIDS testing a standard part of prenatal care] was the powerful tool we were waiting for. We went into the community and educated physicians who cared for pregnant women....
our intensive educational efforts in the hospital and community resulted in a steady decline in the number of newborns testing HIV-positive. The last infant that tested HIV-positive was born at YNHH in 1996. For each of the past 24 years, we have screened and treated about twenty HIV-positive pregnant women, a significant decrease from earlier decades. None of the babies born to HIV-positive mothers between 1996 and late 2019 were infected. Nevertheless, we still care for a few HIV-positive children who have come to us from other parts of the world, mainly Africa, and for a handful of adolescent men who have had sex with older HIV-positive men....
Data collected by the CDC in 2007, revealed that approximately 24,000 American youth, ages 13-24 years, were living with HIV/AIDS. This was a 25 percent increase from 2004, attributed to high-risk adolescent sexual behavior and increasing survival of children infected perinatally....
Unfortunately, in late 2019, an HIV-positive baby was born at YNHH after a gap of 23 years. The teenage mother received prenatal care at a clinic unaffiliated with YNHH. She was non-compliant with the antiretroviral regimen that was prescribed for her. She was surprised to learn that her newborn baby was infected.
So, I'm not sure if you meant to suggest letting AIDS babies die too, but they certainly didn't have any way to avoid it. Then there's again the adolescents...they don't have adult judgement, and may have been groomed...are they included?
(BTW, this is only peripheral to the topic so I'm not going to spend a lot of effort on it, but I personally believe Cochran's "pathogen hypothesis" to be the best fit for the data we currently have re homosexuality. Like I'm not 100% convinced this is definitely the cause, we don't have the data for that, I just think with the data we do have that's the way to bet. And obviously if someone "became gay" due to a pathogen which infected them in childhood, they didn't make a choice. "Dear ants, if you climb up that blade of grass in the middle of the day, you deserve to be eaten. Just choose not to!" Actually I do think "Ants, even if you feel a really really strong compulsion to climb up that blade of grass, it's bad for you so please try your hardest not to do it" is good advice! It's not going to be very effective, but it's better than not giving it. But well...Eliezer was right that it's not really a happy satisfying just world situation, it's a terribly sad one. (The appropriate link here is of course Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided but the quote I was thinking of is from Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?: "When you accurately estimate the Enemy’s psychology—when you know what is really in the Enemy’s mind—that knowledge won’t feel like landing a delicious punch on the opposing side. It won’t give you a warm feeling of righteous indignation. It won’t make you feel good about yourself. If your estimate makes you feel unbearably sad, you may be seeing the world as it really is."))
(BTW2, Maggie Kneip's mom told her that John had once hinted to her about how, as a senior in high school, he was very lonely and an older man "kept inviting him up to his room." A lonely minor, possibly groomed... Plus if Jayman's casual hypothesis is correct, which it may well not be but if, then this happening at 17 rather than say 12 might explain how John kept his attraction to women as well...)
Meanwhile, And the Band Played On:
The anecdote was precisely the story Dr. Jim Curran had feared he might hear, even though it was the kind of information that interviews with 75 percent of the living "gay plague" victims were supposed to engender: One man lives contentedly with his long-time lover in a small, remote town. He doesn't live in the fast lane of big-city gay life; he doesn't use poppers; he's dying. His lover, it turns out, is a traveling salesman who is generally faithful, except when he gets to New York, where he screws his brains out in the gay bathhouses. Shortly after his monogamous lover gets sick, the salesman gets sick too.
(Yeah Larry Kramer didn't die of AIDS...but his semi-autobiographical play about it, The Normal Heart, implies the man he loved did.)
Which brings me back to Maggie Kneip's situation, too.
After her husband's diagnosis, she got a therapist, who connected her to: a support group for AIDS wives. Because she wasn't the only one. Even the social workers running it were AIDS wives.
(Sorry this is kind of thrown together, as a homeschooling mom I don't have time to refine it as I'd like.)
Well...they are part of a culture which, as Freddie de Boer has pointed out, assumes that the right answer is obvious (see point 6) and that the majority already agrees with them (here I'm thinking of his old "We Are All Already Decided" from https://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/04/29/bingo-cards-go-both-ways/ ...which has been deleted and excluded from archive.org BUT I HAVE THE LINK GUYS :D). ISTM even just the first assumption ("the right answer is obvious") would lead its adherents to assume that most people of course agree with them, that there's no way very many people could actually disagree, that the few who do disagree are so evil as to be incomprehensible--so why bother to try?--and so small in number as to be safely ignored. (And can be dismissed as "a basket of deplorables." I mean. I'm a deplorable myself but I do wince in sympathetic understanding of the thought process that led her to that statement.)
But also I'd point out that "weak in theory of mind" is traditionally a core symptom of specifically autism, not "generally lacking neurological development."
"External locus of control as a[nother] possible cause of weak theory of mind"? Not something I've heard of before but an interesting hypothesis.
Can you think of an example of a person who has recognized the need to develop a coherent theory of mind, but seems to have been unable to as a result of external locus of control? (You mentioned Scott; can you think of a Scott post that exemplifies this? Here I saw his handling of the NYT thing as evidence of especially good ToM / social skill...) I'm having a vague memory of someone giving an example that sounds similar (years ago elsewhere on the internet), but in that case I believe the person in the example had NVLD (lower nonverbal than verbal IQ, autism-adjacent) rather than external locus of control.
HonoriaWinchester
7d ago
My parents were/are liberals/progressives. I was raised that the most important part of that was freedom of speech; that "We on the left do not blacklist" (the implication behind that statement, the specter of McCarthyism, was felt to go without saying).
OTOH, my grandparents were Rockefeller Republicans who referred to FDR as "that man in the White House."
As for me, I "turned FDR's picture to the wall" in 2016, and I was literally (for the literal meaning of literally) shaking when I did so. (Suggested that vote to my husband too, but who knows if he did it of course, ballots are and should remain secret.)
So hey I followed my family's tradition of switching "sides" I guess? :D
But also: You can see why.
In my (sub)culture, "the culture of freedom of speech" includes the idea that it's every citizen's right and duty to express their sincere opinion so that the marketplace of ideas can include it. "We" (as a society and polity) can't do our best if we aren't aware of all possible perspectives and ideas! (So I agree with the OP there, and I'm glad to see yo uinspired by the same sentiment.) Similarly, in my subculture it's every citizen's right and duty to improve on ("steelman") ideas they find in said marketplace, if they see ways to do so. It's also every citizen's right and duty to meet argument with argument rather than silencing tactic, because if you allow silencing tactics (or other "debaters' tricks" for that matter) then the marketplace of ideas no longer selects for truth. After all, in "the culture of freedom of speech" (inherited from the British Parliament, after all), the point of freedom of speech is to have an effective marketplace of ideas to guide the government. It's just that in the USA the government is [supposed to be] the people (rather than the monarch).
But also I react to the OP with, "Where have you been? It's already expensive to dangerous." I was first defenestrated 15 years ago (in what in retrospect was an aftershock of Racefail '09). Lost my online home, had people threatening to track me down and physically attack me, no one did and I can never know if my opsec was good enough or if they just didn't try very hard...that time. More recently, people have been arrested for defending their homes from riots. (The process should not be the punishment, but these days, it is.)
But also
I am asking you ("you" as in "people like Nelson"; you, Hoffmeister, may not be included) to make a serious commitment to put these disagreements to one side if you're really serious about wanting to end the cancel-mobs more urgently than you want to defeat progressivism at the object-level.
Well, now I have offspring. And many of both my family and my in-laws tend toward the "socially awkward nerd" type. So any daughter of ours would seem to have especial vulnerability to ROGD, based on how those who seem to have experienced it tend to describe it. A relative of mine married someone whose kids from their first marriage included a natal female who seems to have fit the ROGD profile and who no longer speaks with them. Another relative seemed to flirt with ROGD for a while before returning to a more liberal-feminist, "Why are there so few girls in [insert one of her interests here]?" perspective. (Must ask her parents how they did it! :/) And another married someone who later appeared to fit the AGP profile (complete with military background), and who, when their wife died, transitioned and abandoned their minor children. (I came along on a visit to them once. They spent most of the visit droning on about their many different guns.) So yeah right now actually...well, it's something I'd have to think about.
Still, I don't expect to ever give up my culturally ingrained support for freedom of speech, so I'm happy to make common cause with whoever else supports freedom of speech, regardless of our object-level political positions. Hi there comrade! :)
But I wonder about the viability of this movement. I mean, that's what "we" used to be. "We" got defeated by "the woke movement" so...how will "Reform Progressivism" be different?
HonoriaWinchester
7d ago
The only one that could plausibly contradict what I said is "political correctness", maybe was used self-descriptively back in 90's, but that was before my time.
Yes, I remember it being used as a self-deprecating joke by liberals like my parents in the '80s and '90s. I think it was used seriously among Maoists before that. The joke form carried the message "Of course we're not so illiberal as the old Maoists who would've used this sincerely."
I had written this:
@ArjinFerman said
"Social Justice" may have been the self a descriptive term that progressives used, but "Social Justice Warrior" was always derisive.
Yes, but it used to be within-group derisive, meaning "cares more about their image than about social justice [and it's assumed we all agree it should be the other way around]."
In my memory it was around Gamergate that the pro-social justice quit using it that way (because Gamergaters were).
but hadn't yet posted it and more comments came in.
The Doonesbury use isn't purely positive, it's the (what I would call) "traditional meaning" (that I described above). Your link is to a compilation introduction which mentions "Rev. Scot Sloan, social justice warrior." Here's Scot Sloan:
"Reverend Scot Sloan's the name. Perhaps you read about me in 'Look' [Magazine]. I'm the fighting young priest who can talk to the young."
Guy introduces himself with his press clippings. He cares more about his image than actual social justice. That's (the old meaning I remember for) an SJW.
You're making me nostalgic for my childhood here. :/ In the '80s liberal bubble I grew up in, people like that were seen as "obviously grifting or at least on an ego trip" but treated with amused tolerance, "hey they are officially on our side"--see also the portrayal of Richard Henry Lee in 1776. My dad similarly always referenced Jesse Jackson in that way, with amused tolerance (and in Jackson's case even affection). Still, it's not something you'd really set out to be; an SJW in that subculture was a figure of fun, not someone respected. Another example would be Gilderoy Lockhart.
HonoriaWinchester
20d ago
Do not delay normal developmental milestones, even if you think there's a good reason for it. If you are homeschooling a boy, he needs to be working for a non-family member and in sports the whole time(girls can usually handle most of the things these accomplish for themselves if allowed to).
I wasn't even homeschooled and I arguably couldn't despite being a girl, so... (I would argue this was because I already had CPTSD from my school experience, but that's just like my opinion man.)
I agree with Throwaway05 that it's hard and getting harder. I'm homeschooling nevertheless. So I'd be interested to hear more about this. What do you mean by "normal developmental milestones"? What would you expect a girl to want to be allowed to do that would handle this? Imagining a girl who couldn't necessarily handle this on her own, what should be done for her? (The same things? What sports? Or...?)
HonoriaWinchester
20d ago
Elementary math curriculum: Math with Confidence. Inexpensive (just buy the teacher's guide and workbook, most other needed items can be scrounged from around the house), less busywork than usual, test students got high achievement test scores, can be game-like in a fun way. Not as game-like as Beast Academy (my family has a "that's so game-like we can't take it seriously or spend much time on it" reaction to Beast Academy, but others enjoy it--so that's another option).
Youtube (early elementary): Numberblocks. Doctor John. Brain Candy TV. SciShow Kids.
Good luck!
Without having seen the_others' comment, I had written but not yet posted:
I did consider mentioning the phrase "financial abuse"--because it is.
But it does also seem to me that perhaps among younger people especially (IOW, Reddit commenters)...well, 2 things:
these ideas have maybe been lost / not adopted; and more specifically (possibly a side point)
recent parents having often relied on "when you're helping pay for it, then you can have a say" to control their adolescent children, has left modern young people more inclined toward this type of attitude toward the SAHP.
To put it another way, some subcultures maybe don't have (not sure if "lost" or "never developed") the social technology to equitably manage a partnership which includes a SAHP.
It may be that where you live will affect whether your friend would win in court on financial abuse, IDK...but yeah, I would call it that.
I wouldn't call that low-level bullying. Even if it's just "he doesn't want to move and he thinks the best way to handle this is to lie and make excuses," that's a big problem for the future stability of the partnership, and needs addressing sooner rather than later. Other possibilities: He's poor at managing money (really doesn't ever think they can afford it yet impulse-buys); he deliberately puts his needs above those of everyone else in the household; he's secretly gambling, using drugs, cheating, or visiting prostitutes... None of these things are minor, from a long-term family stability POV.
I mean, I agree that if she has no established career she has less leverage. But IMO this behavior is egregious enough that ignoring it would be a bad idea even for a mom with no money and small kids.
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