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To put it bluntly, the problem is not a loving (caritas) relationship between two men or two women, which is all fine and good, the problem is using each other as mutual masturbation aids or sticking dicks up each others poopy holes. I would suggest that doing so is like eating that potato chip or masturbating to porn. It feels good in the moment, but ultimately leaves you empty and just wanting more stimulation/titillation while building a habit of mind that ultimately makes a person unsatisfied and less happy than they would be if the relationship was affectionate but not erotic.
I mean, I don't like any of those things because I'm asexual, but even if I wasn't, I wouldn't take such a hard-line stance against such things. I don't understand the fixation that conservative Christians have with sex acts that aren't PIV. I just don't get it. If you don't like them, don't partake in them, but don't try and make someone else's life miserable just because you ascribe to those beliefs.
What's you understanding of the role of the homosexual community (and also the hard drug community, similar arguments applied) in the emergence and spread of the AIDS pandemic? Wikipedia lists 42 million dead, among them something like half of the pre-AIDS male homosexuals in America.
Very little, to be honest.
Mm.
Suppose we have the following two statements:
"There's nothing wrong with these acts or the communities that celebrate engaging in them."
"These communities were ground-zero for a plague that has to date killed an amount of people roughly equivalent to a world war, and the acts they engaged in and their celebration of those acts resulted in a highly disproportionate amount of what we know term super-spreading, particularly in the early stages of that pandemic."
Are these statements compatible?
Would you consider conservatives dangerous, due to their behavior in spreading the Covid plague?
Have you considered that part of why AIDS was so dangerous, was because we didn't really have the concept of "AIDS" back then?
I don't think Conservative behavior had any significantly disproportional impact on spreading the Covid plague. But then, I observe that there were a lot of people who disagreed very strongly with my assessment, who called people like my own family members "plague rats", who advocated firing them from their jobs or even putting them in camps, or any of a wide variety of social or legal sanctions in between.
Meanwhile, I observe that Homosexual (and hard drug user) behavior appears to have had a very significant impact on spreading AIDS as widely as possible in the early years of the outbreak. The contrast between the treatment of those opposed to lockdowns or vaccine mandates for COVID, and those who for selfish reasons actively spread an extremely lethal plague as widely as possible is my whole point here.
My understanding is that from fairly early on, they understood that there was an infectious, lethal pathogen, and they understood that it was being spread primarily by homosexual practices and drug use. Further, my understanding is that some gay men intentionally spread it as much as possible, and more gay men staunchly opposed any restrictions on homosexual activity. Eventually this opposition was at least partially overcome, but by then AIDS was endemic.
Does that description seem inaccurate to you?
It really seems like you're focusing on the worst possible examples. This feels like blaming all conservatives for the tiny minority involved in school shootings. Do you really think you're learning useful things about the world by focusing on the worst 1% of a group? Do you feel that other groups should be held to a similar standard, even one's that you're a part of?
Just taking a quick look at an actual timeline here (https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline#year-1982)
Does that really sound like a group that's trying to spread AIDS and opposed to restrictions on homosexual activity?
9 months AFTER that safer sex pamphlet, science is finally confident that it might be sexually transmitted
Are you comfortable saying the same things about these groups as you are about homosexuals?
Going to another source: https://www.aidsmemorial.org/interactive-aids-quilt
Does the AIDS memorial quilt really suggest a group that doesn't care about the consequences of their actions?
I don't get it - you seem opposed to lockdowns for spreading an airborne pandemic that threatens everyone near you, but you also seem to be advocating for lockdowns against a pandemic which only threatens sexual partners? What sort of quarantine actions were you expecting for AIDS? Do you really think "make gay sex illegal" is a reasonable policy position, and would you have also supported "ban all sex during COVID"?
For that matter, weren't there plenty of people selfishly spreading COVID? People who went to major events and caught flights, despite knowing they were feeling sick? Isn't that selfish behavior that we should want to punish?
That's pretty much the definition of what a "superspreader" is, isn't it? And the reason that term is now common knowledge is that, at least hypothetically, superspreaders can cause immense amounts of harm by spreading infectious diseases.
Well, let's roll out the comparison and see where it leads us. Roughly half of gay men in America died to the aids epidemic. What percentage of that number do you think died because they scrupulously avoided risky activities, and just got really, really unlucky?
Meanwhile for COVID or school shooting deaths, I don't think either correlate with Conservative behavior at all, though it is absolutely routine to see such claims made. Having seen such claims made, I'm backtracking the logic to a situation where there does, in fact, appear to be a correlation.
This standard has been applied to groups I'm a part of, and using false data to boot.
Did their efforts work? Not before the disease killed roughly half the male homosexuals in America and went on to be a global pandemic. My understanding of the history is that activists arguing for restrictions were outnumbered by those arguing for no restrictions until it was much, much too late, and even the restrictions they belatedly put in place were not enough to halt the spread.
The actual record of how the disease spread and who it killed tells the story. AIDS is spread overwhelmingly by risky behavior. If Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately contracting the disease, that tells me they're disproportionately engaging in risky behavior. What's the alternative explanation?
In the first place, it seems pretty clear to me that the lockdowns and the vaccines failed at their defined objectives. COVID was too infectious to be controlled, the vaccines were not terribly effective and had side effects, and top-down government mandates caused much harm for little to no benefit.
Despite this, those objecting or resisting absurdly massive and unbelievably draconian interventions into every facet of our lives were treated like antisocial scum, and in many cases had the resources of the state turned against us to punish resistance in any form. This was cheered by the Blue population broadly, based on widespread lies told by academic and government agencies, and the result was demonization of people like myself.
I am pointing out that the gay community was the actual epicenter of a much worse disease than COVID, and the individual action of the members of that community evidently played a pivotal role in the disease becoming endemic, resulting in dozens of millions of deaths. The disease was straightforwardly more serious than COVID. The actions taken to spread the disease were straightforwardly more objectionable, and the end result seems significantly worse. Yet the standard narrative I observe is that American Gays were the victims, and Lockdown/Vaccine Mandate opponents were the straightforward victims.
It seems to me that this narrative is built on a stack of lies, and so I am kicking at them to see what happens.
If you think the "coordinated meanness" deployed against lockdown/mandate opponents was appropriate, what was the appropriate level of "coordinated meanness" for gay men when AIDS got rolling?
If we're going to punish selfish behavior, I'd like to imagine we'd punish it based on fair and impartial standards, and not play tribal favorites.
...What's your guess at the average number of sexual partners per month for a Gay man in California or New York in the era immediately predating AIDS?
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American culture and institutions are actively promoting experimental sex acts though -- from the books in schools to pride parades every June to media on TV to the State Department flying flags at embassies worldwide that have colors to represent erotic tendencies. It's not the Christians are not the only party who are obsessed. Christians think these things are bad, and thus, to the extent that we have common culture (public schools, parades, mass media) that sends messaging about sex acts, it would rather that message discourage non-martial non-PIV rather than encourage it.
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