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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   36915 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Disease eradication is good for everyone. It is bad for global health to have a giant reservoir of AIDS, Malaria, Ebola, and god knows what else just waiting to make the jump to the developed world.

None of these programs are even aimed at eradication. They are aimed at managed control in a way that means the program needs to be funded forever unless magic happens and Africans start building pharmaceutical plants, which is unrealistic because they cant maintain roads.

AIDS and Malaria cannot “just make a jump”. AIDS only is a thing in western world thanks to gays and drug addicts. Without them, we’d, uhm, flatten the curve by now (in fact, it would probably never become a thing in the first place, it only became a thing thanks to gay Canadian flight attendant who really liked to fuck random guys in places he flew into).

Malaria is not a disease that spreads from person to person, and we cannot have malaria become a thing in US, because we already stopped it being a thing. We used to have malaria in US, and we destroyed the conditions that allowed malaria to exist. We can’t have malaria now without recreating this condition, which, given the land use patterns, is highly unlikely.

gay Canadian flight attendant

They invented the term "patient zero" to describe this guy. They were making a chart of who got HIV from who and all lines led to this guy.

Realistically speaking, people will continue to have promiscuous dangerous sex and to use intravenous drugs. The reason is simple: those things feel good. In order to make a major dent in the rates of either of those two things, you would need massive social change that, realistically speaking, could only come from some kind of massive shift in consciousness that, let's be real, is not going to happen - or it would require massive government intervention that would bring its own host of problems. For the latter, you'd basically need the entire US to become like Singapore, and let's face it, probably all but the most ardent social conservatives would hate that once they saw the downsides of having such a massively interventionist government.

Even if one somehow got rid of those things, the fact would remain that the deadliest diseases in human history were not caused by either promiscuous sex or drug use, so it would not even do much to address the overall issue of disease.

If you do literally nothing, the gays and drug addicts will just die from AIDS. I really don’t understand what’s so complicated about it. It’s not even like they have no way of avoiding the fate: all they need to do is to stop rawdogging random guys and stop sharing needles. It’s really not complicated.

IIRC, if you're super promiscuously partyboi gay, condoms don't reduce the lifetime risk of getting HIV that much.

I doubt that, mostly because I don’t believe that the promiscuous party boy gays that use condoms use them 100% of the time.

people will continue to have promiscuous dangerous sex

Yes, but, the likelihood of contracting HIV from no-condom vaginal sex is a fraction of a percent. It's pretty hard get HIV from straight sex. In a counterfactual world in which everyone is straight, HIV would be nearly extinct.

Yes, but that is not a realistic world. Gay men have existed for, probably, as long as humans have existed, and they will continue to exist.

Yes, it is a counterfactual world that has not and will not exist.

More realistically we could somehow strongly encourage condom use and hand out clean needles.

But PrEP is encouraging not using condoms, so I predict a new wave of STDs as the raw-dogging enthusiasts with imperfect PrEP use spread STDs at even greater rates.

will continue to exist

Hopefully there's a cure some day. Perhaps they could spend some of the Africa AIDS money to search for a cure.

Any @TIRM's point isn't that we live in the counterfactual world, but that the counterfactual world indicates that the promiscuous sex practices of gay men are the cause of the problem: but for their existence, HIV would not be a major issue, as you've just agreed. Earlier you stated that "Even if one somehow got rid of those things... the deadliest diseases in human history were not caused by either promiscuous sex or drug use", and by agreeing to his counterfactual, you've just denied that very statement.

Realistically speaking, people will continue to have promiscuous dangerous sex and to use intravenous drugs. The reason is simple: those things feel good.

Uh, what skin off the back of upstanding citizens is it to just let them die?

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.)

If even public health officials don't know, what hope has the average "upstanding citizen"?

Also. A bit after I first read about it online, I mentioned it to my parents--and they dismissed it as a stereotyped myth... 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.")

Excellent post, thank you for it. Saw it in the roundup (well-deserved!) and it stood out to me, that once public health officials didn't know, and now it is more common- among many people, public health officials perhaps most importantly- to refuse to know.

Anyways. An observation. Hope to see more of your writing here.

Wow, that was thoroughly researched. If that's what counts as thrown together for you, I'd love to see what you write when you've got time on your hands.

It's bad karma.

You start dividing humanity into 'upstanding citizens worthy of life' and 'sub-humans whose life and well-being is not worth any efforts', sooner or later someone will put you into the second category.

First they came for the homosexuals, but I was not homosexual, so I stayed silent.

Then they came for the immigrants, but I was not an immigrant, so I stayed silent.

Then they came for the disabled, but I was not disabled, so I stayed silent.

And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

You start dividing humanity into 'upstanding citizens worthy of life' and 'sub-humans whose life and well-being is not worth any efforts', sooner or later someone will put you into the second category.

Isn't this just triage? I don't think anyone has suggested rounding up people who have promiscuous dangerous sex or use intravenous drugs to send them to death camps. It's rather just letting nature take its course while devoting scarce lifesaving resources elsewhere, which I think is a pretty standard thing to do in medicine.

I don't think anyone has suggested rounding up people who have promiscuous dangerous sex or use intravenous drugs to send them to death camps.

They may not be suggesting it now, but if you normalise regarding certain people's lives as a less sacred value than property....

It's rather just letting nature take its course

A principle which, if carried to its ultimate conclusion, leads to 40-50% of babies dying before their fifth birthday.

Given those grim statistics, I hardly think that Nature is a good guide to right and wrong.

while devoting scarce lifesaving resources elsewhere, which I think is a pretty standard thing to do in medicine.

There is a difference between "We're at 200% capacity right now, and getting more resources will take longer than our patients have" versus "We will be over capacity some time in the future, we can get enough resources to save everyone by the time they will be needed, but we don't feel like doing so"; there is also a difference between "prioritising Alice over Bob because Alice has a 90% chance of survival while Bob has a 2% chance" versus "prioritising Alice over Bob because Bob is a member of a group we don't like".

They may not be suggesting it now, but if you normalise regarding certain people's lives as a less sacred value than property....

We already do this, for criminals, regularly. That I don’t see any moral difference between active homosexuals and hard drug users on the one hand and criminals on the other is just a difference in what we see as very bad.

It's rather just letting nature take its course

A principle which, if carried to its ultimate conclusion, leads to 40-50% of babies dying before their fifth birthday.

Given those grim statistics, I hardly think that Nature is a good guide to right and wrong.

I don't understand why you just put in this complete non-sequitur, especially given that it's also a blatant strawman. What "principle" is being pushed in the quoted part above? It wasn't saying that there was anything particularly desirable about letting nature take its course; the reasoning for taking nature take its course has nothing to do with the naturalistic fallacy, which you seem to be implying was part of my statement. The reason to let nature take its course here is, again, triaging; we have scarce resources that we have to distribute to a limited number of people, and letting nature take its course is the default that's left over.

There is a difference between "We're at 200% capacity right now, and getting more resources will take longer than our patients have" versus "We will be over capacity some time in the future, we can get enough resources to save everyone by the time they will be needed, but we don't feel like doing so"; there is also a difference between "prioritising Alice over Bob because Alice has a 90% chance of survival while Bob has a 2% chance" versus "prioritising Alice over Bob because Bob is a member of a group we don't like".

This, too, is a complete strawman. The comments were pretty specific about the people in question, and describing them as "member of a group we don't like" is simply a lie. They were, to quote, "people [who] will continue to have promiscuous dangerous sex and to use intravenous drugs." The reasoning wasn't spelled out, but based on the previous comment, my inference was that it has to do with the fact that people who continue doing those things both tend to catch and spread diseases regardless of the medical care thrown at them, and so the resources of that care could be spent better elsewhere, ie triage. There's plenty of area for discussion on just what the percentages are and where the threshold should be, but characterizing that as anywhere in the same stratosphere as disliked groups isn't even the Worst Argument in the World, it's, again, just a lie.

I must admit, this reply of yours has me questioning if you're commenting in good faith, or if I'm just being trolled.

What "principle" is being pushed in the quoted part above?

The notion that that someone's life matters less if nature wants them dead.

The reason to let nature take its course here is, again, triaging; we have scarce resources that we have to distribute to a limited number of people

The argument "We don't have enough resources to save everyone" falls flat when made by someone who had the opportunity to get enough resources and chose not to.

The comments were pretty specific about the people in question, and describing them as "member of a group we don't like" is simply a lie.

The specific group isn't relevant to my argument, because when that lack of compassion is applied, it has a tendency to spread. That was the point Niemöller was trying to make.

tend to catch and spread diseases regardless of the medical care thrown at them

Actually, there are anti-retrovirals which will make someone carrying HIV not spread it. However, even if that were not the case, saving a life is good.

More comments

They may not be suggesting it now, but if you normalise regarding certain people's lives as a less sacred value than property....

If you show up with a mob and try to burn my house down, I'll kill you, and I will almost certainly not be prosecuted for doing so. Is this an example of "regarding certain peoples' lives as a less sacred value than property"?

Drivers have an elevated chance of dying or being crippled in car crashes. Wingsuit enthusiasts run a much higher chance of dying or being crippled in wingsuit crashes. We maintain an insurance system for drivers, but do not maintain one for wingsuit enthusiasts. Is this an examples of "regarding certain peoples' lives as a less sacred value than property"?

Do you believe that choices made shouldn't influence apportionment of consequences of those choices?

A principle which, if carried to its ultimate conclusion, leads to 40-50% of babies dying before their fifth birthday.

Handy that we are not restricted to ultimate conclusions, then, and are entirely capable of balancing competing interests.

Given those grim statistics, I hardly think that Nature is a good guide to right and wrong.

One of Nature's more useful qualities is that it IS. It provides a default. We can diverge from that default if doing so seems preferable, but that does not give you or anyone else grounds to demand a divergence. You do not get to claim that Nature is unjust in any meaningful sense.

there is also a difference between "prioritising Alice over Bob because Alice has a 90% chance of survival while Bob has a 2% chance" versus "prioritising Alice over Bob because Bob is a member of a group we don't like".

Just so, though I get the impression that we differ on who Alice and Bob are, and to what degree they are culpable for the percentages in the first place.

Is this an example of "regarding certain peoples' lives as a less sacred value than property?

That would be a case of self-defence; the individual persons in the mob are actively attempting to harm you. However, if your town has 1,000 $FOO, and you know that 990 of them are planning to attack you, but not which ones, you are not justified in declaring $FOO as a group to be guilty, killing all 1,000 of them, and claiming self-defence.

If no $FOO has tried to harm you, letting them die to save a tiny fraction of a percent on your tax bill is also not justifiable.

Handy that we are not restricted to ultimate conclusions

It's more a matter of seeking an ethical framework less amenable to gerrymandering for the benefit of one's ingroup/harm to one's outgroup.

are entirely capable of balancing competing interests

The interest of "AIDS patients continuing to get the medication they need to live" > the interest of "your tax bill being slightly smaller".

Nature ... provides a default

And that default leaves behind piles of skulls. Many of those skulls are alarmingly tiny.

We can diverge from that default if doing so seems preferable

Someone getting medication that keeps them from dying of AIDS is preferable to them dying of AIDS.

You do not get to claim that Nature is unjust in any meaningful sense.

And yet I am claiming that.

and to what degree they are culpable for the percentages in the first place

I would not want the medical system picking over every aspect of my lifestyle to decide whether I am worth saving; therefore I apply the Golden Rule, and oppose the same being done to my neighbour.

Pretty much everyone here has had the experience:

First they came for the gay communists, and I spoke out because the gay communists had been teaching me that dumb poem since I was 3.

Then the gay communists came for me and I was like ???

Then when they came for the gay communists again I said "make sure you get all the gay communists. Here I have a list, let me help"

The point of that poem is that when anyone, left or right, starts narrowing the category of 'human beings who deserve to live', they don't stop, and they are likely to end up narrowing it to exclude you. I personally believe that it is morally wrong to have a category of 'human lives that don't matter' (if any exception exists, it is only those who are currently, wilfully harming others and refuse to stop), but even if you do not share this belief, the existence of such a category is not in your self-interest.

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.

The Germans were not going to start genociding Germans. Someone has to leben in all that raum, after all.

The Germans were not going to start genociding Germans

Except for gay Germans, Communist Germans, Social-Democratic Germans, disabled Germans, Germans whose grandparents were Jewish, Germans who were Jehovah's Witnesses or Christian Scientists,....

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Fed the flower of Germany into the meatgrinder, though.

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I just knew that either you or the other guy would bring it up that the "point" of that vomit was that nobody should come for anyone. While you're in that world, I would like a pet unicorn, his coat should be lavender. For the time being, residing in the kill or be killed world, I vastly prefer the left side of the equation.

that nobody should come for anyone

And if someone does, it behooves everyone else to stop them now, before they become entrenched, even if they're starting with people you don't like.

For the time being, residing in the kill or be killed world, I vastly prefer the left side of the equation.

And you are justified in defending yourself against individuals who are trying to harm you. What is not justified is going after people who share some characteristic with them but haven't done anything to harm anyone. Again, this applies to both left and right; the principle that states that the right having grievances against some people who happen to be gay does not justify them treating all gay people as disposable also states that the left having grievances against some people who happen to be white does not justify them treating all white people as disposable.

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The point is false though. Lots of groups have stopped. Pretty much every group has stopped short of omnicide, including the Nazis.

The point of SteveAgain's response is that sometime it's us or them. And sometimes it's us or them for no apparent reason. There's no apparent reason why the situation seems to be that either the "gay communists" get oppressed or the straight cis white men do, but it does seem to be the case.

Lots of groups have stopped. Pretty much every group has stopped short of omnicide, including the Nazis.

They didn't stop, they were stopped, at great cost. If they had been stopped sooner, the cost would have been less; if they had not been stopped in 1945, they would have kept going.

either the "gay communists" get oppressed or the straight cis white men do

Or, we agree to resist oppression by anyone, gay or straight, black or white, red or blue, man or woman, against anyone else, while maintaining the distinction between the individual perpetrators and those who happen to share characteristics with them.

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The point of that poem is that when anyone, left or right, starts narrowing the category of 'human beings who deserve to live', they don't stop, and they are likely to end up narrowing it to exclude you.

Your collapsing of all distinctions into "deserve to live" is notable, but it doesn't seem to me that it changes much, so let's go with it.

We observe that the category of "human beings who deserve to live" can both expand and contract. Your position, then, is that it should only expand? If it expands to include a category of people previously excluded, and then things get significantly worse, we just have to live with it because no takesie-backsies?

We observe that the category of "human beings who deserve to live" can both expand and contract. Your position, then, is that it should only expand?

My position is that "human beings who deserve to live" should be coterminous with "human beings", as otherwise it tends to contract precipitously.

If it expands to include a category of people previously excluded, and then things get significantly worse, we just have to live with it because

...the alternative, a society with mechanisms for declaring whole groups of people to be unworthy of life, sets a precedent which is very likely to end up biting you in the arse.

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

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No pendulum stops in the middle.

Any damped pendulum stops in the middle. But I don't see any damping.

You start dividing humanity into 'upstanding citizens worthy of life' and 'sub-humans whose life and well-being is not worth any efforts', sooner or later someone will put you into the second category.

Homosexuals already put me in the latter category in their scramble to not suffer such a fate themselves. Why should I care if others want to toss them in the abyss with me?

Homosexuals, immigrants, and disabled are very fond of straight white men and fiercely protect them when they're persecuted or murdered.

I dunno, I think my gay friends would stand up for me.

I suppose if you're so straight and white that you can't imagine ever being on the same side of history as homosexuals, immigrants and disabled, you have nothing to worry about and can continue to sneer at the lower castes. Although, as I suspect you know, there's always such a thing as not white enough.

Nothing in the linked article about not being white enough, only not being German / Aryan enough or being too Slavic.

What a bingo card answer. I'm saying that to expect them to "speak for me" is naive to the point of retardation, at best they will cheer when it's my turn, at worst they will be the ones who are coming for me.

Do you have no friends among "Them"? If you do, do you expect all of them to drop you at some point? If you don't, why would you expect anyone to speak for you any more than you speak for them?

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Realistically, probably none. But then, for me the morality of the matter is complicated. There are probably plenty of straight, unpromiscuous, sober people who do more to harm the world than the average promiscuous gay or intravenous drug user does. "upstanding" is not necessarily easy to define, and there are plenty of edge cases. I'm not necessarily against just letting socially harmful people die instead of helping them. I'm just writing all this because it seems to me that @wlxd is jumping on the disease issue in order to push a largely orthogonal case against gays and drug addicts, which is only tangentially relevant to the question of stopping disease.

I don't care, and I don't believe you. I don't think disease eradication is good for me at all. I think it's good for poor starving Africans who I don't care about, and don't want to pay for. You have a large hurdle to convince me that tropical diseases a two continents and one ocean away have anything to do with me. You cannot simply assert it blithely.

If I believed that these programs were actually useful instead of leftist patronage networks, then I might be willing to entertain some sort of intervention. But all of this shit is just patronage networks. It's taking money from me to redistribute to loyalists and partisans.

Burn it all down. If ebola flares up again we can simply close the borders, which are far too porous anyway.

AIDS and Malaria programs in Africa are largely Bush era, preach abstinence is best even when they hand out condoms, and tend to be highly effectual and sent through Christian charities when there's patronage networks involved.

Not exactly your typical NGO.

You can't close the borders without restructuring major parts of the economy. As currently constituted, large sectors of the US economy depend on the cheap labor of, effectively, indentured servants from the third world. American consumers are simply not going to want to pay US citizen level wages to fruit pickers and landscapers. Even the most nativist Trump supporters, by and large, buy cheap Chinese products when they go to the store instead of seeking out things made in America, and they hire third world immigrants to do manual labor instead of seeking out American citizens, and it is likely that even if a nativist government forced consumers to buy American, those consumers would become annoyed because their living situation would feel worse for them. It would take major technological progress to replace the role of the third world indentured servants in our economy.

We should close the borders AND restructure large parts of the economy.

Specifically, labor laws; see this previous post from yours truly.

American consumers are simply not going to want to pay US citizen level wages to fruit pickers and landscapers

This is a self-inflicted wound that we could be corrected overnight. Again, read my earlier post. Our employment laws cause so much friction in hiring (and firing) that the entire reason we have this indentured servant class of illegal workers is because their very lack of citizenship is a competitive advantage in the marketplace. If you want to see what it looks like when a government screws over its own citizens, look no further than American employment law.

Predictions about rapid price inflation of basic groceries due to border enforcement paper over the fact that the American working class is already unable to afford their own lives because they can't get jobs quickly enough. Some simple math with reasonable assumptions;

  • Job search length; 1 - 3 months
  • Offer to first day; 2 - 4 weeks
  • First day to first paycheck; 2 weeks.

All in, we're talking anywhere from 2.5 - 4.5 months between paychecks for a typical lost-job-need-new-job scenario. You can see how untenable this would be for a single person (let alone a family) living paycheck to paycheck. Lost my job at Waffle House? Oh, no problem, I've got four months of cash savings, right?

Contrast this to off the books cash labor which can and routinely does find work (and payment!) within a single week.

American agriculture is the product of hundreds of years of compounding laws and regulations. I've done a little research into the economics of "family farms" and have discovered that your median small farmer is technically a multi-millionaire, but with both assets and debts backed by oceans of Federal dollars. They pay cash for F-350s and also supplement their groceries with SNAP benefits. It's wild, but, with enough over-regulation, anything is possible!

And that's what we're really talking about. Horrible shit-ass legislation in one area (employment law) has created a wholly separate awful situation in another area (immigration). So it isn't about X or Y, but how X and Y interact.

You can't close the borders without restructuring major parts of the economy.

Better get to work, then.

large sectors of the US economy depend on the cheap labor of, effectively, indentured servants from the third world

A moral problem as pernicious as slavery ever was, to be sure. A great evil, indeed.

American consumers are simply not going to want to pay US citizen level wages to fruit pickers and landscapers.

I disagree. Plenty of people buy expensive fruits now, and having a landscaper is a privilege unbecoming the American yeoman.

It would take major technological progress to replace the role of the third world indentured servants in our economy.

I think war with China is what it will take, because then we don't have a choice. If we don't go to war with China, it will be because they strangled all resistance and took over the USA without needing to fire a shot.

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