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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   33233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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The "donating blood" bit is probably unavoidable-- but also I suspect it's just not very salient, even for leftists fighting the culture war. My dad didn't give blood for a long time because there was a mad cow disease outbreak in the region he lived and at some point he was told not to. And honestly, he just didn't really care. Giving blood is an act of charity. People get more mad about the idea that their community doesn't care about them than the idea that the community doesn't need as much of their help.

Yeah, after I visited China was I banned from donating for a period of time because when I went to Xi'an it was technically in a malaria zone. Didn't seem like a big deal.

When I as in middleschool, there was a kid with Hemophilia. Had a rough time of things. Felt like every few weeks he'd be on crutches cause he got a bruise on his leg or something. I remember in 7th grade science class when we were learning about the AIDs epidemic in the anodyne way it might be taught about it effecting everyone and everyone needing to be careful, he flew into a rage. Kept yelling over the teacher that it was those damned gays that spread it absolutely fucking everywhere with their promiscuous lifestyles.

Of course, he was a hemophiliac child in the 80's when HIV positive gays were contaminating the blood supply. I never put two and two together then, but I always wondered if he was personally effected by that, or merely righteously angry that he was put in harms way.

I'll concede that the "no unprotected sex" thing would probably be looked at unfavorably no matter what, but at least hypothetically reagan could have pissed off different people. Imagine if instead of saying, "no sex," he'd said, "instead of penetrating each other, why not try out these bizarre fetishes?" and subsequently promoted, for example, full-body latex condoms, humping in fursuits, teledildonics, tying up people in chairs and verbally abusing them while they pleasured themselves, etcetera. In a degenerate alternate universe reagan could have enraged the conservatives instead of the liberals by trying to convince America that penetrative sex was for boring straight people.

I mean, even just a year or two ago when Monkeypox was spreading, the humble suggestion that gays stop having giant unprotected orgies with multiple strangers was viewed as a demand that "gays stop having sex". There seems to exist a certain vocal segment that gets their way that any insistence that gays use protection or practice monogamy is akin to trying to get them to stop being gay.

I mean, even just a year or two ago when Monkeypox was spreading, the humble suggestion that gays stop having giant unprotected orgies with multiple strangers was viewed as a demand that "gays stop having sex".

I think that's a framing issue, not something intrinsic to communicating with the gay community. I think there are ways the same advice could have been conveyed and been well received. But-- I admit that that's never going to happen in practice, because the only way to alter a group's community norms without pushback is to credibly present yourself as part of the group and working in your own best interests. Key word: credibly. For minority groups that see themselves as marginalized, the only way to avoid "uncle ruckus" accusations would be to simultaneously display high-cost signals of group affiliation. And politicians are notoriously averse to sending high-cost signals*. Jared Polis could have given effective monkeypox advice, but only if he'd done it in the middle of a livestream while blowing his husband's back out.

* Trump is notable for being an exception to this. His base is rabid precisely because of how many high-cost signals he sends them. As an equal and opposite reactions, his enemies (including myself) hate him for the exact contents of those signals.

I don't hate him for the signals, I hate him because I think he actually possesses the vices he signals. But the basic point applies - part of Trump's success is being maximally offensive to pretty much everyone outside his base.

Hemophiliac are treated with clotting factor that's pulled from a huge number of people's blood donation so if one of the people who donated I'm the say 10,000 people whose clotting factor they got had HIV they got it! Government policy in the 80s murdered hemophiliacs to be polite to the gays. Then it used the Ryan Whites their policy gave HIV to to humanize the disease to straights.

I mean, even just a year or two ago when Monkeypox was spreading, the humble suggestion that gays stop having giant unprotected orgies with multiple strangers was viewed as a demand that "gays stop having sex". There seems to exist a certain vocal segment that gets their way that any insistence that gays use protection or practice monogamy is akin to trying to get them to stop being gay.

My interpretation of it was more that, if you decouple 'advice given to gay people' from 'advice given to straight people', those who harbour animus against gay people could then tell gay people to abstain from any sex, even in a monogamous marriage, while placing no burdens on straight people, and there would be little to no motivation to ever lift that injunction. One could avoid this by imposing the same interventions on straight people, and not lifting them on straight people until one lifts them on gay people.

"Do not participate in massive unprotected orgies" is an intervention that can be equally applied to both straights and gays. And in fact, straight people were already de facto banned from participating in massive unprotected orgies based on the many, many restrictions placed on gatherings. And yet my recollection is that gays thumbed their noses at the rules, and were allowed to, even when it was causing a mini-pandemic within the pandemic.

Minor correction- there’s a vocal segment which makes no distinction between ‘gays should use condoms when they gangbang strangers’ and ‘the gays will all be executed- BREAK OUT THE CONSTRUCTION CRANES’.

Quite right, the infamous Salo Thread on HIV has extracts from a book where certain gays compared closing the bathhouses they were using to have lights-out orgies to gas chambers.

We can never criticize the genre-unawareness of zombie movie protagonists when stuff like this happened in real life:

Many members from the gay community were at that meeting. Bobbi Campbell, who was already infected with AIDS, was standing at the back. I remember at least three members of the gay community, nude, just with towels around them, holding signs that said, "Today the baths; tomorrow the ovens." They meant that, if we let you close the baths on us, next thing you'll quarantine us, then we'll be in jail, then you'll destroy us, like a Hitler. It was very, very extreme.

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