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Particularly in the case where it is flouted at the rest of society, it is a form of aggressive norm-deviation that intuitively makes other norm deviations such as criminal activity more plausible.
So? Not only is there no dispute that plenty of serious, smart, and useful LGBT people, it doesn't preclude the possibility that this particular person doesn't have more transgressive proclivities that you either don't know about or haven't manifested yet. The subject of this thread is (according to some) a serious, smart, and useful nuclear scientist.
That seems dubious, but even so, you could say the same thing about, e.g., Hans Reiser. It proves nothing in itself.
How much more plausible? 1.05x? 1.5x? 10x? The numbers aren't even the point, it's just that "makes more plausible" is a very vauge statement that covers for a lack of detailed understanding.
Also, 'being a fabulous faggot" isn't nearly as much of a 'deviation' in 2020 as it is was in 1960, to say nothing about 1860! Much of society thinks that's just great, and otherwise we wouldn't have seen the biden admin appointment.
@ rest: yeah, it was a tangent, but the general point is that if there's something wrong with being a weirdo sex pervert, there has to actually be some effect of it, even if it's complicated or indirect or suppressed knowledge, that makes it bad. Using "drag queen kink is norm deviation" + "norm deviation is correlated with norm deviation" + "this kinky drag queen did a bad norm deviation" is absurd, it's a simulacra, circular, you've entirely dodged whether there's something wrong with it!
It was somewhat rhetorical, but the idea is that the causal impact of a person existing vs not existing on society is quite complicated, and people who do complex, requiring-intelligence work, especially work that improves the quality of infrastructure used by many in a scalable way, and especially work that might not have happened if they weren't there, have a counterfactual effect much larger than someone who does work that's easy, already plentiful, doesn't. have impact that scales. What, precisely, is the impact on society when an extra 100iq person exists? They do some extra accounting, watch some youtube, purchase some extra food, vibe?
We don't know. I don't know the person used in the example, but let's think about this a bit:
(1) He doesn't exist. That thing never gets created.
(2) He doesn't exist. Someone else creates it.
(3) He exists and is kinky. He creates the thing.
(4) He exists and is kinky. He doesn't create the thing.
(5) He exists and is not kinky. He doesn't create the thing.
(6) He exists and is not kinky. He creates the thing.
Those are the possibilities I could think of, and that seem to break down to about an equal chance of "thing gets/does not get created". Whether or not he's kinky is not correlated with him being smart and creative to create thing. You complain about norm deviation drag queen being "absurd, it's a simulacra, circular, you've entirely dodged whether there's something wrong with it!" but you have not proved either that 'norm deviation drag queen' is a good thing. "Kinky guy creates useful thing" and "Kinky guy commits crimes" are both possibilities. "Alongside the kink, we got the useful thing" is what is argued, and the counter-argument to that is "Without the kink, we might still have got the useful thing". That without the kink we would not have got the useful thing has not been established.
I'm trying to be as fair to Brinton as I can be, but it is true that they made a point of being public about breaking/flouting norms. And now one of the norms they have flouted is about theft. If that brings disrepute upon kinksters, that's on Brinton.
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Not at all, my language is vague precisely because my intuitions are vague and I have a lack of detailed understanding.
fair, that was excessive. In political debates people often use vague 'X is associated with BAD THING's as reason for strong condemnation, but you weren't doing that.
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