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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32275 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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The main reason you don't see anything unhealthy about homosexuality is that there exists a bustling antiretroviral industry that stops the gay population's numbers from collapsing practically overnight. Most other populations manage to survive without corporate sponsorship.

Most other populations manage to survive without corporate sponsorship.

Corporate sponsorship is all that separates us from malthusianism, under which most extant populations would collapse.

I'm not sure how relevant it is that some people are making very good money off of HIV retrovirals. Whether or not homosexuality is healthy or not would, ultimately, be the result of some interaction with society and technology, just as with anything else. For those of us fortunate to live in developed western countries, many things are safe that would otherwise not be - like drinking tap water or sleeping without a mosquito net. That's true whether or not Big Mosquito Net is making a lot of money.

I mean, really, what percentage of women died in childbirth before modern medicine? Enough that we could say that pregnancy is unhealthy?

I mean, really, what percentage of women died in childbirth before modern medicine? Enough that we could say that pregnancy is unhealthy?

Pregnancy surely is unhealthy for the individual. Even without counting within-pregnancy/immediate postpartum things like pre/eclampsia and risk of hemorrhage amongst a litany of other issues, there are potential long term sequelae like pelvic wall issues (leading to incontinence) and increased risk of diabetes (if a lady is unlucky enough to have gestational diabetes). (I think there’s also something about increased risk of dental issues and permanent skin changes but I’m not sure or very knowledgeable on that front)

The first relevant thing that came to mind on the topic of skin changes is stretch marks, which at the least are aesthetically distressing.

I fail to see this as a particularly compelling argument.

You could say that modern feminism is also as equally dependent on "corporate sponsorship" because in the absence of birth control the sexual freedom they desire is impossible.

Sure, but "feminism" is not a demographic group, and I consider there to be a qualitative difference between "doesn't have sexual freedom without corporate sponsorship" and "will literally die without Gilead (NASDAQ: GILD)".

Well no, it isn’t. Women desiring sexual freedom could sterilize themselves, or have abortions, or just abandon their babies, or insist on condoms. Or be good enough at counting to statistically not get pregnant very often.

In that case gays who are absolutely adamant about avoiding AIDs could insist on screening partners and using condoms. You can go by revealed preferences that they care less than really ought to, albeit AIDs is no longer a death sentence in the civilized world.

"Corporate sponsorship", a basic facet of modernity, makes things easier for almost all of us, barring the dearly departed Ted.

Well sure- and I think this is your point here- it depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. Personally I’m quite comfortable with drawing the line at ‘necessary to avoid the normal consequences of your own actions’.

That's a form of sexual freedom, but perhaps not the sexual freedom "they desire," which seems to include (among many other unrelated things, of course) the freedom to have sex without committing to being a mother without having to sterilize themselves, or getting an abortion, or feeling the guilt of abandoning a baby, or using a condom, or having to count.

Well yeah, but ‘do whatever I want with no constraints or work involved and I never have to feel guilty’ is simply not how the real world works.

Perhaps so, but I think it's clear that modern feminism is largely about changing the real world so that it does work that way, with no constraints or work involved or feeling guilty or facing undesired consequences, at least in certain preferred topics for certain preferred people. Given that the real world doesn't and, AFAIK, has never worked that way, changing the world to do so even within just this limited scope is the kind of hugely difficult endeavor that requires corporate sponsorship.

You could say that modern feminism is also as equally dependent on "corporate sponsorship"

I mean... yes? That's certainly an argument that's been made before. I don't think it's prima facie unreasonable.

In another reply, I stated that a good chunk of the populace depends on the kind of industrial machinery, seeds and fertilizers required for agriculture. That counts as corporate sponsorship required for staying alive too, so it's a rather diffuse argument to make.

I think it's a claim about what sort of lifestyles and practices could exist in principle in the absence of corporate sponsorship, not whether any of us in actuality are free of it in 2023.

We know that people can survive in the absence of corporate sponsorship. They did it for millennia. Granted, gay people have existed for millennia too, although perhaps not with the level of promiscuity we see today.

Our civilization is much more dependant on corporate sponsorship than gays are. 99% of people would die without it due to mass starvation, while the percentage of gays who'd die without meds would be much lower.

What's true is that gays are more dependant because they depend on the medical industry in addition to depending on modern agriculture/ logistics like everyone else. But it seems to be an arbitrary line to draw.

Will feminists actually die if they don't get birth control?

Is it unreasonable to say women who derive a sense of purpose from caring for their children are less likely to be active feminists ?

It's certainly harmful to the political movement.

A good chunk of humanity would die if we didn't have industrialized agriculture relying on machinery, fertilizers and seeds produced by a relatively small number of companies. I'm suitably thankful for that kind of "corporate" sponsorship.

They could just wear condoms and survive. In fact I've wondered if PrEP is going to usher in a wave of STDs as it makes not wearing condoms seems like a valid choice for some.

Also lesbians have especially low STD rates. Shall I accept that as a reason to advocate lesbianism since we are apparently concerned with STD rates? Or is this concern selectively targeted?

In fact I've wondered if PrEP is going to usher in a wave of STDs as it makes not wearing condoms seems like a valid choice for some.

It took about 14 years between the legalisation of male homosexuality and the HIV epidemic. If you were going to design an incubator for STDs, then globalised male homosexuality is a pretty good one, but for the fact that its nurturing environment has been temporarily made less potent by fear of AIDS.

The next HIV might not be as bad, but it could be worse.

In fact I've wondered if PrEP is going to usher in a wave of STDs as it makes not wearing condoms seems like a valid choice for some.

I have seen quite prominent "GONORRHEA ALERT" billboards in some jurisdictions, and apparently the numbers suggest this is actually happening, as the common strains are now antibiotic-resistant.

The antibiotic resistant clap is apparently of Indian origin. And yeah, they're very likely to spread it around because there's no other demographic whose significant fraction has weekly orgies.

Interestingly, my state put up billboards and wall-ads encouraging gay men to get the monkeypox vaccine and get a PrEP prescription so they could "get your pride on."

I get that gay guys like to fuck. Good for them. But does this have to include raw dogging strangers? HIV isn't the problems here, it's every STD at that point.

I suspect that raw dogging large numbers of strangers is the sexual norm that would be developed by any group made up entirely of people with male sex drives.

Condoms are cheap and plentiful already, often even free. Even so, 1 in 6 homosexual men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime, with the number rising to 50% of gay black men. I'm unaware of any other demographic whose existence is only made possible by pharmaceutical companies stepping in to stop 16-50% of the population and its subgroups from dying in the streets due to self-inflicted pathogens.

Also lesbians have especially low STD rates. Shall I accept that as a reason to advocate lesbianism since we are apparently concerned with STD rates? Or is this concern selectively targeted?

Sure, go ahead. Lesbians mostly slap each other around AFAIK, but that happens behind closed doors and doesn't require billions in health spending to prevent national contagions, so I'll freely admit I don't care about it as much.

I'm unaware of any other demographic whose existence is only made possible by pharmaceutical companies stepping in to stop 16-50% of the population and its subgroups from dying in the streets due to self-inflicted pathogens.

The infant mortality rate was 46% a scant 200 years ago. Presumably it would reach that again in the absence of modern medicine and sanitation. Literally every demographic is heavily dependent on government and corporate spending.

If infant mortality went up, so would birth rates almost certainly.

Literally every demographic is heavily dependent on government and corporate spending.

Bullshit. People were breeding more prolifically in the absence of government spending. Daily doses of excitement and the meaning derived from imposing your will on the hostile world are what we evolved to do.

Being docile cubicle drone is unnatural which is why people are so sad now.

In the same way that withholding maternal/infant care wouldn't cause the human race to go extinct, withholding HIV medication wouldn't cause the extinction of the gay community. Clearly OP means 'dependent on medical care' as shorthand for 'dependent on medical care for a relatively normal healthspan/lifespan,' not 'dependent on medical care for the group to exist, period.'

Even then, people for some reason love assuming that group behaviour is static. Whites have below replacement birth rates so we MUST DO SOMETHING NOW or they will go extinct! Gays are reckless so if medical care is withdrawn they will go extinct from AIDS! It's as if they haven't even thought of the idea that people behave differently when in peril vs. out of peril.

Gays are reckless so if medical care is withdrawn they will go extinct from AIDS!

It's just that back when AIDS was a deadly peril, the gays (as a bloc) were still pretty reckless?

Well, they didn't go extinct.

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You're ignoring the self-inflicted part. There's no inherent reason why gay men should be more exposed to STDs than any other population.

Fair enough. Although to a large extent, it's just bad luck that HIV is so difficult to vaccinate against/treat paired with much easier anal/i.v. transmission versus vaginal. In a world where HIV was cured with a round of antibiotics similarly to syphilis or gonorrhea I suspect CD would nevertheless hate the gays.

Speaking of self-inflicted diseases necessitating medical intervention, I hope he isn't obese. You could level his argument at more or less the entite developed world and diseases of affluence.

In a world where HIV was cured with a round of antibiotics similarly to syphilis or gonorrhea I suspect CD would nevertheless hate the gays.

Didn't he point out that the issue of AIDS and other STDs is already preventable? If he hates them, it seems to stem from the lack of precautions they are taking, rather than them being gay.

Speaking of self-inflicted diseases necessitating medical intervention, I hope he isn't obese. You could level his argument at more or less the entite developed world and diseases of affluence.

Yup!

Didn't he point out that the issue of AIDS and other STDs is already preventable?

He never mentioned other STDs

If he hates them, it seems to stem from the lack of precautions they are taking, rather than them being gay.

The idea that he decides which demographics to hate based on whether they avoid preventable diseases or not is laughable

HIV is not sexually transmitted?

The idea that he decides which demographics to hate based on whether they avoid preventable diseases or not is laughable

Yeah hate is way too much, I'm at most bemused, and it has at least as much to do with some gay activists acting entitled.

On the other hand, I do remember a lot of hate, for precisely that reason, during COVID times, and I don't recall you laughing.

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Didn't he point out that the issue of AIDS and other STDs is already preventable? If he hates them, it seems to stem from the lack of precautions they are taking, rather than them being gay.

There's a lot of bad information on the effectiveness of condoms for preventing HIV transmission. They're useful, but it's probably closer to an order of magnitude difference for perfect-use, rather than a complete barrier.

((And any look back that includes pre-1986 also has the problem the other direction: a lot of the explosive transmission of HIV and YOLO-esque behavior came about during the Ryan White-era, where people believed that standing too close to or using the same bathroom as a gay man could transmit HIV. Despite the wikipedia summary, they believed that because a lot of mainstream experts were cautioning about it! The devil-may-care behavior regarding condoms during a lot of that time period makes more sense when people reasonably believed that would have little impact.))

((And any look back that includes pre-1986 also has the problem the other direction: a lot of the explosive transmission of HIV and YOLO-esque behavior came about during the Ryan White-era, where people believed that standing too close to or using the same bathroom as a gay man could transmit HIV. Despite the wikipedia summary, they believed that because a lot of mainstream experts were cautioning about it! The devil-may-care behavior regarding condoms during a lot of that time period makes more sense when people reasonably believed that would have little impact.))

No, this is the product of historical revisionism aimed at making homosexuals seem more sympathetic than they actually were and are. The scientists and experts who were at Ground Zero of the AIDS epidemic noted several times that many of their HIV-positive patients were intelligent, savvy men who understood the risks and transmissibility of HIV/AIDS as it was explained to them. They chose to continue spreading HIV anyway, because they simply did not care. See Marcus Conant:

I can recall about that same time seeing a patient who was a young Ph.D. scientist from the Peninsula [south of San Francisco], a very good-looking man with Kaposi's sarcoma who I was caring for. He had AIDS. He was sitting in my clinic on Parnassus. He was kind of impatient. I said, "I'm sorry I'm running late; I can tell you're impatient. What's wrong?" He said, "I wish you'd hurry up; I'm going to the bathhouses." My reaction was, "Wait a minute."

See, I was being a typical physician. We all in this society forget--and I think physicians are the worst--that when people are diagnosed with a fatal disease, all of the desires and longings and drives that they had the day before they were diagnosed are still there. Everybody believes that patients who are dying of AIDS are no longer sexual. I have patients that have sex the day before they die. I encourage them to do that. And people believe that women who have had breast cancer are no longer intimate or have longings to be intimate. We need to begin to relate to people and realize that those human, very human, desires don't go away because you have now had a label of "AIDS victim" stuck on you.

But being the typical doctor, it just never occurred to me that he was still out there having sex. He had Kaposi's sarcoma--AIDS, this horrible new, fatal disease. My line to him was, "Somebody must think you're smart, because they gave you a Ph.D. How come you're still going to the bathhouses?"

He said, "There's nothing wrong with that. I probably caught it there, and so my view is, it's there and I'm going to have sex." I said, "Are you telling the people that you're having sex with that you're HIV-positive"--it wasn't even called HIV then--"that you have AIDS?" He said, "No. I figure that they ought to be smart enough to understand that there's AIDS out here, and that they can catch it. It's their responsibility as much as mine." I think that that, more than any other single event, called into focus for me the notion that someone needs to speak out.

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