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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   27776 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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This all reminds me of the movie Pleasantville.

What I most distinctively remember from it is that the kids are taught in public schools about the evils of STDs and teen pregnancy. It appears to me that condom-related sex ed was a major psy-op for the average middle-class teenager. Indeed, STDs are mostly transmitted by drug users and MSM, not the average encounter for the types of people most likely to conform to what the teachers say.

It really is propaganda, where characters of a 1950s' sitcom gain colors as they gradually go through a sped-up sexual revolution and some other modernization (not racial integration unfortunately)

"Pleasantville" is the kind of parable that encourages us to re-evaluate the good old days and take a fresh look at the new world we so easily dismiss as decadent. Yes, we have more problems. But also more solutions, more opportunities and more freedom. I grew up in the '50s. It was a lot more like the world of "Pleasantville" than you might imagine. Yes, my house had a picket fence, and dinner was always on the table at a quarter to six, but things were wrong that I didn't even know the words for.

We're already fully bathed in this type of propaganda, like fish in the sea, we don't even imagine that things could be different.

Second I'm not saying you out not to notice who your enemies are. I'm saying that you ought not to care.

Noticing is usually a first step toward action. You can't notice if you don't care, and you can't take action if you don't notice. What your hypothetical enemies want you to do is not care; they want you to only get upset if you actually see more white people than usual.

Indeed, STDs are mostly transmitted by drug users and MSM, not the average encounter for the types of people most likely to conform to what the teachers say.

This is true about GRID (also known as AIDS), but not true about other STDs. Syphilis and herpes spread quite quickly among users of heterosexual casual sex. This is because HIV has relatively low likelihood of transmission in penile-vaginal intercourse, in contrast to e.g. syphilis, which spread like wildfire around the world in 16th century in a matter of a couple of decades after the initial contact was made, despite much lower population mixing coefficient at the time.

Syphilis and herpes spread quite quickly among users of heterosexual casual sex.

This probably changed, but those STDs were not the target of sex ed propaganda in the 2000s. That movie is so over-the-top that I thought it was reverse-propaganda, and maybe it was, like Elysium.

which spread like wildfire around the world in 16th century in a matter of a couple of decades after the initial contact was made

Well the social order was much different then with more sex work, sailors and soldiers... It seems that syphilis went down thanks to antibiotics, not condoms or sex ed propaganda.

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