FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
Sure, most STDs before HIV was not particularly lethal.
STDs that we know of. The Joseph Henrich argument is that cultures with memes optimised for evolutionary fitness will outcompete cultures without. For all we know, there could well have been ancient cultures in which homosexuality and free love were tolerated, and which hence went extinct at the hands of some sexually transmitted pathogen that modern medicine has never encountered.
I also think your rebuttal rests on an implicit Nirvana fallacy. Yes, cultures in which homosexuality was aggressively stigmatised still had STDs. Is your contention that, had they not stigmatised homosexuality, the rate of syphilis transmission in Victorian Britain would have been the same or lower?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
So the Israelites knew about STDs, but not the Romans and Greeks?
Haven't you ever wondered why the latter two empires collapsed?
Homosexuality prohibitions didn't stop 10% of Victorian Britain from getting syphilis.
Yes, and yet you will notice that syphilis is far less lethal than HIV.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I completely understand, I was just curious.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
cumming once or twice a day
Gosh, I thought I had a high sex drive, and yet I imagine I could count on the fingers of two hands the number of days last year where I masturbated twice.
Which religion are you, out of interest?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
This is the second time in five days that I've seen someone on the Motte use the term "Kafkatrap" with a meaning very different to my understanding of the term. If you don't mind my asking, what does the term "Kafkatrap" mean to you?
New Year's resolution check-in:
- Published my sixteenth blog post of the year on Monday, a review of ARX-Han's Incel, lightly edited from a comment I posted here.
- Returned from my holiday on Saturday evening and went to the gym on Monday evening. Can deadlift 1.89x my bodyweight for 3 reps, squat 1.32x for 6 reps and bench press .89x for 6 reps.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st. Nearly at the halfway mark.
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I feel an instinctive revulsion at the idea of contracts that interfere in matters of marriage, fertility, sex, etc.
But marriage itself is a binding legal contract!
Today, I often see something I think of as an inverse boy-who-cried-wolf, where the social conservatives cry wolf, progressives/liberals/mainstream all loudly insist that there is no wolf, then a wolf eats a sheep, and then the next day the process begins all over again.
My favourite example of this was when Scott recounted an anecdote in which he was talking to a friend and saying that he couldn't understand the classical prohibition on homosexuality, and his friend pointed out that the destigmatisation of homosexuality directly precipitated one of the worst pandemics in human history, killing young men in their millions. Even living in the Bay Area, in a social milieu with a disproportionate share of LGBT people; even being an avid GK Chesterton enjoyer; even being a qualified medical doctor who has probably read experimental studies about antiretrovirals and PrEP, it still didn't occur to him how the AIDS epidemic completely and utterly vindicated the stigmatisation of homosexuality. This isn't even a case where he failed to see how tearing down a particular Chesterton's fence could have hypothetical negative consequences down the line: this is where tearing down a particular Chesterton's fence did have extremely negative consequences decades prior and still does, and yet it didn't occur to him, even though it's a reality he's confronted with every day.
The article I was thinking about was "Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad" (archive link):
A while ago I was talking about this kind of cultural evolution idea to a conservative friend. I admitted I found them interesting, but also didn’t want to take them too far. Sure, tradition warned us against communism. But it also warned us against homosexuality, so it obviously also contains a lot of stupid stuff about what ancient people hated for no reason. We have to be selective in what we accept so we don’t keep the stupid stuff along with the ancient wisdom.
My friend pointed out that the obvious cultural-evolutionary-justification for homosexuality taboos was to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, which spread somewhat more easily through gay compared to straight relationships. Our ancestors didn’t have germ theory, so the best that cultural evolution could do was make people really against homosexuality for stupid-sounding illegible reasons. And within a few years of homosexuality becoming more accepted in the US, hundreds of thousands of people were killed by a particularly awful disease, transmitted in large part through homosexual contact. From here:
By 1995, one gay man in nine had been diagnosed with AIDS, one in fifteen had died, and 10% of the 1,600,000 men aged 25-44 who identified as gay had died – a literal decimation of this cohort of gay men born 1951-1970… In 1990, AIDS caused 61% of all deaths of men aged 25-44 (born 1946-1965) in San Francisco, 35% in New York, 51% in Ft. Lauderdale, 32% in Boston, 33% in Washington, DC, 39% in Seattle, 34% in Dallas, 38% in Atlanta, 43% in Miami, and 25% in Portland, Oregon.
Was improved tolerance and equality worth 100,000+ deaths? Honestly, both answers to that question would be equally horrible, so I’m not even going to try. On the other hand, now we have good anti-retroviral drugs, AIDS is mostly conquered in rich countries, people have been openly gay for decades, getting gay married, having gay adoptions, and nothing further has gone wrong. My guess is at this point the anti-gay traditions really are obsolete, the same as it would be silly to insist on nixtamalizing our corn the old-fashioned way now that we know the important thing is getting enough niacin to avoid pellagra. In fact, given how badly the religious groups that continue to insist on homophobia are doing, and how many of them are switching to the opposite position, one could even say that cultural evolution has spoken.
But still – the point at which the relevant sexual taboos switched from Untouchable Ancient Wisdom to Obsolete Bronze Age Bigotry was…the development of good anti-retroviral agents? How were we supposed to know that beforehand?...
The worrying thing isn’t just that the more intelligent, educated, and willing-to-use-Reason-to-debate-things you were, the more likely you would have been to say there was no possible downside to increasing tolerance of same-sex activity. It wasn’t just that I missed yet another a case of an apparently stupid/evil tradition actually having an illegible justification. It wasn’t even that I missed the case so egregiously that I used it as my knockdown example of “obviously some traditions lack justification”. It was that I missed it even after the problem had very publicly happened. I didn’t just fail to predict which cases of breaking traditions could have negative consequences, I couldn’t even retrodict it until a friend basically rubbed my face in it.
The passage quoted above is taken from the archive link. If you go to the version of "Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad" on the website, it's gone, with the note: "Deleted a controversial section which I still think was probably correct, but which given the number of objections wasn’t provably correct enough to be worth including." Never change, Scott.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I've been putting off working on my next album for too long. My plan is to pick up my guitar every day, and keep playing it until I come up with one interesting riff or chord progression. Hopefully if I keep at it for a month or so I'll have enough ideas that I can start assembling them into songs. Yesterday evening was productive.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Does anyone use Tinder or Bumble where you live?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Out of curiosity, what kind of smut is it? Hetero/homo/both?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
Bob Dylan: I'm not even going to address this.
... because he so obviously should be included, or shouldn't?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
I'd just like to take this opportunity to once again thank you for all the hard work you put in to make this space possible. You really are the unsung hero of this place, I'm proud to make my monthly Patreon donation, and would encourage anyone else who appreciates the work Zorba puts in to match it.
Not that I don't believe your account, but I'm curious if anyone's done a proper longitudinal study on the efficacy of vapes as a means of weaning oneself off tobacco. I've known more than one person who bought a vape for this explicit purpose, but after a few pints would inevitably get a craving and buy a box of fags. They'd just doubled up their nicotine intake.
I despise the environmental impact of disposable vapes, there's something profoundly unsightly about seeing discarded chunks of bright plastic on the side of the road. I particularly hate the way they design them to look like toys with rounded corners and bright eye-catching colours, a transparent and shameless effort to make them appeal to children. (Under EU law, cigarettes must be sold in plain standardised cartons using a colour scheme selected by graphic designers as the ugliest in the visual spectrum: by rights, this legislation ought to apply to vapes as well.) That goes double for vape shops themselves, which are invariably garish eyesores rightly derided as one of the most aesthetically displeasing aspects of the modern Yookay. And while Irish people have successfully internalised the idea that it's impolite to smoke cigarettes indoors unless given the express permission of the owner or resident, a lot of people seem to think that this basic common courtesy doesn't apply to vapes. I do not want my flat smelling like candyfloss any more than I want it smelling like John Player, thank you very much.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
What kind of social circle is this? It sounds like one profoundly unrepresentative of Western society as a whole.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
Physical media stages a real comeback beyond vinyl.
How do you think this will work in practice? Will we see renewed interest in Blu-ray or DVD players?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
I can imagine a big backlash against vaping, with legislation designed to make it harder for children to get their hands on them and heavy taxes on disposable vapes.
Still reading de la Rochefoucald's maxims. A few I took photos of on my phone:
Absence makes average passions decrease and great ones increase, just as wind extinguishes candles and kindles a fire.
What makes us so bitter against people who act cunningly is the fact that they think they are cleverer than we are.
(In recent weeks, a man tried to scam me into letting him use my parking space without paying for it. Another man punched me in the face. For the reasons outlined above, I was far angrier about the former.)
We readily forgive our friends for faults that do not affect us.
We try to pride ourselves on the faults we do not want to correct.
The same pride that makes us criticise the faults we think we do not have, also leads us to feel disdain for the good qualities we do not have.
Moderation has been turned into a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to comfort average people for their lack of fortune and lack of merit.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6d ago
You are still thinking that the respondent is giving advice on how to get laid. She is doing no such thing.
The article is literally called "All the Dating Advice, Again".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6d ago
But this is the exact point of disagreement – I don't think there's any correlation between being a "decent guy" (read: feminist) and getting laid. It's trivial to find examples of men who aren't decent guys and yet have no trouble attracting women. So the advice is worse than useless.
I think self-driving cars will become a massive new culture war battleground. Industries that stand to benefit from human drivers (e.g. taxi drivers, Uber drivers etc.) will be relentlessly pushing every story they can find about how dangerous self-driving cars are, and we will see "scientific" "studies" with the headline finding that self-driving cars actually get into more accidents than human-driven cars per mile driven (and then you dig into it and you find that the severity of the accidents in the former case is vastly lower than in the latter). Meanwhile, Waymo et al. (along with car insurance providers) will be relentlessly touting the safety of their own vehicles and pushing stories about other kinds of dangers associated with human drivers (e.g. expect to see a lot of stories about women getting raped or sexually harassed by Uber drivers).
Eventually some city will experiment by rolling out self-driving taxis and refusing to issue any new taxi licenses for human drivers. This city will have a vastly reduced rate of automobile deaths and insurance payouts compared to peer cities, and the battleground will be quietly ceded in self-driving cars' favour.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6d ago
the prevalence of GLP-1 products and will negate the unspoken reason that high-waisted mom jeans got popular.
Hey, you said no politics!
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6d ago
In "Radicalising the Romanceless", Scott provided a prime example:
Step I. Consume More Art By Women – I think it’s a good idea to make a deliberate year-long project of it at this time in your life, when you are trying to figure out how to relate to women better…Use woman-created media to to remind yourself that the world isn’t only about you + men + women who have/have not rejected you as a romantic partner.
Sometimes I wonder if the person who wrote this actually believed that consuming art by female artists would make a man more desirable to women, or if she was just trying to line the pockets of her fellow female creatives.
I don't know what this means.
More options
Context Copy link