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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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Those two definitions are going to sometimes return conflicting signals. One definition is essentially the definition of a crime or a sin, a thief is someone who takes something that isn't theirs. The other is the definition of a predilection or a disease, a kleptomaniac is someone who constantly desires to steal things. Conflating the two definitions leads to communications breakdowns.

A frat boy who wakes up still drunk and drives his lifted Jeep Wrangler home and kills a moron cyclist riding his bike at 4am* is a killer, in the sense that his actions caused the death of another, and he is guilty of the appropriate crime of manslaughter. But he isn't a killer in the sense that a hitman or a gangbanger is, or even in the sense that a Navy SEAL who has never committed a crime** is a killer. We learn nothing about the frat boy's (literal) killer instinct or bloodlust from his drunk driving disaster, it has little predictive value as to the risk that he will kill again. Vehicular manslaughter, as a crime of killing, is mostly non-predictive of a tendency towards killing in other situations. Similarly, special categories exist, killing in the military is poorly predictive of killing in civilian life.

Normally these two definitions of gay will work together. If you want to have sex with a dude, your attraction algorithm probably contains other dudes. But having never been to Thailand or spoken with a ladyboy customer, idk what their attraction algorithms look like. Certainly I doubt most of the gay men I know want to have sex with a post-surgery (breasted) tranny.

*Me

**lol

So your argument is basically if they have implants its not 'gay'?

No my argument is that a guy who is attracted to a tranny prostitute with good tits is more likely to also be attracted to Sydney Sweeney than he is to be attracted to Jaxson Dart; so calling him gay would generally fail as a predictive model of the world, he isn't likely to act like the other people I call gay.

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing it doesn't belong in a fruit salad.

I think you've thrown out the baby with the bathwater. If my uncle had wheel's he'd be a bike. People who have homosexual sex can be defined as gay. I think its silly to needlessly add qualifiers. It is LGBT* except guys who top dudes with implants?

It just depends what you want to use the word "gay" to mean. If you want to indicate a certain variety of sinner, then it's best to use the "screwing anyone with a Y chromosome even once, in any manner, regardless of context" definition. If you want to try to describe a group of people with similar attributes, then calling people attracted to Traps gay isn't really very useful, they don't share attributes with most of the rest of the group.

I think this is the crux of the argument, my definition is activity and attraction based. And for record, since you mentioned sin, having a same sex attractions is not a sin to most people. My definition was quickly written, and I'd throw in consent, and full knowledge as caveats as well.

I think you're using the word to describe people fitting what your definition of gay is. I don't know what attributes you consider in your definition.

I'll expand, can you talk gay? Or dress gay? Sure that sort of description only has meaning because societal connotations and associations with people following the definition as gay. You can talk/dress gay without being gay. You can be gay without talking/dressing gay. Try changing the word and its doesn't make sense to use the attributes as gate-keeping mechanisms. Example: Can you talk/dress American without being American? Can you be American without talking/dressing American?

To be clear, I'm not really attached to either definition, I think the word "gay" is inconsistently used and applied, such that using it in conversation or argument to exclusively mean either the act/sin-based or identity/attraction-based definition is likely to run into snags when two people are using the word to mean different things. Without clarifying our definitions all we're going to achieve is shouting our definitions at each other, so I asked you to clarify what definition you are using to get the conversation moving more productively.

Personally, Homosexuality and sexual orientation is something that I'm intellectually struggling to define at this point. I really don't know what I think Homosexuality is. The "Born This Way" argument seems to have been more or less abandoned, repealed without replacement, by the LGBTQWERTY types. Not long ago Posner would cite the "helper in the nest" theory when writing an opinion on gay rights, the Born This Way theory was a keystone to the entire gay rights movement. Now, it is treated as either an assumption or an irrelevancy, but it isn't even part of the catechism anymore. When I ask woke friends of mine, queer themselves, what the current theory of homosexuality is in this month's issue of The Gay Agenda, they shrug and say idk it doesn't really matter anymore.

Alternatively, homosexual behavior is a pure choice that anyone can make. That doesn't feel right to me, as there is no situation in which I would be attracted to a male, I can't imagine a situation where it would occur to me to engage in homosexual activity. I can imagine most things that I don't like being appealing in some context, Islam or Hockey or beans on toast or genocide, but homosexuality I can't imagine. So there clearly must be some genetic difference between me and the men who are gay. But no one seems interested in telling me what anymore.

Idk, it's something I'm pretty lost on at this point if I stop to think about it.