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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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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.

Scott was living two blocks from downtown Hiroshima and asking why everybody got so nervous about nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, like 5 comments upthread, @ArjinFerman is telling us that the AIDS crisis was oversold. (I really wanted to gloss his complaint as “fake and gay,” but figured that could be mistaken for mockery). There’s clearly some sense where he’s correct, and HIV will see use as a political lever long after everyone who knew a victim is also dead.

I’m not sure how to square this other than a rather uncomfortable model: the amount of suffering around us at all times is literally inconceivable, but your brain works really hard to filter it out. Turn off too many of those filters and you end up going mad and/or effective altruist.

On the other hand, like 5 comments upthread, @ArjinFerman is telling us that the AIDS crisis was oversold.

No, I'm saying it was self-inflicted, and doesn't deserve more thought than a "men purposefully hitting their own balls with a hammer" epidemic. That the expectation that society would drop everything and save people who refused to take the barest of precautions, when their own lives were on the line, and they only did so for the purpose of sexual gratification (which they didn't even have to abstain from, just limit to a reasonable level), was deranged, as was the implicit (and sometimes explicit) moral judgement when society failed to act fast enough.

Decades later we put half of the world under lockdown over a glorified flu, and anyone who didn't wear a mask when they were entering a restaurant, where they could sit without it for hours, was seen as a moral freak, but somehow we have to look at the AIDS episode as a giant tragedy, because it got in the way of a bunch of guys having unlimited orgasms. Then, to add insult to injury, we immediately dropped all Covid-era moral norms, when the same community brought in monkeypox.

How far had the destigmatisation of male homosexuality got in blue states when AIDS turned up in the early 1980's? It looks like blue states and libertarian-inclined red states repealed their antisodomy laws in the 1970s but most of the South still had them. And of course that is only the first stage in destigmatisation.

In the UK, homosexuality was still broadly stigmatised, even in left-wing circles, well into the 1980's. (The Labour Party was still dominated by blue-collar unions at the time). For example, Section 28 (which prohibited public-sector organisations promoting homosexuality) was broadly popular when it was introduced in 1988

According to Wikipedia, homosexuality in the UK was partially decriminalised in 1967. This article by Peter Thatchell claims that ~100k men were convicted of homosexual offenses between 1885 and 2013, of which 15,000 were convicted after 1967 i.e. an average of over 1,000 convictions a year before 1967 vs. 326 after. Obviously the UK population was much higher in 2013 than in 1885, so convictions per capita in the two periods would be much more disparate. Taking the population sizes at the beginning and end of the two periods and averaging them suggests the period 1885-1967 saw 2.2 convictions/100k population/year, while the period 1967-2013 saw 0.5/100k population/year. In other words, a gay was more than four times more likely to be convicted for his sexuality in the period 1885-1967 than he was in the period 1967-2013.

This certainly seems consistent with the claim that increasing liberalisation and tolerance for homosexuality was a precipitating factor for the AIDS crisis.

I'll give a caveat that the really simple version, literally "within a few years of homosexuality becoming more accepted in the US", doesn't line up the timeline right. The progression from HIV to AIDS to fatality takes the better part of a decade, the initial infection spike predated the normalization of homosexuality, the initial infections were probably WWII-era transportation results (and that difference explains a lot about the limited benefits of a Cuba-like quarantine), and to make it work you'd have to have the tail end of the Reagan era as the break of the taboo against homosexuality, to the surprise of Bowers v. Hardwick.

There's a stronger version that focuses less on the stigmatization and more the actions, especially in a more mobile world. But then the stigmatization didn't work, and arguably concentrated the fuckpile into three or four major cities where enforcement of the stigma become impossible and the disease could run far more rampant.

And there's a steelman about injuries and disease more generally, although that turns the confusing bit from "effective antivirals" to "consistent access to clean running water, antibiotics, good diet, and cheap lube".

So the Israelites knew about STDs, but not the Romans and Greeks?

Homosexuality prohibitions didn't stop 10% of Victorian Britain from getting syphilis.

The Israelites definitely knew about STDs, Leviticus contains specific regulations for dealing with what was probably gonorrhea.

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.

…unlike the first, which had such a great time over the next 2500 years?

And no, I think I’ve got a decent understanding of the Roman collapse. It really doesn’t line up with a narrative of (social) decadence and tolerance. Centuries of geopolitical pressure and food distribution far outweighed any trends in buttsex.

…unlike the first, which had such a great time over the next 2500 years?

Seems like a great argument for the tenacity of their memes (including prohibition on homosexuality) in the face of overwhelming hostility from literally every other tribe they came into (come into) contact with. The story of Jewish success is really a story of their having superior memes to their competitors: it's no wonder they've wielded such power and influence in Hollywood for so many decades.

And no, I think I’ve got a decent understanding of the Roman collapse.

Admittedly, my ascription of the collapse of these empires to that cause was somewhat facetious. But it is interesting that both empires collapsed or were absorbed into other tribes, while the Israelites are still going strong and a distinct cultural tribal grouping many thousands of years later.

Attributing the ascendancy of a particular species to a specific gene is foolhardy: it's a particular package or constellation of genes that wins out over its competitors. Likewise with memes: no single meme is necessary and sufficient. Cultures which survive and thrive are those with an evolutionarily fit package of memes, of which prohibition of homosexuality was likely one, but prohibition of homosexuality is not necessary and sufficient in its own right. A tribe which prohibited homosexuality but encouraged all its members to sterilise themselves or to eat hemlock could not reasonably expect to outcompete a tribe which did none of those things.

Yes, the Roman Empire heavily prohibited and criminalized homosexuality after the reign of Constantine. While pre-Christian Rome had complex social norms that tolerated certain same-sex relationships under strict conditions of dominance and class, the Christianization of the empire led to systematic legal and social bans

Hmm....

Yes, and yet you will notice that syphilis is far less lethal than HIV.

Sure, most STDs before HIV was not particularly lethal. But that would go against the idea that prohibitions on homosexuality were created because of devastatingly lethal STD epidemics.

STDs do impact female fertility though.

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?

Well, judging by the modern world, the pro-homosexuality meme has thoroughly defeated the gay bashers.

I don't know what this means.

If "cultures with memes optimised for evolutionary fitness will outcompete cultures without", and the west is the most pro-homosexual culture in history, and also the most dominant culture in history...?

The West became dominant decades if not centuries prior to the destigmatization of homosexuality. Until very recently, the West stigmatised homosexuality almost as aggressively as the Arab countries do today (e.g. Turing probably deserves as much credit as Churchill for ending the war in Europe, but when his sexuality was discovered, he was not simply let off with a slap on the wrist). The new CEO does not get to take credit for the accomplishments of his predecessor.

It was also new- syphilis had not been in Europe prior to the discovery of the new world.

People are very good at not noticing things that are taboo. It’s the same thing every time- Scott just lives in a bubble where stigmatizing homosexuality is taboo.

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