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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8212 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 STD transmission 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.

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