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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3492 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 11, 2023

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Weird question. When I was in 4th grade, in the early 90s, we did a multi-day segment on AIDS, where they just went and scared the shit out of us.

So in my 20s any time I did something remotely risky, I'd freak out and go to the doctor. And they'd always ask if I was gay. And when I said no they seemed like they stopped taking seriously the possibility that I contracted it.

And looking back on it it finally just hit me. Was the whole program I went through in 4th grade a massive psyop aimed to stop gays from being stigmatized?

If so I feel honestly betrayed. It feels extremely wrong to use children in that way, even if the end seems like a good one.

Yes. That's exactly what happened.

We saw it again with Monkeypox, where no one was willing to say "hey, this is mostly in a subset of the gay population, they should probably take precautions and it won't spread". This wound up costing some number of gay lives, but it was worth it to the powers that be to avoid a rando right-winger on the internet fulminating about gay diseases.

Public health is just political arguments as soldiers.

This is a weird argument to make given that, in my recollection, this:

"hey, this is mostly in a subset of the gay population, they should probably take precautions and it won't spread"

is exactly what happened. All my gay male friends got the vaccine (which was targeted at gay men and was pretty much never even promoted to straight men or women).

From the first New York Times article about monkeypox that shows up when I google it (from June 2022):

Nearly all of the cases outside of Africa have been in men who have sex with men. In New York, only 1.4 percent of monkeypox patients self-identified as straight, with the rest describing themselves as gay, bisexual or declining to say, according to city data.

They did come around, luckily before the thing metastasized. But before that, there was a month or so of disinformation during which a lot of people caught a very nasty disease.

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