This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Also, @Soriek's "Transnational Thursdays" have continued to garner AAQC reports:
- Transnational Thursdays 7
- Transnational Thursdays 8
- Transnational Thursdays 9 Special Edition: Forgotten Wars
- Transnational Thursdays 10
Here are the rest:
Quality Contributions in the Main Motte
- "Review of Yes Minister – televising the British deep state (in 1980)"
- "If it takes 10 quality, honest people to make a successful company or to run an electricity grid without blackouts..."
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Notes -
"[A]dvances in HIV treatment have surely raised that number in the last few decades, but the fact remains that practicing homosexuality is a lifestyle with health consequences similar to those we associate with smoking, sedentary lifestyles, bad foods, etc."
The argument is basically centered the definition of unhealthy. It is not precise to label actions that are merely correlative with worse outcomes as "unhealthy" per se. Driving a pickup truck vs a Prius is likely correlated with worse life expectency (i.e., being a male living in a rural area). But it would be absurd to say "driving a pickup truck is more unhealthy than driving a Prius (for the driver)" without extra caveats.
Furthermore the original use of "unhealthy " in the thread in cake's post used a different definition altogether (likely ideologically based) -- making naraburns' reply somewhat of a non sequitur.
This response makes me feel like you read the snippet without bothering to read my post, which consists in substantial part of exactly the kinds of caveats you're talking about.
This response suggests to me that you just don't understand how the "natural law" mentality pervasively underpins conservative thinking. When someone refers to a lifestyle as "unhealthy" when they also mean something like "immoral," they are (often unconsciously) drawing on millennia of moral judgments evolved in advance of germ theory and other forms of contemporary medical understanding. I suspect that religious prohibitions on pork and prostitution and homosexuality are grounded in the same kinds of intergenerational social evolution as traditions for preparing manioc. Modern science allows us to grasp (at least some of) the causal factors better and so mitigates the consequences of our historically unhealthy choices.
(Imagine how much less pleasant, and how much more potentially illness-inducing, anal and oral sex were in times and places lacking reliable access to clean water--much less soap, antibiotics, anti-virals, etc. Even heterosexual sex was dramatically more risky--but many of those risks could be more easily mitigated through lifelong monogamous pairings.)
Of course the standard caveat now is that we do have access to clean water etc. So why talk about past problems when doing so could stigmatize homosexuality needlessly? Well, mostly there's no need, any more than people need to get on my case concerning my bacon consumption, or for driving a less-than-maximally-safe vehicle. But sometimes it is valuable to understand why people have the intuitions they have about things, to see that the people who disagree with you are not malicious bigots with baseless concerns, but human beings wrangling with facts about the world you have chosen (perhaps quite justifiably!) to elide from your own calculations.
I read your post. You clearly say.
Without presenting evidence that the association is any more than correlative.
Later you say
I disagree. I think way we use "unhealthy" in normal contexts is far more often causative "smoking is unhealthy" rather than correlative "driving a pickup is unhealthy".
Obviously I can't speak for @Doubletree1, but the answers to your questions seem fairly obvious. The correlative cause, when it comes to spreading disease, is (a) having a lot of sex with a lot of different people and/or (b) having sex with people who are part of a community that has a lot of sex with a lot of different people (even if your own behaviour doesn't fall within that category).
The former is a "pickup truck" level of causality: homosexuality is correlated with promiscuity which is correlated with disease transmission. The latter may not be, in that men who have sex with men form a somewhat more dangerous community to have sex with even if you are, yourself, quite careful.
Since I would not have had reason to think this distinction through without @Doubletree1's comment, I think it's fair to say that they have made a useful contribution to the discussion and should not be getting downvoted. Perhaps you were already thinking in terms of (b)? If so, I guess I can understand why you wouldn't see the point of their analogy. Still, I appreciated it.
Thank you-- but with one further clarification/nitpick. My "pickup truck" analogy was intended to describe a situation that is closer to the (b) kind of association. The (a) kind of association seems to me to be causative since there is a clear mechanistic cause and effect relationship.
Interesting! I was reasoning by analogy with "driving a pickup truck is correlated with being male and rural which is correlated with worse life expectancy." In that situation, all else being equal, the pickup truck itself is not a concern. Similarly, if it were just a matter of personal promiscuity and the community effects weren't salient, then homosexuality itself would not be a concern.
But the promiscuity is a direct result of the homosexuality no?Heterosexual sex is less promiscuous solely because it involves women. And then the community effects are a direct result of that promiscuity.
In a hypothetical world where homosexuality is just "heterosexual relationship and sexual norms, but with 2 men" then sure, it would be not unhealthy, but that world fundamentally cannot exist as long as men have a higher sex drive than women and are willing to take greater risks in sex, which I can think of no way of changing.
In this sense, the pickup truck analogy doesn't work, because pickup trucks don't make people rural, or male. Homosexuality does make people more promiscuous, because it increases access to high-sex-drive partners.
Mm, fair enough. There’s still a part of me that balks at phrasing like “practising homosexuality is a lifestyle with health consequences,” in that it seems to consider “practising homosexuality” as a single thing that can be considered risky in itself instead of looking into the underlying causative relationships. But this may be influenced by the disgust with which the word “lifestyle” is sometimes deployed in this specific context, rather than any analogy with other contexts. “Having a full time job that requires you to sit down all day is a lifestyle with health consequences” would probably not stand out to me in the same way, even though this, too, is a causative chain that can be somewhat interrupted by, for example, taking breaks in which you are mobile.
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