"If you don't want people to take your stuff out of context, then stop using shit examples to make a contestable claims."
Congratulations, you have just demonstrated why Scott needed to put Ns up like Christmas ornaments around the words.
"How very dare you trample on my toes about something I think is peachy!" is what your comment sounds like to me. He's not saying "gayness bad", he's saying "if you're looking for biological bases only, these two things are not that distinct in which has and which hasn't one".
And you demonstrate precisely the politicised angle which drives these decisions and why the pure biological factors only approach is not going to fly.
"Pedophillia has no evolutionary fitness advantage"
How do you know? Why are men of all ages attracted to a narrow band of female age range, while women can be attracted to an older age range? The evopsych story there is fertility versus proven provider.
The younger the girl is when the man has sex with her, the likelier to be at the peak of fertility, he can be sure that the children are his as he is the most likely to be her first/main sexual partner, and the longer span of reproductive years she will have. That this gets knocked about so that some paedophiles are attracted to children too young to be past puberty doesn't matter, if there are hebephiles who like girls of twelve upwards, then there's a lot of reproductive advantage there.
Men who like young boys (ephebophiles) are no worse off for evolutionary fitness advantage, in re: the gay uncle theory, than the gay uncle who likes them a bit older. And the classical instances of gay uncles are indeed men who like them young, not men in same-age steady relationships. Paederasty has been the model of male same-sex relationships, not thirty or forty year old men living in quasi-wedded bliss. Then you go on to get married and have kids as your duty to society, even if you prefer fucking twinks. So long as you do the social role of propagating the family, you can sleep with boys and have that be tolerated or accepted.
>Pedophillia has no evolutionary fitness advantage
>How do you know?
What matters is the amount of offspring a female can give a man over the long-term not her current fertility. A 30yo woman is over half way through her reproductive lifspan while an 8yo girl has all of her fertile years ahead of her. Even though an ancestral man would have to wait some years for his 8yo wife to reach reproductive age he could still potentially get double the amount of offspring out of her than a 30yo wife.
It would have made more biological sense for ancestral men to chase after 8yo girls than 30yo women and we see this happening in modern primitive foragers. In a lot of these primitive societies it's normal for men to marry little girls before puberty and these little virgin girls are more sought after and highly prized than the adult women who have already had children.
A certain amount of pedophilic attraction does make evolutionary sense for men. But don't expect evolutionary psychologists and psychiatrists to be objective about this. Attraction to minors is just about the biggest taboo in the West at the moment and the official position is that it must be completely abnormal and can't possibily be evolutionarily adaptive!
Also, being smaller and weaker than the man is one of the markers of femaleness -- it's common, though obviously not present in every male -female pairing. Seems to me that responsiveness to smallness and weakness may be some of what drives pedophilia in males. As a woman, I have no trouble understanding feeling tempted to have a sexual relationship that would do harm to someone. But even if you surgically removed my entire conscience I don't think I'd want to have sex with children. They're just not sexy to me. They too small, and just in the wrong category -- they way, say, parakeets are.
Generally speking though, it seems like pedophiles are explicitly attracted only to pre-pubescent girls (true pedophilkes here) It's not, "attracted to girls when they are pre pubescent nd then continue to be sexually attracted to them as they age".
My guess would be it is mre that sexual imprinting is very flexible, and the one thing we know to be a cause for pedophilia is to be sexually molested pre-pubescently.
Yes, and we don't know how big a part being molested as a child plays in someone's becoming a pedophile. It's very hard to get data, because a LOT of people are sexually abused as kids and never tell anyone, including earnest researchers. So if we find that say 20% of pedophiles were sexually abused as kids, we don't really know whether that percent is higher than baseline. Also at least one study found that pedophiles frequently lie about being as abused as kids, in hopes of being seen more kindly. So I think it's entirely possible that sexual attraction to children comes into being the same way all the other kinks do. It's just a very unfortunate kink to have, because you can't enact it without harming a child, and the whole world hates you.
And I don't think we really understand much about where kinks come from. My impression from reading about kinks and talking to kinksters is that it's mostly not imprinting. Adults into BDSM have vivid memories of BDSM-like experiences they had -- spankings they got or witnessed, movie scenes where somebody was tied up, etc -- but what they say about the events isn't that the event caused them to develop an interest in BDSM They say that it was the first time they became aware that BDSM-type interactions were fascinating and thrilling to them.
>There are distinct claims I make: homosexuality has an evolutionary fitness advantage. Pedophillia has no evolutionary fitness advantage.
How does that translate to "They aren't the same thing from a purely biological standpoint" ? Whether something is advantageous or not has nothing to do with whether it's nature or nurture (or politics).
>I am not taking a stance on morality.
You expressing concern about "Far right" people reading Scott's blog and agreeing with those things make me somewhat skeptical that you're completely value-neutral.
In a world where there are methods to avoid women getting pregnant, pedophilia could have enormous fitness advantages, because it's possible to have children specifically for the purpose of abusing them.
No one said the pedophile was acting out his urges, let alone on his own kin... Anyway how are any of my childless brothers different from each other, regardless of their sexual leanings?
Total genetic similarility is irrelevant. We're talking about whether a particular trait gets passed on by means of the genes that code for it being replicated. If a gene codes for a trait that reduces that's gene's replication (i.e. not having kids due to being gay), then it will be selected against.
If any of your siblings lack the gene that makes them (occasionally) infertile, their non-infertility genes will be selected for and come to dominate the following generations.
One could also argue that the paedophile has a *greater* incentive than the gay uncle for his siblings to have lots of children and to help those children thrive. Maybe Uncle Virtuous MAP doesn't act on his impulses, but he's 'very good with children' and is always around to babysit and help out, whereas Uncle Gay is spending all his resources on attracting boy toys and splurging on roosters and hoops to impress them:
The problem is that there are so many 'just-so' stories around evolutionary psychology that we don't know that the gay uncle/gay aunt theory is anything close to reality. In some cultures the mother's brother is very important in the family, but that doesn't mean that the uncle is himself gay.
Trying is the word, indeed. How many samples of real-world Gay Uncles do we have, where they invest time and money into their siblings' children?
If gay men today want kids, they can (if they can afford it) go the IVF and surrogacy route. So there is no bar (except money) to having their own biological offspring and investing in them, not in the nieces/nephews.
Yes, there's the traditional trope of the family dancing attendance on a rich, childless, elderly relative in hopes of getting favourable treatment in the will, but Rich Bachelor Uncle or Spinster Aunt need not be gay. They could as well be widow or widower, or their own kids died young.
The basic argument I'm seeing in the comments is that "homosexuality must have some evolutionary advantage or why would it persist?" and the Gay Uncle theory is an attempt to fit a suit of clothes for evolutionary advantage.
Well, by the same token, paedophilia must have some evolutionary advantage, or why would it persist? But homosexuality good, paedophilia bad, is the reaction there. *That* is why there can't be a pure objective science-based psychology manual, no matter what the hopes and wishes are.
This is a confused view of evolution. Reproductive fitness is the limit of the drunkards' walk. Things can happen that happen (in an evolutionary setting of the hunte gatherers) rarely enough that they dont negatively impac fitness. Maybe in post agriclutre society with endocrine disurptoes they happen more freqiently.
"Because of its genetic basis, there is strong evidence to imply that it is positively selected for,"
But the "genetic basis" for homosexuality is very weak! Heritability estimates are lower than most behavioral traits. The classic old ironyis that views on gay marriage are literally more heritable than being gay itself is!
>"Homosexuals are pedophilles grooming your children" is right now, at this moment, spreading among the far-right.
There is a thousand thousand "Drag Show for Kids" and similar trends on twitter and tiktok already to fuel this, so I don't think the people who want to paint homosexuals as pedophilles are really in a deseprate want.
>He is of course opposed to negative coverage in large media outlets, and feels slighted by the NYT in particular. I do not care about that, and nobody really should.
Why ? I actually *do* really care about doxxing and the unfair treatment of ordinary people by those who wield a public pen. Scott is fortunately not exactly without power, but even he got his life intensely disrupted by the NYT. It sounds really tactless to say """Meh, so he quit his job and spent a year or so recalculating his entire lifestyle **Yawn** so what ?""". To say nothing of the countless people who got their life disrupted an order of magnitude worse and had nothing to do about it.
In contrast, I actually don't give the slightest shit about the latest panic about people equating homosexuality with paedophilia, 99% of it self-inflicted.
Scott is a lot more respected than WatchMeDoMakeupOnTikTok lady number 12055, so people will take his comparison more seriously than a tiktok trend, and I think it would be wise to consider the effects of expanding a harmful platform carefully.
Doxxing is distinctly awful &, whaddya know, can threaten the safety of the person doxxed and individuals around them including minors. It's weird that no one takes it seriously as an issue. Meanwhile, other topics about threatening the safety of minors cause people to absolutely lose their marbles. Strange.
The thing is, the word "harmful" here is doing an aweful amount of (undeserved) work. Comparing gays to paedophiles is not any more harmful than, say, (1) comparing right-wing advocates to facists, (2) comparing anti-abortion advocates to Al-Qaeda terrorists ("y'all Qaeda"), or (3) comparing parents concerned about their children's education (whether rightly or wrongly) to domestic terrorists.
Every single one of those groups rejects the comparison, every comparison is derogatory as well as violence-suggesting (what do you do to fascists or terrorists except spraying them with bullets ?), and yet I have never seen any objection to them from the same people who see comparing gays to paedophiles as beyond the pale.
Love it or hate it, you can say anything on the Internet. The entire success mythos of progressive ideology is that it started as a radical sect that initially parasitized the University institution then spread on to the Internet, becoming super-charged by the new medium's global interconnectivity. Feminists spent entire decades and several server farms to rage on men and their various behaviours and traits, comparing them to various repulsive and dehumanizing things in the process.
So it rings a bit hollow if, after all of this, after 40+ years of wokes\progressives freely dehumanizing their opponents and 20+ years of doing it on the internet, it's suddenly a crime to compare gays to paedophiles. Where was this decency when "Facist" was and is used to denote anyone who thinks "Woman" should only mean "Adult Human Female" ? Nowhere to be seen, as far as I can tell.
TL,DR; Meh, comparing gays to paedophiles is no big deal, and is no worse than what most movements on the side of gays themselves do.
>(Especially the blindness to the fluidity of sexuality, how many "gay" men have had children? Turns out you can hit both ways!)
Homosexuals are not bisexuals. I have never felt attraction to a woman. I probably never will. Lord knows I spent years trying to turn myself straight in my teens and early 20s, drenching myself in self-loathing in the process, before finally ripping the bandaid off and learning to just accept myself for what I am.
Yes, some strictly homosexual men marry women and have children within those relationships, but this is largely due to societal factors that are dying out in WEIRD societies. Trust me, there are no strictly homosexual men "hitting both ways".
I find the idea that everyone is bisexual deep down to be a common error that's obviously false. I see it a lot from bisexuals, unsurprisingly, but I also see it a lot from a certain type of politically liberal heterosexual.
Regarding the whole " everyone is bisexual deep down" argument...here's what I think. I think sexuality is a spectrum. Many people are on either end of the spectrum (straight/gay), while a select few are in the middle (bisexual). However, I actually think that a lot of people are mostly straight/gay, but not exactly. Like...I think that many straight men can recognize when they see another guy who's hot, even if they would never fuck them.
So...while I don't think that everyone is bisexual, I do think that a...moderately high percentage of people might not be perfectly straight or gay. But hey! That's just my guess, I could be completely wrong.
> and there have been many investigations into the ways that gay or lesbian aunts and uncles may help overall biological fitness of families within indigenious cultures.
But having a 'make gay babies gene' wouldn't be passed on, even if your siblings kids were more likely to survive. Their kids success is irrelevant, because those kids aren't the ones carrying the 'have gay babies' gene, so it can't be selected for! Even if it benefits the group overall, on the individual level, whoever has the most fertile offspring determine the genetic landscape of that population, and having non-gay kids (and the genes for this) makes having more fertile offspring much more likely.
>This also meshes well with the observation that humans are one of the few species that survive past menopause - there is an evolved preference for supporting the children of those in your immediate family. Their reproductive success is reproductive success for your genes as well!
This is completely different. Your kids have your genes, and being monopausal on net balance is likely to increase the rate YOUR genes propagate, hence your genes for eventually having menopause are passed on!
If your helping other people's kids, even those related to, it's not your genes being passed on, and if we're talking about a trait that makes you different than your family members (i.e. 'having gay babies' gene), then the gene for this trait won't be passed on, because them having fertile offspring is precisely because they lack this gene.
It doesn't matter if it benefits the group, no individual is evolutionarily incentivized to have infertile kids, because the genes cannot be passed on. And it doesn't even matter if you're strongly genetically related to your siblings. If you're the one with the gay babies gene and they're not, your gay babies gene doesn't get passed on. Even if a majority of your genes are tied up in that of your group, the specific trait of having gay babies cannot be passed on in this way.
>and evolutionarily ignorant!
This is a dumb thing to say.
You're the one positing a magical form of evolution where genes that code for not having your genes propagate are somehow being propagated more than the genes which don't code for this. This is magical thinking.
I'm not saying I agree with the axioms before the math, but redo your math friend. If a family has five kids, with one that doesn't reproduce and four that do, and each of the four kids shares a random 50% of their genes with the one that doesn't, that's a pretty decent chance that the four kids will pass on the genes the other has.
The ones that don't have gay babies genes are the ones that will pass on their non-gay-baby genes
It doesn't matter if you share a lot of genes with them. If they don't specifically have the gay baby gene, the gayness-as-reproduction-strategy- cannot possibly be passed on. Infertility CANNOT BE SELECTED FOR regardless of how much it benefits the group, because by definition the genes specifically for that mating strategy cannot propagate, and people without infertility genes, even if they share most of your other genes, will domiante future generations
> If your helping other people's kids, even those related to, it's not your genes being passed on
People who are related to you by blood (likely) share genes with you. This is what matters for evolutionary pressures. The percentage of shared genes is (likely) lower than with your own children but this is just difference in degree.
but humans evolved in groups. if one group survives because of its complex dynamics when others peroish, those duynamics are passed on- its an overlooked harder to measure aspect of evolution in social species where individuals cant survive withot the group.
Those dynamics cannot possibly be passed on. Genes are what gets passed on, and if the genes giving rise to this dynamic (having gay babies) have no vehicle by which they can be passed on, the dynamic dies after one generation.
It doesn't matter if it benefits the whole group. Evolution acts on individuals because individuals are the vehicles of genes. Any individual in a group who has more fertile offspring than the rest of the group will dominate future generations, and individuals without gay baby genes will be more fertile. Infertility cannot, cannot, cannot be selected for. Sharing 50% of your genes without your siblings isn't enough. If the people whose genes make up subsequent generations aren't the ones having infertile kids (which they necessarily won't be), having infertile kids is not a trait that gets selected for.
All kinds of things *could* benefit groups but that do not emerge as stable reproductive strategies because they are genetically self-stultifying. It may benefit the group to not have kids, but people with genes to have more kids are the ones whose genes get passed on, therefore the strategy has to die.
Again though, you're not thinking about how groups as a whole could become extinct losing out to other groups who have evolved more useful dynamics.
In that case, whatever fluctuations of evolution in the group arent reproduced, whereas groups where fluctuations that resulted in group with better dynamics relative to the local environment do go on.
Failed groups dont show up in the fossil record.
Its kind of like how if one evolves a culture that is outcompeted by other cultures , not only the culture dies off at the small group level but the evolution of members of said group which result in the culture also dies off.
At any rate, my argument if for group evolution, not that this is the cause of homosexuality specifically. Things can happen that arent beneficial in an evolutionary sense as long as they happen rarely enough that it doesnt hurt the fitness of genes. It is likely that homosexuality is a combination of genetic susceptibility and hormone exposure.
if such cases were rare enough, but the genes that made one prone had potential benefits for some other reason, in large scale socities where there was more exposure to conditions that created homosexuality of transgender or whatever you would see more manifestation.
Its well known that genetic diseases where the genes other different circumstances of different configurations can proliferate and last even though they are obviously non adaptive.
It doesn't matter how related you are in general. The specific genes for 'infertility' need to be passed down, otherwise the strategy has no way to propogate
if any of your siblings/cousin etc don't have genes for gay babies, their non-gay-baby genes will dominate future generations
But this strategy does (at least potentially) have a way to propagate. If there is some gene/allene that raises the probability of homosexuality in men and then those gay men would help their relatives, some of whom might be carrying the same gene, more than otherwise, then that may mean that gene is evolutionarily favored.
Were you perhaps thinking that the claim was that there would be a dominant allene that would cause homosexuality with 100% probability? I don't think the hypothesis was that extreme (and even in that case it likely wouldn't cause homosexuality in both sexes). Of course, I don't know if there's any evidence for this kind of hypothesis but at least it's not an illogical proposition.
but in a situation where groups are competing, groups with more succesful dynamics woould outcompete those with less successful dyanmics, and that would be very hard to calculate since you cant look at the range of ehat group dynamics allowed one group to surviuve while another perished.
First of all, I already explained why having gay kids doesn't help the group during times of hardship, because any resource benefit is delayed a full generation. And if gay people using resources is fine because they help raise their siblings kids, then why does it suddenly stop being fine a full generation later? Not only does it change from one generation to the next, it changes at a point even further removed from the initial stress that 'necessitated' having infertile offsrping!
Second, it doesn't matter how successful a group is. For a mating strategy to propogate, the genes for that trait specifically need to be passed on.
It doesn't matter if having infertile children benefits the group. Genes for infertile children will necessarily be selected against, which means genes for infertile children cannot be passed on. Even if your infertile children benefit the group, other members of the group who don't have the genes for infertile children are the ones will pass on their non-infertility genes, and 'having fertile children' genes will be the only thing inherited by future generations (other than through mutation).
For a trait to be selected for, the genes that code for that trait specifically need to be selected for.
Benefitting the group does NOT allow infertility genes to be passed on. There is literally no possible way that infertility can be selected for. Your infertility genes die out and the most fertile of your group will have their genes dominate future generations, meaning infertility as mating strategy MUST die out.
See? This is the entire attitude and argument in a nutshell. "Comparing homosexuality and paedophilia? But that is so wrong, everyone knows gayness is great and natural and beautiful and kiddly-fiddling is wrong and bad and terrible!"
Biology doesn't care. If a twist of the genes one way gets a result, it'll twist genes into all kinds of shapes. And some of those shapes have more in common than we might be comfortable with. Being exclusively gay so you never have any kind of sex with the opposite sex means no reproduction. Being exclusively paedophilic so that you never have any kind of sex with adult members means no reproduction (until we get into the area of 27 year old men fucking 9 year old girls and knocking them up, which is wrong and bad and terrible but evolution does not care because baby).
Biology does not have a moral judgement about good or bad, ethical or unethical, moral or immoral. Biology judges on "life? more life? continuing life?"
The political angles around "we used to think gay bad but now we think gay good" have nothing to do with biology.
Have you read "the goodness paradox", I think you'd like it. Humans domesticated themselves, and one of the traits that goes along with domestication (less aggressive behavior.) is increased sex... I mean who doesn't remember the dog trying to hump every human leg it saw. (I guess most of our dogs are 'fixed' these days?)
No, I haven't and on your recommendation (I think this is the third?) I don't want to. Your obsession with humping sounds like you need a dose of bromides, or a course of psychotherapy. Obsession is a sign of mental problems.
Oh sorry, please excuse me I didn't mean to offend. The book is not about sex, it's about violence, and this idea that humans self domesticated themselves to reduce reactive violence, but still have (perhaps increased?) proactive violence.
The inquiry for truth is valuable even if victim-cosplayers and special pleaders might complain about it.
Our society's current moral framework excessively valorizes victimhood. A saner society would devalue or ignore it. Instead we celebrate it.
I am an unapologetic gay man. But I don't care about PC and I find this sort of thing tiresome.
It'd MAYBE be one thing if this were being blared into the front page of Big Newspaper circa 1985. But it's not. This is a community of mature adults, I'd like to think. No one reading ACX is going to go on a gay panic rage fueled crime spree.
You still need some criteria for what mental states qualify as a problem. For instance, right now whether your behavior impacts your ability to maintain a job is a factor we'll consider in whether your mental status constitutes having a mental disorder. It's part of your overall global functioning. If you're just independently wealthy with people hired to manage your wealth, consider yourself lucky.
My area involves people with cognitive disabilities. Because of this, I'm especially sensitive to how surrounding economic conditions are an important variable in what it means to be able to maintain employment given how you think and behave. Macroeconomic conditions, employer attitudes, government regulations, etc. all matter a lot.
There's no brain scan you're ever going to be able to give someone that will tell you someone has a disorder that makes them have difficulty maintaining gainful employment separate from the prevailing economic conditions and culture. Disqualifying traits for employers aren't objective, for example. They're dependent on social context.
If your point is that mental disorders are to be treated as a social problem first and suggest involuntary treatment as a go to, then yes, you are disregarding the mentally ill person as a person. There is no way around that.
No - treating mental health primarily as a social problem when considering an individual and treating it primarily to make others feel better around them is disregarding them as an individual.
Well, you can give them meds and prevent them from killing themselves. You can structure their day, ensure that they get enough sleep, get good nutrition, get some sunlight, do some productive work (weeding a garden, building something). There are people who argue not implausibly that some fraction of at least modest depression can be effectively treated by behavior modification. But if the patient lacks sufficient clarity of purpose and motivation -- which is typically the case in depression -- then inducing therapeutic behavior modification by external force might be the kindest and fastest approach in the end.
The same argument is made in the case of alcohol and drug abuse, hence the common preference in the judicial system for coercing offenders with a drug and alcohol problem into inpatient treatment by offering them jail as the only alternative.
I know several people who avoid seeking help, despite being depressed, sometimes suicidally so, because they fear involuntary commitment. Necessarily, if someone like this goes on to kill themselves, they'll be recorded as a suicide that didn't seek help in the system. This isn't necessarily saying involuntary institutionalization is a bad thing in every instance, but if it prevents people who want care from getting care because they fear this mortifying ordeal, it needs to either not happen or be so closely controlled so as to not substantively prevent people from getting help.
I was struggling to write a response to your drugs and alcohol comment but cannot come up with the necessary evidentiary backing to respond - it's a complicated thing. For alcohol specifically, the people being threatened with jail or some form of rehab (12 steps options being cheap) have probably committed some alcohol related crime, like drunk driving. If rehab is the acceptable alternative, why is jail on the table? Not trying to pretend society is a coherent or cohesive thing, but why is "We can either rehabilitate you or punish you" even a choice? If someone's behavior is so dangerous that they find themselves in this situation, shouldn't they go to a jail that aims to rehabilitate? Either/or is a bad solution.
Sure, either choice is going to have collateral damage. That's the nature of the real world. The question is are more people saved by forceful intervention or by avoiding it? I don't have a good answer to that question, but I'm a priori doubtful that either extreme is an optimal solution.
I will say two events tended to push me towards the side of intervention, though. The first is when I read a long story in the Atlantic, I think, many years ago, which reported on a detailed study someone had done of people who had attempted suicide from the Golden Gate bridge. (This was in the context of the endless debate at the time about installing a suicide barrier, the usual objection being "it won't do anything, because if people can't kill themselves from the bridge they'll just do it some other way.") Astonishingly (to me), it turned out almost none of the people who jumped and survived ever even attempted suicide again. A significant number of them took their survival as the affirming miracle that it was, and turned their lives around. One quote from a survivor really stuck with me: "I realized in the moment that I jumped that everything I had thought was insoluble and unbearable in my life could be solved -- except for the fact of my having just jumped." The conclusion of the report was that at least in this particular subset of people, preventing them from killing themselves *on that attempt* could very likely prevent them from doing it at all -- it was a momentary impulse, and if thwarted by force, would *not* necessarily cause them to just find other means. (This is also, I believe, the logic by which people who urge gun control believe fewer guns, even legal guns, would cut down on gun suicides, which is most of them, because if people don't have a gun at hand, they will not, contrary to the opposive argument, just go out and buy a rope.)
The second thing is that I had a good friend some years ago who actually did this thing, he jumped from the Bridge. (He was not one of the rare survivors.) It has definitely occured to me that had he been prevented *on that day* from carrying out his impulse, he might ultimately have been saved. He was just the kind of person who would get carried away by an impulse, but, if prevented from acting on it, reconsider and be more reasonable. It happened in many small things, and then one day, it happend in the biggest thing of all. When people say to me "well, we should just respect his agency, it was his choice to make, et cetera" I tend to hostility. He liked his life, mostly. He was usually happy, but not always, and sometimes dreadfully unhappy. He had good friends, he could hold down a job, and he had a future.
But he also had a disease inside his head that made him sometimes do stupid shit, like go off his meds, not tell anyone, and sit around in a dark apartment until some demon told him to go end it. Abandoning him to that demon seems inhuman to me. I believe in the famous Donne quote[1], we *are* our brothers' keeper, and we let people like my friend down, all the time.
I don't even necessarily believe it's because we venerate free choice so high, as we often say. I think in many more cases the real reason is squalid and unworthy: it's because the mentally ill can be incredibly exhausting, and we just secretly want to wash our hands of them.
Yes, people in the justice system who are compelled into rehab necessary have some punishment hanging over their heads, usually for some minor crime -- petty theft, assault and/or battery, robbery. It's a choice because (1) the system is overwhelmed with cases, and they try to clear their caselog with deals if they possibly can, and if it's clear a drug or alcohol problem is underlying, they think it's worthwhile to try to kill two birds with one stone: put the offender in what amounts to a closely-monitored parole setting *and* try to ensure he doesn't come back, and (2) most judges are actually fairly human people who are trying to help the miserable wretch in front of them straighten out his life. You probably have to be a first-time offender, without a record -- certainly not violent -- and it helps to be young, so the court quails before screwing up your life for a very long time with a criminal record and jail time.
I don't want to romanticize it, however. There is also substantial corruption with the system, and sometimes the treatment programs are abusive and exist just to bleed insurance companies for cash, and sometimes the connection between the court and the program is corrupt. It's a human system, and necessarily imperfect, with dark corners and squalor.
I wrote my comment with the understanding that suicide is often impulsive - when we remove certain convenient methods of suicide, the rate drops and doesn't recover. I believe one of these was a kind of coal fired stove, but it's been years since I read the article and I think I'd have trouble finding it now, so forgive the lack of source. I think there's kind of an error in assuming that giving caregivers the ability to involuntarily institutionalize others they suspect (for what might be very good reasons) of being about to attempt suicide - plenty of people have some level of suicidal ideation constantly for months or years, but picking out the specific moment the impulse strikes me as difficult, if not borderline impossible for a caregiver. I think a preferable solution would be to remove more convenient methods of suicide as a society - netting under bridges and tall, hard to climb fences around rooftops - similar to what you hint at with guns (I certainly don't want to turn this into a gun control debate, this is thorny enough without introducing something else highly contentious).
Shortly - we should not abandon people suffering from depression and suicidal ideation to their demons, but we shouldn't inadvertently aid their demons in attempting to help in a way that causes unnecessary harm. Unfortunately, I think we're also rapidly approaching a point in this debate where even the most measured solutions will have casualties - some from what I fear, which is the folk who cannot seek help from fear of internment, and some from the other direction, folk who could use internment to hold through the worst impulse but are not interned, and then are no longer here.
I think one reason to support free choice as much as possible, even with depression and suicide, is to recognize that we value other human beings as human beings, not just creatures we need to prevent from doing bad things to themselves because otherwise we would feel bad. Other people matter not just because we care about them, but because they have inherent value as individuals with agency, and carrying the threat of internment in anything but the most severe and immediate cases is diminishing them as people. It's easy to think "Oh, I don't matter as a person who makes decisions, just someone who needs to stay alive so that others won't be sad."
As for drug and alcohol addiction - I don't think I have much to add to your points. I would prefer these be treated as social and health problems rather than legal problems, but I would also prefer that petty crimes of other sorts be treated the same way. I'm sorry for not giving this the detail I gave the other topic - there's too much to get out and it's a big enough topic all on its own.
I'm not sure that I disagree, and if so by how much, but I do want to observe that you are talking coercion in either case. Either you coerce people who are mentally healthy -- e.g. by constraining the tools they can own and use, like guns, or by ruining the view from the Bridge, or compelling people to fork over more in taxes to construct suicide barriers -- or you coerce people who are mentally unhealthy. There's no getting around the fact that there is no social solution at all (short of exhortation and prayer) that doesn't involve constraining *somebody*. I don't think it's a sufficient argument that certain kinds of constraint constrain people in ways that aren't readily legible, or that if we spread the burden out among a million people it's a priori better than if it's borne by a few on the other side. These approaches are evasions of responsibility, and do not face the problem squarely.
As I said, I don't have a good answer. I study physical law, because that is amenable to mathematical certainty. This kind of stuff is not, and there's a good reason I did not aspire to a career in it. I'm just arguing for unflinching clarity in recognizing the issues at stake, and the costs in either direction.
I think we can also theorize that survival and prosperity of a group or population MAY be enhanced by a % of homosexuality and evolution of a group could favor that.
You can theorize all sorts of dumb things. The math of genetic group selection doesn't work out, because of variance within groups vs variance between groups (cultural group selection is a different story).
> And who's to say that there aren't child-rearing and social hierarchy benefits to having population subsets (including grannies) who are not competing for offspring?
Homosexuals are not notable for devoting greater effort for the raising of children. Grannies are grandmothers, as in they have already reproduced and are now devoting their energies for raising the fitness of their existing descendants rather than creating more.
Who said I'm just talking about post-industrial societies? Where is there any evidence in any society of males devoting themselves to child-rearing rather than mating? There are societies in sub-Saharan Africa where a mother will receive more help from her brother than her husband when it comes to raising a child... because in those societies men take many wives to benefit from their labor without expecting sexual fidelity, and thus the maternal uncle can be more confident he's actually related. But those uncles still don't prioritize helping raise their sister's children over pursuing mating opportunities for themselves.
Male chimpanzees don't devote much effort to the raising of children. Henrich's "The Secret of Our Success"* discusses the novel development of fatherhood in one of its chapters.
You're literally suggesting being a cuck and supporting the bloodline of competing males was an advantageous strategy and that's why homosexuality exists?
The math doesn't even close to work out, how do you propose this altruistic behavior actually evolved?
I think your point would be right on a narrow conception of politics on which it has to do only with elections and parties. But it’s very natural to characterize the French Revolution and liberation theology and Extinction Rebellion as political movements, along with anything that determines how we collectively live as a society.
I also wonder about it and it would be wonderful to get an answer but for what it's worth I was reading "The Neurotic Personality of Our Time" by Karen Horney (from 1937) and it was implied there that homosexuality is a result of pathological develompent but I wouldn't say it was impiled it was "bad".
I don’t think psychoanalysts are taking a moral stance on homosexuality, but I do suspect they still believe it is caused by pathological development rather than having a ~~genetic~~ biological component, ie nurture rather than nature.
FWIW, I suspect that it *does* have a strong genetic component. But that that's not dominant. Also that in small, highly-related groups (e.g. tribes) it was advantageous to the group. So it was fostered by kin selection.
OTOH, I also suspect that most people have a strong tendency towards homosexuality. There have been studies that indicated that more women than men were homosexual, and men have been known to be focused on .... well, I even heard of one case that was focused on tailpipes, though I'm not sure whether it was automobile or motorcycle. That *CAN'T* have been the "genetically intended target"...but it also can't be anything that he would have chosen rationally (if "rational choice" means anything in this area).
It's *not* "nurture rather than nature", but rather a feedback system involving BOTH nurture and nature, and with a huge helping of random chance.
There's evidence to suggest that women are more sexually-ambivalent ('bisexual') than men, yes, but the vast majority of women still self-identify as heterosexual. Literally one anecdotal case of a man screwing a tailpipe doesn't prove anything about men as a class (honestly, isn't the lesswrong/rationalist crowd supposed to understand statistics?)
Ignoring tailpipes (which can get painfully hot), why the fcuk do we care about sexual preferences, at all? The urge to classify and to try to explain people's sexual preferences seems pathological to me. Is the need to categorize people in the sexual preference categories genetic or learned? I suspect that it's learned, because many pre-modern societies didn't make a big deal about it (though some did). But the need to lump things or people into binary categories seems to hardwired into our brains, and once we start doing it for one set of categories we can't seem to unlearn it.
So guys group themselves into the "I like gals" groups and the "I like guys" groups, and socially they tend to isolate themselves from each other. And the gals who like gals want to hang with gals who like gals while the gals who like guys tend also isolate themselves (but I think less so than the guys). And anyone who likes both are given the hairy eyeball because they don't fit into those predefined categories. And because of our pathological need to lump people into sexual preference categories we build all sorts of stereotypes about the people we place in those categories—many of which tend deindividualize or worse dehumanize people in those categories.
Back in the 80s I remember seeing an interview with Robert Reed (who played the dad in the Brady Bunch) on some daytime talk show. He had at some point publicly came out as gay (even though I guess he was pretty open about the way he swung with the Brady Bunch actors and crew). Anyway, he seemed to have regrets—even though he didn't specifically say that—about proclaiming himself gay because he said he was now the "gay actor" in the Brady Bunch, rather than the actor who played the dad in the Brady bunch—and he felt the label eclipsed his talents. Meanwhile, Jody Foster kept mum about her sexual preferences until the rumor mongers forced her to admit it. Why the obsession with Jody Foster's sexual preferences? Why the need to pigeonhole her? It all seems rather pathological to me, but I don't write the DSM...
I'm not sure why we care about sexual preferences either, but I have the sense that we're wired to care. Certainly nature wants us to be aware who is a possible mate, so of course that pushes us in the direction of being alert to the sexual interests of the opposite gender. I believe -- but am embarrassed to say I do not know for sure -- that most cultures make rules about sex and that these rules are taken pretty seriously. It may be that we are driven to make rules about sex because we sense its power and make rules to try to keep order. Many murders, suicides and plenty of crimes are motivated by sexual ambition, sexual jealousy, sexual loss and humiliation. Also, we seem to feel sexual repugnance as easily as we feel sexual desire. Sex acts that do not seem hot and luscious often seem grotesque and repugnant to us. There's not a lot of in between. And that kind of seems like wiring to me too. So while I agree with you that for us, in our era, it's really not important how somebody gets off and who they like to do it with, I think we are wired to care.
Because sexual desire and romantic attraction are some of, if not the most, powerful motivators of human activity (generally speaking), with some of the most powerful intuitions, taboos, and disgust reactions surrounding it; and sexual reproduction is how humanity carries on from generation to generation. It's literally at the core of who we are, how we relate to each other, how we organize our societies, and how we reproduce.
LOL. "Doomscrolling" is a prevalent issue right now, so it's not just sexuality classifications. People are actively hurting themselves over all flavors of "must read how a thing has been described and classified." Apparently in-home cooking appliance classifications is the latest trend.
Yes, and almost all men self-identify as heterosexual. But there's LOTS of variation. IIRC Kinsey used a 9 level scale to figure the degree of homosexuality, but I think that's still wrong, because it's one dimensional.
P.S.: What the guy with a tailpipe fixation proved is that people can fixate as unreasonably as a gosling. They usually don't, but there's no reason to believe that that guy was extremely out of the ordinary except for the particular object class that he fixated on. Possibly because we delay the fixation until much later in life than a gosling. (Though there seems to be *something* about motorcycles and flashy tailpipes that is fairly widely considered sexual signaling.)
A Swedish twin study put the contribution of genetics at 1/3 for gays and 1/6 for lesbians (with shared environment having no effect and non-shared environment making up the rest).
So it's certainly a factor, but it's also the smaller factor.
To my knowledge twin/sibling studies indicate that homosexuality is around 30% genetic, but "non-genetic" is not necessarily the same thing as "produced by nurture"- environmental influences can be congenital and/or random (e.g, produced by random hormone fluctuations in the womb, intestinal flora, role models, or whatever.)
I'm personally willing to take the stance that, yes, in fact, homosexuality is a biological disorder. It's just incurable, and so long as the individual in question avoids spreading dangerous STDs or screaming for the family to be abolished, it's a harmless disorder. Like having a version of OCD that just compels you to always put on red shoes in the morning, or something.
Likewise... yes, gender dysphoria is a disorder of some kind. If, e.g, a biological male wishes to live and pass as a woman, then depending on how you look at it you're either looking at a man with a psychological problem or a woman with a physiological problem- either way, it's a disorder. If there wasn't a disorder of development, they wouldn't have dysphoria!
Technically, no, but the idea that humans should cease reproducing and/or cease taking responsibility for looking after their offspring is an idea so close to promoting your own society's extinction that I would consider it tantamount to calling for violence.
Would you consider heterosexual non-breeders to be perpetrating a violent act? Or are non-breeders with non-standard sexual preferences or identities the only ones perpetrating violence by not reproducing?
In case you haven't noticed, there's currently no shortage of people on the planet. I don't know whether homosexuality and transsexuality is becoming more common, but if it is I'd wonder if possibly that's nature's way of limiting population growth. It's certainly more humane than killing off a bunch of people via starvation and plagues.
What pushes you towards seeing homosexuality as a biological disorder rather than as a biological variant, in the same category as red hair or left-handedness?
I believe Scott explained it fairly succinctly in the original article, but to reiterate: healthy organisms normally gravitate toward sexual partners they can actually reproduce with.
(Same-sex sexual acts are not that uncommon within the animal kingdom on a sporadic basis, but a stable lifelong attraction to the same sex is actually very rare: it is only documented in humans and male domestic sheep. There's a theory this might be a consequence of self-domestication.)
Well, you and also Scott if he said what you think he did, would need to define quite clearly what you mean by healthy. What are the criteria by which you judge an organ, an entire body or a behavior to be healthy? You mention that homosexuality is rare among other species. Is that how you define a healthy behavior -- one that occurs as frequently among animals as it does in our species?
Here's the thing: I think ourt species is wired to have strong reactions to the sexual habits of other people. My observation is that most people do, and also I think it makes sense that we would have strong reactions. We are social animals, and the way sexual relationships play out can have both very good and very bad consequences for society: It can lead to lasting bonds between sexual partners, and of course it produces children and then the tribe also has the extra stability that comes from having bonded family groups. But sexual ambition, jealousy and disappointment also lead to conflict and misery, and of course that's bad for the tribe. In my experience, a lot of people's objection to homosexuality comes down to their having a very strong EWWWW reaction to certain sex acts and/or to picturing any sex acts at all happening between members of the same sex. I'm inclined to think we're wired to react that way to sexual acts that are a bit different from those we enjoy. So if you find yourself viscerally convinced that homosexuality is unhealthy, you might try on the idea that your EWWW is interfering with fairminded thought.
Nature is replete with healthy organisms that do not gravitate toward sexual partners they can actually reproduce with. Kin selection is such a successful strategy that haplodiploidy has evolved at least 10 separate times, and it's entirely plausible that evolution selects for a certain amount of "take care of your sister's kids instead of having kids yourself."
I think whether you see it as a disorder or not depends on the context in which you're thinking about it.
First, you might think in terms of individual well-being. In 2022 USA, being gay is not a huge impediment to living a good life. But in 2022 Iran or 1922 USA, it's a substantial impediment to living a good life. At an individual quality-of-life level, whether being gay is something terrible that wrecks your life and so you'd really like to be cured of depends on your environment and culture.
If we're thinking about evolution, then it's a disorder to the extent it decreases the inclusive fitness of the genes of the gay person. It seems almost inevitable that being gay decreases your fitness in most contexts (when you get a chance for some extracurricular action, do you go for the kind that *can* leave an extra kid or the kind that *can't*?). But this isn't a moral evaluation or anything, it's just how we can think about evolutionary forces. To the extent homosexuality is genetic, it's kind-of a puzzle, since it seems like it must decrease the number of offspring you leave behind.
If we're thinking in moral terms, then it depends on our moral code. If you believe that homosexual behavior or desires are terrible, wicked, sick, etc., then you're going to see homosexuality as a disorder needing treatment, much like we'd see pedophiles. People with a different moral code will see things differently. And since we don't all agree on moral codes, you can easily end up with people in our society who desperately do not want to be gay, and would like some kind of therapy or something that would turn them straight. I gather this doesn't work too well, but it's not crazy that someone who is convinced that wanting to sleep with dudes makes them an evil person doomed to eternal hellfire would like some help with that.
What does “dysfunction” mean? If it’s about something biological not functioning in the evolutionarily normative way, then it might be a dysfunction, just like ability to shift time zones frequently without experiencing jet lag.
Likely yes, because it would likely be generating more heat than usual too. You might have a setup where excess heat generation isn't as much of a problem as the benefit gained by the excess speed, just as someone with a job that involves a lot of international travel might have a setup where the unstable sleep cycle is beneficial, but in the environment both of these systems were developed, they likely ended up with particular normative behavior because the downsides were worse and the upsides were much less.
It depends on the software you are trying to run. For example, some old videogames expect your computer to process at a certain speed and become unplayably fast in modern computers. Modern games don't have that limitation anymore.
In this analogy, a computer operating too quickly is the dysfunction, CPU/framerate throttling was the treatment and videogames are society.
Well, I think the short answer is "no" (since psychoanalysts are probably liberal about such things, and I understand even some early psychoanalysts were), but the question is what one means by dysfunction. I think psychoanalysts think that a lot of behavior or personality is the result of early adaptations that might not make sense in later life, but when do they become dysfunctions? I mean, if all men treat women based partly on their childhood relationships with their mothers, all men are at least a bit crazy (since these women aren't their mothers), but for some of them it works out and for others it doesn't.
I get the impression that psychoanalysts (and a lot of therapists) don't like the DSM style diagnostic system, which is based on somatic medicine and divides mental health problems into discrete disease states.
Most of what I know about contemporary psychoanalysis is based on reading Nancy McWilliams's books (psychoanalyst and professor at Rutgers). They are quite good if one is interested in the subject.
ISTM as an outsider to the field like the need to medicalize everything and make a diagnosis in order to get psychiatric treatment covered by insurance or Medicare or Medicaid warps the hell out of diagnostic criteria.
I think it varies. There are a lot of subschools of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts tend to be artistic, literary and politically liberal. I'm sure these leanings push them in the direction of thinking homosexuality is not a dysfunction, and psychoanalytic theory is so vague and so independent of empirical tests that I'm sure it's possible to adjust one's personal version of psychoanalytic theory to make it consistent with all kinds of ideas that are driven by political leanings, wutz kool at the moment, etc.
I suspect nothing will actually stop the NYT taking you out of context. You’ll probably just get something stupider about the Ns being a dog whistle: “Scott Alexander drops N bombs in article comparing pedophilia to homosexuality.”
I hope it does cause any readers who see it out of context to go back to the original article because its funny as hell.
But also, the idea Scott is writing about is extremely taboo, even in context. People aren't ready for it. We have too much cultural and religious thinking that elevates fatalism, determinism and what's 'natural' as justification for who we are supposed to be.
I just think that is silly and counter-productive. If someone wants to quote this in a hostile way, he or she could simply say that the author is aware of how bad it sounds and so wrote the most objectionable parts in a sort of code with the idea that it would dissuade quotation. But translated back into ordinary English it reads as follows: [insert the text without the extraneous letters]. With that explanation there would be no journalistic problem with quoting the real sentences being communicated without regard to any added characters.
>"You’ll probably just get something stupider about the Ns being a dog whistle: “Scott Alexander drops N bombs in article comparing pedophilia to homosexuality.”
huh. That group seems.. pretty intense. Is ir generally just a "hate rationalism cause its not hard left" thing?
I think there are probably valid crtiqiues of tendencies and ideas that are common to x-rationalist circles andI'm sure there are some sketchy individuals, but they seem like, really really intensely angry that rationalism is a thing.
I personally feel like... so what. We know there are people who are going to permute everything through their political tribal lens.
Why should we care anymore that the NYT will do it then that some Muslim will think "these people dont believe Allah is the one true God so they are all evil followers of Satan?"
Yes, this has always been a weird thing about "Born this Way" moral arguments. Each of us is born with certain tendencies we want very much to transcend, some of which would be immoral to indulge. You can't sidestep ethics with appeals to biology.
I believe the reference is to Crowley's Thelema ("'Do what thou wilt' shall be the whole of the Law"), which is literally a Satanic philosophy*. So I think that addition breaks the intended meaning.
*Crowley renamed himself Aleister in order that his name add up to 666, and claimed the title "Master Therion" - "Therion" means "beast" and also adds up to 666.
Sorry, but Crowley's philosophy was NOT Satanic. It was, however, definitely non-christian. And he was making things up as he went along (allegedly with "spiritual" inspiration). If you want Satanic look up Anton Lavey. I found Crowley's philosophy an incoherent mix of anarchism and authoritarianism. This is probably because he drew on multiple sources, including Hinduism.
That said, he *did* work to present an image of a Satanist, but that was pure PR.
I interpret "born this way" as an appeal to the same cultural sympathies that helped race relations make real gains in the late 20th century. Homosexuality is at the very least more mutable than race, so your point is taken. But positively affirming the ethics of homosexuality wasn't a winning strategy when progress was being pushed for. I'm not surprised "born this way" got as much traction as it did.
Plus, this isn't like anger issues or nail biting or some objectively bad thing. If someone likes the way they are and they aren't hurting anyone, why change?
People are born unvaxxed and their rights are very restricted if they don't take vaccine. One could say the unvaxxed help virus circulate, but this is at best, probabilistic. Similarly, a great host of diseases are more effictively spread by homosexual men than by heterosexual contacts, due to e.g. alternating passive and active roles (not possible in heterosexuals), greater desire to engage in group sex, etc.etc.
No I don't. Most virus-friendly way is to insert penis into anus (and probability of passing infection is depedant on direction), and women lack the former. Dildos, ropes etc. don't change that.
People generally think of "harm" in diffeent ways; direct harm or social harm. Both traditionall moral conservatives and progressives have ideas of "social harm" whereas libertarians tend to foucs on "direct harm".
As an example, there are places where people are not allowed to do things on their own prpoerty. The libertarian view says "the thing this person does on their property doesnt cause me any harm." The social ethical view says "this person lowers my properrty values thus brings me harm" or "brings down the neoghborhood" or some such.
So sexual behavior that is consensual doesnt cause any type of direct harm- the "harm" you're talking about is a 'social" harm, i.e., some forms of sex increase the risk of disease transimision which has negative effects on cost to society etc.
But generally the people who think of "harm" are thinking in two very distinct ways.
Furthermore, the reality is most people in our cultural spheres think of bpth but draw the lines differently- the have their own ideas of what is personal autonomy versus social harm.
I literally just wrote a 1000 words on how WRONG this claim is in the recent “when do we get political backlashes” thread! To avoid you having to refer back to that, let me cut an paste:
I think that at least part of the answer requires an *honest* understanding of why the "losing" side is against whatever the issue is. Such honesty is, of course, not exactly common...
In the case of gay rights, I think the explanation is pretty simple. The issue of gayness (being honest now, as opposed to the usual story) I think was primarily viewed by its opponents as set of anti-bourgeois values and morals. And why wouldn't it have been so? In the late 60s/early 70s gayness presented as an all-party all-the-time lifestyle built on endless drugs, zero personal responsibility, and destruction of the family:
The infamous 1972 Gay Men’s Liberation demands looked to most people like a demand for legalized pedophilia and does the usual political yutting thing of throwing in multiple demands that have zero to do with gayness but an awful lot to do with making themselves unpopular with most of America.
Read the above document. THAT is what most people thought they were protecting America from in the 1970s, and who can blame them...
What happened in, I guess the 90s, is that a smart enough group of gay people managed to wrest control of the agenda away from these lunatics and worked hard to ensure that the ONLY issue on the table was gayness. Not gayness and how the military sucks. No gayness and how the family should be abolished. Not gayness and drug legalization. NO OTHER CRAP except gayness and laws related to that. And it turns out that, big fscking surprise, Americans did not have a problem with gayness per se, once it was stripped of the lunacy.
To the extent that other agendas like "racism" or "sexism" win without backlash, it would be by following the same agenda. But it appears that both of these are in too deep in terms of having defined a totalizing world view that is anti-bourgeois and anti most of what Americans support (including such basics as decency, honesty, truth, and rationality).
In a sense I think you have the story backwards. Both race and sex got most of what was reasonable in the late 60s and early 70s, but were not content to take the win and build on that; they created a backlash by refusing to take yes for an answer.
Gay rights stand out as being a rare case in history where common sense prevailed, where the winning group was content to accept its winnings, shut up, and stop fighting. If gay marriage had immediately been followed by other items on that 1972 agenda ("Americans remain as homophobic as ever, until they are willing to destroy that most homophobic and repressive institution of all, the family!!!") yes, there would have been, and would continue to be, massive backlash.
More generally, if Y is a more extreme request than X...
...if you actually want Y, bundle X with Y.
...if you actually want X, unbundle Y from X.
This reminds me of a warning to be careful about people for whom your goals are only a mean to achieve their goals. Wasn't obvious why you should care. Even if they care about your goals instrumentally, they will still help you achieve them, right? But one possible problem is they might bundle your requests with their specific requests, because they do not care if it decreases the probability of your requests succeeding, as long as it increases the chance of their requests.
But... if Y is much more prominent than X, then you might want to bundle X temporarily in order to raise it up the prominence ladder to the point that it can stand alone (at which point you unbundle it).
There is a great deal to this. But it misses an important part of the history, which is why the GLF were so radical in the 1970s.
The Mattachine Society had been asking for gay rights on a "just gayness" basis from the 1950s and getting absolutely nowhere. By allying with all these other radical groups, the GLF were able to get gayness onto the radical agenda - if the GLF is demanding an end to the Vietnam war, then supporters of the end of the Vietnam war would be more favourably inclined to the GLF.
What happened afterwards is not so much what you have as the 1990s, but that the existing moderate pro-gay groups (from the Mattachines to the Gay Rights National Lobby of the 1970s to the Human Rights Campaign since 1980) were able to get traction in a way that they hadn't until the late sixties/early seventies - because they got traction in opposition to the GLF and other radicals.
This is a pretty common thing: there are both radical and moderate supporters of a cause, the moderates are unable to bring initial attention to that cause, while the radicals can bring that attention. But it's the moderates who get the cause actually implemented.
There are still plenty of radical anti-family gay activists. It's just that HRC has nothing to do with them and the media largely doesn't report on them.
I'm not too familiar with this, but I do wonder if age played a role - lots of people are anti-family in their youth, then change their mind as they get older. I'm sure there are some people who stick with their convictions, but it wouldn't surprise me if many of the people who were in the GLF ended up becoming more moderate supporters a couple of decades later.
Absolutely. Also many GLFers were just gay people who were angry and "weren't going to take it any more" (as that generation put it) - they didn't endorse the whole agenda, and certainly didn't endorse the linkages that GLF had created. But they endorsed the radical noisy tactics of the GLF, and radical noisy tactics tend to be organised by radical people who are usually keen on multiple radical things and support whatever the current broad radical agenda is.
There are always two issues - why things happened as they did in the past, and what is the relevance to today. I was more concerned with the relevance to today aspect, along with clarifying the history.
Relevance to today is that we see the same over and over again. Consider, for example, BLM.
Let's consider one way BLM could have played out.
BLM advocates could have said "police violence is a problem for all Americans, let's all work together to try to ensure that it is tracked, that it is punished where appropriate, that it is reduced". The slogan could have been, I don't know, All Lives Matter...
But of course that was the path not followed, and people who tried to go down this path, that police violence is a problem no matter what the circumstances were accused of being racist and scorned.
Now how should one interpret this? *I* interpret it (and I think most Americans agree with me) that the real goal here, for the activists, is not police violence, it is "ways to make whitey feel guilty". And so anything that solves the police violence problem but does not make whitey feel guilty (and hell, maybe reduces the salience of some aspect of white guilt) is not a path to be pursued. Leninist "heighten the contradictions" as opposed to liberal "solve the problem as much as possible".
The gay case is interesting because it shows (again IMHO) just how reasonable Americans are when a reasonable case is presented to them. BLM, for example, could have chosen to go down that path. They did not, and I believe they deliberately chose not to go down that path, fully aware of (and desirous of) the consequences.
I guess I understand it differently - that if radicals don't go out and piss a lot of people off, then there's no way that moderates get the political opportunity to achieve something.
I think a large part of the difference between us is that I see this as a battle between two groups (of radicals and moderates or Leninists and liberals or whatever you want to call them) where one is better at getting attention and the other is better at converting that attention into effective action - while you see it as a tactical choice by a more homogenous group of people.
To me, you can't stop the radicals being idiots. Sometimes you have to publicly scold them, sometimes you have to just ignore them and concentrate on doing sensible things, sometimes you have to protect them from an overreaction from the other side. But you're not going to stop there being people who want whatever it is that they want.
What it is that they want is a separate question. I think they are themselves a very varied group, some want white people to feel guilty, some want to abolish the police, some want to abolish the entire concept of enforcing laws, some want to bring the revolution, whether that be an authoritarian communist one or a chaotic anarchist one - and some are just angry at the police for beating up and killing black people and want to express their rage and haven't really got as far as wanting a specific solution.
One of the things I've learned about politics from thirty-something years in various political organisations is that everything is factional, and every statement, every policy, every manifesto, every slogan is the result of negotiations between factions and usually reflects much more the internal dynamics of those factions than it does have anything to do with intent on how people outside will think about it. The ability of any political leader to prioritise how the mass of people on the outside will consider what you are saying/doing/proposing over the internal factional dynamics is what generally makes for effective political leadership, and it's a rare talent - you have to both know what will be effective messaging and policy and also be able to win the internal faction fight to let you use it.
You're right that you can't stop stupid. But you don't have to valorize it!
We have enough experience from history to know how these things work out.
The Whigs gave us 1688, the Jacobins gave us 1789. The progressives and the Fabian Society gave us Social Democracy, communists gave us the USSR. MLK gave us the passage of the civil rights laws, Malcolm X gave us the backlash that persists.
I don't see why society (broadly understood) is making excuses for why these people are "valuable", let alone treating them as heroes. They are dividers, not uniters, and I reject the very premise that they "accelerate" change; instead they create precisely the environment where change is not possible until catastrophe.
("These people" is not left or right; it refers broadly to people of the "my way or the highway persuasion", people who are unwilling to accept either compromise or allies with only limited overlapping aims. These people are poison to the entire project of politics because they are conceptually opposed to the compromise that is the essence of politics, and enjoy the act of burning down the world by labelling as enemies anyone who is not 100% committed to every detail of their current ideology [which can, of course, turn on a dime. There's a reason the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was a touchstone for identifying the type, or why tankie is such an effective [and accurate...] insult.])
Black Lives Matter was specifically focused on the problem of police misconduct as it relates to its disproportionate impact on black people. This isn't to dismiss the issue of police misconduct and subsequent impunity generally, but to to focus attention specifically on racial discrimination. It's an assertion that the rights and well being of black people matter too. Responding to this with, "well, all lives matter" at best misses the point, and more nefariously was adopted by people as a counter-slogan meant to actively dismiss and mock their concerns.
There is no indication that american blacks are disproportionately impacted by 'police misconduct' once the frequency of black crime rates are controlled for. (They're somewhat more more likely to be subject to use-of-force when arrested but actually less likely to be killed during arrest, relative to whites, and unarmed men of any race in the US are more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by police.)
practically speaking as an anti-poloice activist, I do se the point that prior to BLM there was an increasing consensus from americans of all stripes the police wer out of control and had to be reigned in, whereas BLM practically ahd the effect of making it more of a tribal racial issue that probably increased racism (a racist who sees an american or a human have their rights violated might start to have more sympathy when they think "that could happen to me or smeone I carr about"- by making it a "this only happens to black people and not white people" (which isnt true, though true proportionally) the movement was hurt and more people supported the police and became more racist.
This was my practical observation, and I think part of the reason was you had people sort of attach other political agendas to the poice reform movement which were less palatable, i.e., the "woke" agenda, as the practical organization of BLM groups became domiated by these politics and there were cases for example where libertarian police reformers were explicitly harrassed and kicked out of blm groups for being opposed to the police bot not supporting the broader poltiical agenda.
As someone who was long an anti-police activist, I was personally quite willing to let the racial issue "take the lead" so to speak but this often wasnt enough and people who wanted to support the caiuse were harrased for not agreeing with seperte politival issues.
I agree that the normalisation of gays and lesbians played a big role in their public acceptance. Obviously opinions will differ within any movement, but from what I've heard gay marriage was initially a controversial proposal within the movement - the more radical members didn't even want it and had other concerns, while the more pragmatic saw it as too far out of the Overton window. The idea of gays and lesbians wanting to marry probably did change people's opinions on the movement, challenging some previous preconceptions of who they were and what they wanted - in many ways it's a very conservative demand to make!
"Gay rights stand out as being a rare case in history where common sense prevailed, where the winning group was content to accept its winnings, shut up, and stop fighting"
It sure doesn't seem like it. What about the "rainbow bombardment" of our children these days? Not content to have each person do their own thing in their own bedrooms (which I think 99.99% of us are all in favour of), we are now trying to force the teaching of homosexuality and transsexuality as equally biologically normal and equally morally valid as heterosexuality... in public schools... to six-year-olds... apparently to make sure that no one feels bad about themselves...
Given that, as Scott mentions above, there is little evidence so far to support a wholly genetic or congenital cause for homosexuality, this means it's cause must be at least partly sociocultural. This does not mean it is a choice, just that some genetics, together with an unchosen set of environmental factors seem to be the most likely cause. And if homosexuality is even partly decided by sociocultural factors, parents should be free to not wish that lifestyle to be encouraged in their children (as atheists might wish, in a public school, to not have religion taught to their children, or vegetarians might not wish for their children to be taught to eat meat).
So if the gay movement had stopped at the achievement of being treated with respect in doing what they want to do in the privacy of their own homes, that would have been great and everybody would have been happy with that. But that hasn't happened. There is not an episode of any new Disney series which goes by where my young children don't get homosexual themes explicitly thrown in their face. It has become an ideology which must be imposed...
This is correct, but I think it doesn't quite get to the real point.
As I get older, I keep getting more convinced that the relevant dueling values are between 'sex is for entertainment' and 'sex is for reproduction'. There's always been tension between the two, or at least for as long as the 'oldest profession' has been in business, and I don't think any society can claim to be entirely one side or the other. Neither can claim to be totally correct, but there is enough fundamental behavioral truth to them that neither is wrong. As such, there are strong reasons 'sex is for reproduction' has stayed around, most of which are probably associated with unchanging truth that sex is an act which may have life-long consequences for everyone involved, and treating it casually is a recipe for potential tragedy.
The LGBT community is a focal point for the underlying entertainment/reproduction debate in that basing your identity around who you want to have sex with implicitly assumes 'sex is for entertainment'. The government weighing in on this via the schools thus firmly puts a massive finger on one side of the scales. What this has generated is people that were told 'sex is entertainment' and when hit with the natural consequences supporting 'sex is reproduction' (or just the internal contradictions in 'sex is entertainment') they push even harder.
That is fine, but I just want to say that 'entertainment' isn't the right word for me. Sex as an itch that must be scratched, is closer, but still not quite right.
I agree with this. The biggest problem with LGBT activism isn't the bad behaviour of a minority of gay men with respect to STDs and borderline-pedophilia (though that's not a trivial problem.)
The biggest problem is that destigmatising LGBT lifestyles means that your wider society has to collectively pretend that having children isn't the healthy and normative thing to do (something that gay men, lesbians and transsexuals intrinsically have a harder time with), and/or pretend that there's nothing special about the nuclear family (as if stable pair-bonding or the protective instinct of biological parents was irrelevant to childrens' safety.)
Equality is nihilism. The only way we can all have equal value is if nothing we do matters.
>having children isn't the healthy and normative thing to do
>there's nothing special about the nuclear family
Yes and yes. Both are things people get pressured into just because. People should be free to choose the type of family, including the number of children, based on whatever works for them, and not because their parents demand grandchildren or something like that.
"There is little evidence so far to support a wholly genetic or congenital cause for homosexuality, this means it's cause must be at least partly sociocultural"
Twin or sibling studies don't rule out congenital causes, and 'environment' doesn't necessarily mean 'sociocultural factors'- it could just mean random hormone fluctuations in the womb, for example.
With that said, I broadly agree that the "lunatics" name99 refers to don't appear to have disappeared anywhere and it certainly doesn't look like their 60s/70s PR tactics were purely instrumental.
Leaving aside transsexuality for a moment, since most people have a harder time with that one, it seems like homosexuality /is/ equally biologically normal and morally valid as heterosexuality. Not as common perhaps, but neither is being left handed vs right, which was once persecuted more than homosexuality.
We're teaching six-year-old kids in public schools about sex /already/, often by government mandate, so everyone's faux-shock about this issue is pretty ridiculous (or insidious). Acknowledging the fact that some people like to have sex with others of the same sex is /not/ advocating for children to start doing so, any more than teaching them about sex is advocating for them to start.
Just like teaching that many people believe in different religions is not the same as advocating or preaching religion, and explaining how it's perfectly fine that some people eat meat is not the same as forcing vegetarian children to eat it.
You seem to think that people want children to be forced or argued or even encouraged into homosexuality, which has never been on any school's agenda, and no advocate would tell you is an actual goal, it's just a weird strawman conservatives are madly fighting against.
People just want to be acknowledged for who they are and not stigmatized while they aren't hurting anyone. Which is /absolutely/ a thing that six-year-olds should be taught in all arenas, which includes sex, since we're already teaching them about that anyways.
"Leaving aside transsexuality for a moment, since most people have a harder time with that one, it seems like homosexuality /is/ equally biologically normal and morally valid as heterosexuality."
I'm not sure why I'm being notified for this remark, but... again, as Scott explained fairly clearly in the original article, that's probably not true. Biologically speaking homosexuality and pedophilia are likely to be both be "sexual targeting errors", and can be considered maladaptive insofar as they reduce the reproductive fitness of the host.
The main counter-arguments don't add up. (Kin selection isn't supported empirically. And although homosexuality is more common than would be expected given the fitness penalty, you could easily say the same for colour-blindness or endometriosis. We don't have to *persecute* people for being colour-blind, but at the same time nobody bends over backwards to explain how colour-blindness must be 'normal'.)
Huh, all I can say to that is we are working from different meanings of the word "normal" here. I think that if we treated homosexuality the same way we treated my slight color-blindness (which is extremely common and, in my usage of the word at least, super-duper normal), then that would be fine.
There's basically no stigma associated with most common-but-mildly-maladaptive traits, as you mention, and that seems like it fits the fairly colloquial meaning of normal I'm familiar with at least. No bending-over-backwards required. No one is trying to say it's /ideal/, it's just perfectly normal. Replace with "common and acceptable" if you like.
If I had an A/B selector for my own child, I wouldn't choose homosexuality, since dating and relationships are hard enough as it is without that wrinkle. But since no-one has that selector, I certainly want my child growing up in a culture that thinks it's perfectly fine, just in case that's how he turns out, through no choice on anyone's part.
And, for what it's worth, language does have power, and classifying that group of people as "abnormal" does not seem to lend itself to creating that culture, despite it being true for some meanings of the complicated word normal. I would love to see the negative connotation taken away from the concept of "abnormal", but that's a dumb hill I certainly don't want to die on.
As to the morally valid part, I assume we both believe there is a vast gulf between pedophelia and homosexuality on that score.
yeah, reading that dcoument it mostly sounds reasonable to me. Now, I dont support forcing people not to discriminate, but i think they shouldnt, and the rest sounds fine.
If someone likes the way they are, and they aren’t hurting anyone, then why does it matter whether they were born the way they are, or they chose to be this way, or it happened in some way other than genetics or free choice?
It turns out that a lot of people aren’t convinced by that question, so “born this way” is a rhetorically effective move. But it is morally problematic because it conditions acceptance on an empirical claim that could easily be false, rather than on a better moral theory.
I think partly this is an arguments-as-soldiers thing. It was historically easier to argue for gay rights by framing homosexuality as something you were born with, rather like race. And at least some arguments for widespread societal acceptance of homosexuality would be undermined by arguments that homosexuality is heavily affected by environment and social pressure. But neither of those tell us that the born-this-way explanation is correct or incorrect.
Seems like most of it is easily solved by just accepting that "born this way" is really just a stand-in for "didn't choose this", which is the reality. Either way, the same acceptance should apply.
I think the "Born this way" argument is more a counter-argument against people who shout homosexuality is unnatural. The default opinion is that any behavior is morally neutral; you have to argue why a behavior is morally wrong. "Born this Way" are counter-arguments to homosexuality being wrong; not an argument that homosexuality is right.
Without supporting the sexually conservative viewpoint I'd like to take a minute to explain the notion of Natural Law because the "Born this way" argument consistently uses a strawman of the Natural Law position.
Natural Law was a moral movement that influenced the Sophists and other ancient Greek philosophical groups and was basically adopted by early Christian apologists who wanted to use the hip lingo of their day. The terms of Natural Law are not used with perfect consistency, but the question of whether something was 'natural' or not never had to do with whether or not that thing was found in nature. So the constant litany of examples of this or that behavior being 'natural' because someone found an animal doing it are missing the point, either accidentally or deliberately.
Natural Law is an attempt to construct a system of ethics which is higher than convention or the status quo, and can therefore be used to criticize the status quo.
If you find animals defecating next to their drinking water, this is not proof that getting poop in your drinking water is 'natural.' However if you find proof that defecating near drinking water spreads disease in humans and makes them sick then you can argue that allowing poop in the drinking water is 'against nature.' And you can still make that argument even if the king himself or a majority vote or a thousand-year-tradition has determined the position of the outhouse.
Your framing of Natural Law doesn't seem to make as much sense at first blush. Specifically, it seems like you'd have to assert that getting sick is against nature (can I use "unnatural" here? Not sure...). But getting sick and being sick seems like a very natural thing for humans to do from time to time.
It is "natural" for people to get sick in the sense that getting sick is a thing that happens.
It is "not natural" to be sick because a living things "natural" state is to be well: the only way we recognize a difference between sickness and health is that sickness is an abnormality that is different from the "natural" functioning of an organism.
Natural in this sense means "According to somethings nature" and not "the oppisite of artificial." So, for instance, a dog "naturally" has four legs because part of the nature of a dog is that it is a four legged animal. The fact that some dogs are born with two or three legs doesn't change the fact dogs are "naturally" four legged.
Well, then apparently it's either not natural to be a ginger, or completely natural to be gay, as these two things have about the same prevalence in the human population.
Whether something is natural or not in this scheme has nothing to do with frequency but is about whether it is in line with the Teleology of the species.
"It is "not natural" to be sick because a living things "natural" state is to be well"
Is it, though? I would bet that a large majority of living animals at any given time is suffering from at least one significant injury or disease. Organisms that are completely healthy must be a rarity in nature.
That is, unless you interpret "natural state" to mean "best possible state", in which case "natural" becomes just a synonym of "good", and Natural Law degenerates into a tautology.
You will indeed better understand "natural law" if you interpret "natural" to be "best possible state", although that goes a smidge too far in the other direction.
A dog is "naturally" a creature with four legs, eyes, nose, digestive system, waggy tail, etc. If the dog gets cancer and his digestive system is blocked and no longer functions he has moved away from his "natural" state into an "unnatural" one. One way we know this is that the purpose of the digestive system is to turn food into nutrients that the body needs, and if cancer is blocking his intestines so that the food cannot pass and the nutrients cannot be absorbed then the digestive system is being frustrated in accomplishing it's "natural function".
Actions that make you sick might be said by some to be opposed by nature. Getting sick would generally be a negative *consequence* of an action, not an action itself.
I'm not saying that Natural Law is a good or coherent system or a rigorous system, especially as the ancients conceived of it. I'm saying that people keep going back to trying to define 'Natural' (a term of art with a distinctly non-modern meaning, in context) as 'that which is commonly observed' rather than 'according to an intended higher purpose' (Catholic) or "that which avoids harmful consequences." (more sophist/pagan)
If someone wanted to make a natural law argument in favor of same sex relationships it's not enough to say "bonobos are often observed having same sex relationships so such relationships are natural." You'd have to argue that such relationships were *purposeful* or *adaptive.* Which you could do. People argue that same sex relationships in bonobos help diffuse tension and promote bonding, for example.
In which case you'd need to consider the molecular machinery of a rotating flagellum on some single-celled organism as possible prior art, along with hip joints, and that one type of flea which uses interlocking gears to ensure symmetrical leg motion when jumping.
My impression is that the majority of people break under torture. If one person is being tortured into giving up the location of the rebel base, and another person isn't, then the torture is really the most morally important fact here. I don't think it's fair to say "everyone faces temptations to give up rebel bases, I don't know why you [who are being tortured] couldn't resist them like I [who am not being tortured] did." This is true even if the second person is being tortured in some kind of incredibly weak way (like being in a room 5 degrees warmer than is comfortable) such that there is no clear yes-being-tortured vs. not-being-tortured distinction.
I also don't think this metaphor depends on "literally everyone breaks under torture" to work. If one in a billion people can avoid breaking, does the metaphor still hold? One in a thousand? One in ten?
I thought that's what moral heroism is. People who eat meat enjoy eating meat, but if you think not eating meat is ethically positive despite losing out on eating meat, then you're doing something good. You still might have the same desire, but you choose not to act on it. If someone has a very strong desire, as in desiring to stop being tortured, it would still be ethical for them to not erm, give up the rebel base.
Based on Israel's and America's experiences dropping torture from police interrogation, I would say: torture reliably makes people *talkative* but doesn't reliably make them *honest.*
You don't get more *honesty* by using force, just more *verbosity*. Your captives remain perfectly aware that they can lie to you, and continue to lie, no matter how much you beat them, as long as they think you've no way to tell the truth.
That might work *if* you've taken the right guy in the first place. If the suspect actually doesn't know where the body is, your scenario plays just the same, until you find the body by sheer accident or the prisoner dies from the torture.
I can absolutely guarantee that you will get my debit card PIN code out of me through _very_ brief torture. Presumably this holds true for virtually everyone else as well.
This seems trivially true. Muggers exist and work from the theory that *threatening* bodily harm is a great way to get people to hand over their wallets. People could try to lie and say that they don't have one, or whatever, but mugging is very successful anyway.
I think society has developed some kind of need to pretend that torture doesn't work because a society where torture is an option is a society where torture is overused and we're dealing with a lot of traumatized people. I think the alternative is a society that toughens up and a wide range of petty tortures (getting punched, someone screaming at you, etc.) are ineffective for most people. This appears to be the norm in prior generations, maybe up until the 80s or 90s.
Of course, these previous generations were less psychologically healthy in other ways, so there's some give and take involved.
Yeah, this is weird. We can all agree that torture is at the very least _almost_ always wrong, and the problem is _that_ it often works - if it didn't, it would be far less of a problem, after all, as there'd be no point.
Current society seems to have this bizarre idea that evil things also don't work, and you're wicked for suggesting they might, as though efficiency and moral quality were the same thing.
Meh, current society seems more like it's (correctly) arguing against a policy that allows torture, and will, via some motivated cognition, take any ammunition they can get. The story of humanity. I think most people would agree that mugging is effective.
Still, torture for actually usueful purposes (i.e. not some random civilian's PIN #) is probably only effective in some pretty specific types of situations, and cases where it's the best (not just the most expedient) option are surely vanishingly rare and nearly impossible to correctly identify.
In Stalin's Russia, about 1 in 50 condemned officials resisted all torture and refused to sign the confessions drawn up for them.
So "1 in 50" is my guess for how many people completely resist even pretend cooperation with their torturers.
For "reveal the rebel base" or "kill your own mother while I watch" scenarios, where the cooperation is much less superficial than "sign this confession," I'd expect a higher number.
I think this probably depends entirely on how painful the torture is vs. how bad doing what they want would be, and how much the victim believes in their cause. I'm reluctant to put any generic numbers on it.
> Is torture helpful in getting people to be more honest and not just make things up? Moderately opposed evidence.
Torture as a threat ("tell me what I want to know or I'll continue to torture you") doesn't shield against people making things up (presumably, to stop the torture at least for a while).
I wonder if the following was tried: 1) assign tortured person cognitively demanding task (like a video game), automatically give them (more or less intense) electric shocks if they don't perform well enough. 2) while they're playing, ask the questions.
Lying is cognitively taxing, so it might be ~impossible if torture-game's difficulty is set properly for a given person (but make it too difficult, and they might not be able to tell you even the truth).
Compulsive liars will lie more easily in this scenario. People who have to stop and think through their lies will struggle to lie. This is the same theory that goes into interrogation using loud noises, bright lights, people yelling at them, etc.
The confessions almost always included confirmation of false accusations against others, and the balance between «those we will kill no matter what» and «are you an enemy of the people that you let the now-known crimes of X slide?» in the works of the system is probably still unknown (and from some evidence prisoners seemed to err on the side of the latter), so the difference with «reveal the base» is less in superficiality and more in the risk for captors to be lead into a literal minefield.
But doesn't context matter to the sample? A condemned official in the USSR in 1935 would know that there are zero even theoretical limits on what the secret police can do to him, etc. Russia had zero cultural history of anything but totalitarian government, etc. His situation is hopeless -- complete resistance is basically "suicide by cop" -- and everybody knows it. So only the most truly stubborn and/or pain-resistant and/or suicidal individuals would stick with complete resistance.
Whereas someone in a different cultural/historical context but in the same sort of room with the same sort of investigators demanding at him to give up the info -- say a Brit or an American -- might not be as completely convinced that the situation is hopeless. They might keep demanding a lawyer no matter how many times they're told by the interrogators that nobody knows where they are, they have no rights, etc. Just because they grew up with a different baseline expectation -- however unrealistic it may be in the moment -- than a 1930s Russian did.
It doesn't seem clear that the resistance rate in Stalin's USSR would map into other less-extreme cultural contexts, in other words.
> would know that there are zero even theoretical limits on what the secret police can do to him
Most likely many of them did believe (usually mistakenly) that police still tries to keep the investigation in some contact with reality.
> Russia had zero cultural history of anything but totalitarian government
No recent history of non-absolutist government, yes (short fluke was quite clearly a fluke…). However if we are talking about court system, Russia had half a century history of a trial by jury system where lawyers openly argued for jury nullification with nonnegligible chances of success. It was clear, of course, that Bolshevik court system was willing to just kill for «interests of revolution» reasons; however early red terror did include announcing who and why, for some values of «why», is persecuted. Switching to the mode where it is OK for an accusation to be beyond forgery and all the way into absurdist prose was a change many missed…
> complete resistance is basically "suicide by cop"
Some did not know, some had no chance to survive either way, though…
(Not sure what fraction of people initially destined for a non-lifelong prison term refused to sign a confession and still got a non-lifelong prison term, that probably also has happened)
> They might keep demanding a lawyer no matter how many times they're told by the interrogators that nobody knows where they are, they have no rights, etc.
Those might break at the stage where interrogators start torturing their relatives before their eyes (which the 1930's USSR political police have done at least in some cases — not sure how often things reached that stage).
Was this a case of "you will be shot anyway", or did they have a chance of survival if they held out against the torture? This makes a giant difference, after all.
Note that torture was applied not only to those they planned to shoot, but also to those they planned to imprison. I wouldn't exclude existence of circumstances where the confession reduced the eventual prison term, and existence of other circumstances where it made the sentence harsher. (Of course what the people under torture believed themselves about this is hard to establish…)
I've heard it claimed (can't vouch for this, though) that a weird legalism was in place, where convictions often required proof (which was difficult and annoying, especially when someone was innocent) or a confession (much easier!). So the confession might not have been just window-dressing.
Not dissimilar from some *actual* witch trials, come to think of it.
I would make the point that the religious conservative perspective doesn’t exactly excuse heterosexuals from needing to resist sexual temptation.
Nor for that matter are people excused from resisting the temptation to commit other sins, regardless of how much they naturally want to. If you happen to be born with a particularly bad temper, too bad, Thou Still Shalt Not Murder.
"If you don't want people to take your stuff out of context, then stop using shit examples to make a contestable claims."
Congratulations, you have just demonstrated why Scott needed to put Ns up like Christmas ornaments around the words.
"How very dare you trample on my toes about something I think is peachy!" is what your comment sounds like to me. He's not saying "gayness bad", he's saying "if you're looking for biological bases only, these two things are not that distinct in which has and which hasn't one".
And you demonstrate precisely the politicised angle which drives these decisions and why the pure biological factors only approach is not going to fly.
"Pedophillia has no evolutionary fitness advantage"
How do you know? Why are men of all ages attracted to a narrow band of female age range, while women can be attracted to an older age range? The evopsych story there is fertility versus proven provider.
The younger the girl is when the man has sex with her, the likelier to be at the peak of fertility, he can be sure that the children are his as he is the most likely to be her first/main sexual partner, and the longer span of reproductive years she will have. That this gets knocked about so that some paedophiles are attracted to children too young to be past puberty doesn't matter, if there are hebephiles who like girls of twelve upwards, then there's a lot of reproductive advantage there.
Men who like young boys (ephebophiles) are no worse off for evolutionary fitness advantage, in re: the gay uncle theory, than the gay uncle who likes them a bit older. And the classical instances of gay uncles are indeed men who like them young, not men in same-age steady relationships. Paederasty has been the model of male same-sex relationships, not thirty or forty year old men living in quasi-wedded bliss. Then you go on to get married and have kids as your duty to society, even if you prefer fucking twinks. So long as you do the social role of propagating the family, you can sleep with boys and have that be tolerated or accepted.
>Pedophillia has no evolutionary fitness advantage
>How do you know?
What matters is the amount of offspring a female can give a man over the long-term not her current fertility. A 30yo woman is over half way through her reproductive lifspan while an 8yo girl has all of her fertile years ahead of her. Even though an ancestral man would have to wait some years for his 8yo wife to reach reproductive age he could still potentially get double the amount of offspring out of her than a 30yo wife.
It would have made more biological sense for ancestral men to chase after 8yo girls than 30yo women and we see this happening in modern primitive foragers. In a lot of these primitive societies it's normal for men to marry little girls before puberty and these little virgin girls are more sought after and highly prized than the adult women who have already had children.
A certain amount of pedophilic attraction does make evolutionary sense for men. But don't expect evolutionary psychologists and psychiatrists to be objective about this. Attraction to minors is just about the biggest taboo in the West at the moment and the official position is that it must be completely abnormal and can't possibily be evolutionarily adaptive!
Also, being smaller and weaker than the man is one of the markers of femaleness -- it's common, though obviously not present in every male -female pairing. Seems to me that responsiveness to smallness and weakness may be some of what drives pedophilia in males. As a woman, I have no trouble understanding feeling tempted to have a sexual relationship that would do harm to someone. But even if you surgically removed my entire conscience I don't think I'd want to have sex with children. They're just not sexy to me. They too small, and just in the wrong category -- they way, say, parakeets are.
Generally speking though, it seems like pedophiles are explicitly attracted only to pre-pubescent girls (true pedophilkes here) It's not, "attracted to girls when they are pre pubescent nd then continue to be sexually attracted to them as they age".
My guess would be it is mre that sexual imprinting is very flexible, and the one thing we know to be a cause for pedophilia is to be sexually molested pre-pubescently.
Yes, and we don't know how big a part being molested as a child plays in someone's becoming a pedophile. It's very hard to get data, because a LOT of people are sexually abused as kids and never tell anyone, including earnest researchers. So if we find that say 20% of pedophiles were sexually abused as kids, we don't really know whether that percent is higher than baseline. Also at least one study found that pedophiles frequently lie about being as abused as kids, in hopes of being seen more kindly. So I think it's entirely possible that sexual attraction to children comes into being the same way all the other kinks do. It's just a very unfortunate kink to have, because you can't enact it without harming a child, and the whole world hates you.
And I don't think we really understand much about where kinks come from. My impression from reading about kinks and talking to kinksters is that it's mostly not imprinting. Adults into BDSM have vivid memories of BDSM-like experiences they had -- spankings they got or witnessed, movie scenes where somebody was tied up, etc -- but what they say about the events isn't that the event caused them to develop an interest in BDSM They say that it was the first time they became aware that BDSM-type interactions were fascinating and thrilling to them.
>There are distinct claims I make: homosexuality has an evolutionary fitness advantage. Pedophillia has no evolutionary fitness advantage.
How does that translate to "They aren't the same thing from a purely biological standpoint" ? Whether something is advantageous or not has nothing to do with whether it's nature or nurture (or politics).
>I am not taking a stance on morality.
You expressing concern about "Far right" people reading Scott's blog and agreeing with those things make me somewhat skeptical that you're completely value-neutral.
In a world where there are methods to avoid women getting pregnant, pedophilia could have enormous fitness advantages, because it's possible to have children specifically for the purpose of abusing them.
I'm sorry, can't the pedophile help his kin as much as the gay man? (Do I need to say I think practicing pedophilia is a crime? )
No one said the pedophile was acting out his urges, let alone on his own kin... Anyway how are any of my childless brothers different from each other, regardless of their sexual leanings?
Theyre not really different. None of them have their genes passed on, so it's largely irrelevant in this sense whether they're gay or not.
Hmm well almost, they all have (on average) the same number of genes in my kids ~ 1/4.
Total genetic similarility is irrelevant. We're talking about whether a particular trait gets passed on by means of the genes that code for it being replicated. If a gene codes for a trait that reduces that's gene's replication (i.e. not having kids due to being gay), then it will be selected against.
If any of your siblings lack the gene that makes them (occasionally) infertile, their non-infertility genes will be selected for and come to dominate the following generations.
One could also argue that the paedophile has a *greater* incentive than the gay uncle for his siblings to have lots of children and to help those children thrive. Maybe Uncle Virtuous MAP doesn't act on his impulses, but he's 'very good with children' and is always around to babysit and help out, whereas Uncle Gay is spending all his resources on attracting boy toys and splurging on roosters and hoops to impress them:
https://www.worldhistory.org/image/13546/ganymede-playing-with-a-hoop--rooster/
The problem is that there are so many 'just-so' stories around evolutionary psychology that we don't know that the gay uncle/gay aunt theory is anything close to reality. In some cultures the mother's brother is very important in the family, but that doesn't mean that the uncle is himself gay.
"trying to solve the riddle of eusociality"
Trying is the word, indeed. How many samples of real-world Gay Uncles do we have, where they invest time and money into their siblings' children?
If gay men today want kids, they can (if they can afford it) go the IVF and surrogacy route. So there is no bar (except money) to having their own biological offspring and investing in them, not in the nieces/nephews.
Yes, there's the traditional trope of the family dancing attendance on a rich, childless, elderly relative in hopes of getting favourable treatment in the will, but Rich Bachelor Uncle or Spinster Aunt need not be gay. They could as well be widow or widower, or their own kids died young.
The basic argument I'm seeing in the comments is that "homosexuality must have some evolutionary advantage or why would it persist?" and the Gay Uncle theory is an attempt to fit a suit of clothes for evolutionary advantage.
Well, by the same token, paedophilia must have some evolutionary advantage, or why would it persist? But homosexuality good, paedophilia bad, is the reaction there. *That* is why there can't be a pure objective science-based psychology manual, no matter what the hopes and wishes are.
This is a confused view of evolution. Reproductive fitness is the limit of the drunkards' walk. Things can happen that happen (in an evolutionary setting of the hunte gatherers) rarely enough that they dont negatively impac fitness. Maybe in post agriclutre society with endocrine disurptoes they happen more freqiently.
"Because of its genetic basis, there is strong evidence to imply that it is positively selected for,"
But the "genetic basis" for homosexuality is very weak! Heritability estimates are lower than most behavioral traits. The classic old ironyis that views on gay marriage are literally more heritable than being gay itself is!
I also made the point that I disagree with Scott that homosexuality is simply a case of faulty sexual imprinting with no evolutionary benefit.
But your last sentence is vile.
If you make contestable claims then you have no right to complain when bad faith journalists deliberately smear you.
That's rubbish. Every claim that anyone makes is contestable. Decent people just say "I disagree, and this is why.."
I also see no evolutionary advantage to paedophilia - but we could both be wrong about this. We don't know; this claim is contestable too.
Even more vile.
'You are not allowed to express that idea because I imagine that "literally Nazis" agree with it'
- is a line that has been used by the far left to shut down any questioning of the ideology they are trying to impose on the rest of us.
It has got so bad that to even suggest that it might be a bad idea to put rapists in female jails is "dangerous speech" and "hate speech". No thanks.
>"Homosexuals are pedophilles grooming your children" is right now, at this moment, spreading among the far-right.
There is a thousand thousand "Drag Show for Kids" and similar trends on twitter and tiktok already to fuel this, so I don't think the people who want to paint homosexuals as pedophilles are really in a deseprate want.
>He is of course opposed to negative coverage in large media outlets, and feels slighted by the NYT in particular. I do not care about that, and nobody really should.
Why ? I actually *do* really care about doxxing and the unfair treatment of ordinary people by those who wield a public pen. Scott is fortunately not exactly without power, but even he got his life intensely disrupted by the NYT. It sounds really tactless to say """Meh, so he quit his job and spent a year or so recalculating his entire lifestyle **Yawn** so what ?""". To say nothing of the countless people who got their life disrupted an order of magnitude worse and had nothing to do about it.
In contrast, I actually don't give the slightest shit about the latest panic about people equating homosexuality with paedophilia, 99% of it self-inflicted.
Scott is a lot more respected than WatchMeDoMakeupOnTikTok lady number 12055, so people will take his comparison more seriously than a tiktok trend, and I think it would be wise to consider the effects of expanding a harmful platform carefully.
Doxxing is distinctly awful &, whaddya know, can threaten the safety of the person doxxed and individuals around them including minors. It's weird that no one takes it seriously as an issue. Meanwhile, other topics about threatening the safety of minors cause people to absolutely lose their marbles. Strange.
The thing is, the word "harmful" here is doing an aweful amount of (undeserved) work. Comparing gays to paedophiles is not any more harmful than, say, (1) comparing right-wing advocates to facists, (2) comparing anti-abortion advocates to Al-Qaeda terrorists ("y'all Qaeda"), or (3) comparing parents concerned about their children's education (whether rightly or wrongly) to domestic terrorists.
Every single one of those groups rejects the comparison, every comparison is derogatory as well as violence-suggesting (what do you do to fascists or terrorists except spraying them with bullets ?), and yet I have never seen any objection to them from the same people who see comparing gays to paedophiles as beyond the pale.
Love it or hate it, you can say anything on the Internet. The entire success mythos of progressive ideology is that it started as a radical sect that initially parasitized the University institution then spread on to the Internet, becoming super-charged by the new medium's global interconnectivity. Feminists spent entire decades and several server farms to rage on men and their various behaviours and traits, comparing them to various repulsive and dehumanizing things in the process.
So it rings a bit hollow if, after all of this, after 40+ years of wokes\progressives freely dehumanizing their opponents and 20+ years of doing it on the internet, it's suddenly a crime to compare gays to paedophiles. Where was this decency when "Facist" was and is used to denote anyone who thinks "Woman" should only mean "Adult Human Female" ? Nowhere to be seen, as far as I can tell.
TL,DR; Meh, comparing gays to paedophiles is no big deal, and is no worse than what most movements on the side of gays themselves do.
>(Especially the blindness to the fluidity of sexuality, how many "gay" men have had children? Turns out you can hit both ways!)
Homosexuals are not bisexuals. I have never felt attraction to a woman. I probably never will. Lord knows I spent years trying to turn myself straight in my teens and early 20s, drenching myself in self-loathing in the process, before finally ripping the bandaid off and learning to just accept myself for what I am.
Yes, some strictly homosexual men marry women and have children within those relationships, but this is largely due to societal factors that are dying out in WEIRD societies. Trust me, there are no strictly homosexual men "hitting both ways".
I find the idea that everyone is bisexual deep down to be a common error that's obviously false. I see it a lot from bisexuals, unsurprisingly, but I also see it a lot from a certain type of politically liberal heterosexual.
Regarding the whole " everyone is bisexual deep down" argument...here's what I think. I think sexuality is a spectrum. Many people are on either end of the spectrum (straight/gay), while a select few are in the middle (bisexual). However, I actually think that a lot of people are mostly straight/gay, but not exactly. Like...I think that many straight men can recognize when they see another guy who's hot, even if they would never fuck them.
So...while I don't think that everyone is bisexual, I do think that a...moderately high percentage of people might not be perfectly straight or gay. But hey! That's just my guess, I could be completely wrong.
> and there have been many investigations into the ways that gay or lesbian aunts and uncles may help overall biological fitness of families within indigenious cultures.
But having a 'make gay babies gene' wouldn't be passed on, even if your siblings kids were more likely to survive. Their kids success is irrelevant, because those kids aren't the ones carrying the 'have gay babies' gene, so it can't be selected for! Even if it benefits the group overall, on the individual level, whoever has the most fertile offspring determine the genetic landscape of that population, and having non-gay kids (and the genes for this) makes having more fertile offspring much more likely.
>This also meshes well with the observation that humans are one of the few species that survive past menopause - there is an evolved preference for supporting the children of those in your immediate family. Their reproductive success is reproductive success for your genes as well!
This is completely different. Your kids have your genes, and being monopausal on net balance is likely to increase the rate YOUR genes propagate, hence your genes for eventually having menopause are passed on!
If your helping other people's kids, even those related to, it's not your genes being passed on, and if we're talking about a trait that makes you different than your family members (i.e. 'having gay babies' gene), then the gene for this trait won't be passed on, because them having fertile offspring is precisely because they lack this gene.
It doesn't matter if it benefits the group, no individual is evolutionarily incentivized to have infertile kids, because the genes cannot be passed on. And it doesn't even matter if you're strongly genetically related to your siblings. If you're the one with the gay babies gene and they're not, your gay babies gene doesn't get passed on. Even if a majority of your genes are tied up in that of your group, the specific trait of having gay babies cannot be passed on in this way.
>and evolutionarily ignorant!
This is a dumb thing to say.
You're the one positing a magical form of evolution where genes that code for not having your genes propagate are somehow being propagated more than the genes which don't code for this. This is magical thinking.
I'm not saying I agree with the axioms before the math, but redo your math friend. If a family has five kids, with one that doesn't reproduce and four that do, and each of the four kids shares a random 50% of their genes with the one that doesn't, that's a pretty decent chance that the four kids will pass on the genes the other has.
The ones that don't have gay babies genes are the ones that will pass on their non-gay-baby genes
It doesn't matter if you share a lot of genes with them. If they don't specifically have the gay baby gene, the gayness-as-reproduction-strategy- cannot possibly be passed on. Infertility CANNOT BE SELECTED FOR regardless of how much it benefits the group, because by definition the genes specifically for that mating strategy cannot propagate, and people without infertility genes, even if they share most of your other genes, will domiante future generations
> If your helping other people's kids, even those related to, it's not your genes being passed on
People who are related to you by blood (likely) share genes with you. This is what matters for evolutionary pressures. The percentage of shared genes is (likely) lower than with your own children but this is just difference in degree.
but humans evolved in groups. if one group survives because of its complex dynamics when others peroish, those duynamics are passed on- its an overlooked harder to measure aspect of evolution in social species where individuals cant survive withot the group.
Maybe you meant to reply to Goldman Sachs Occultist rather than me?
Those dynamics cannot possibly be passed on. Genes are what gets passed on, and if the genes giving rise to this dynamic (having gay babies) have no vehicle by which they can be passed on, the dynamic dies after one generation.
It doesn't matter if it benefits the whole group. Evolution acts on individuals because individuals are the vehicles of genes. Any individual in a group who has more fertile offspring than the rest of the group will dominate future generations, and individuals without gay baby genes will be more fertile. Infertility cannot, cannot, cannot be selected for. Sharing 50% of your genes without your siblings isn't enough. If the people whose genes make up subsequent generations aren't the ones having infertile kids (which they necessarily won't be), having infertile kids is not a trait that gets selected for.
All kinds of things *could* benefit groups but that do not emerge as stable reproductive strategies because they are genetically self-stultifying. It may benefit the group to not have kids, but people with genes to have more kids are the ones whose genes get passed on, therefore the strategy has to die.
Again though, you're not thinking about how groups as a whole could become extinct losing out to other groups who have evolved more useful dynamics.
In that case, whatever fluctuations of evolution in the group arent reproduced, whereas groups where fluctuations that resulted in group with better dynamics relative to the local environment do go on.
Failed groups dont show up in the fossil record.
Its kind of like how if one evolves a culture that is outcompeted by other cultures , not only the culture dies off at the small group level but the evolution of members of said group which result in the culture also dies off.
At any rate, my argument if for group evolution, not that this is the cause of homosexuality specifically. Things can happen that arent beneficial in an evolutionary sense as long as they happen rarely enough that it doesnt hurt the fitness of genes. It is likely that homosexuality is a combination of genetic susceptibility and hormone exposure.
if such cases were rare enough, but the genes that made one prone had potential benefits for some other reason, in large scale socities where there was more exposure to conditions that created homosexuality of transgender or whatever you would see more manifestation.
Its well known that genetic diseases where the genes other different circumstances of different configurations can proliferate and last even though they are obviously non adaptive.
It doesn't matter how related you are in general. The specific genes for 'infertility' need to be passed down, otherwise the strategy has no way to propogate
if any of your siblings/cousin etc don't have genes for gay babies, their non-gay-baby genes will dominate future generations
But this strategy does (at least potentially) have a way to propagate. If there is some gene/allene that raises the probability of homosexuality in men and then those gay men would help their relatives, some of whom might be carrying the same gene, more than otherwise, then that may mean that gene is evolutionarily favored.
Were you perhaps thinking that the claim was that there would be a dominant allene that would cause homosexuality with 100% probability? I don't think the hypothesis was that extreme (and even in that case it likely wouldn't cause homosexuality in both sexes). Of course, I don't know if there's any evidence for this kind of hypothesis but at least it's not an illogical proposition.
but in a situation where groups are competing, groups with more succesful dynamics woould outcompete those with less successful dyanmics, and that would be very hard to calculate since you cant look at the range of ehat group dynamics allowed one group to surviuve while another perished.
First of all, I already explained why having gay kids doesn't help the group during times of hardship, because any resource benefit is delayed a full generation. And if gay people using resources is fine because they help raise their siblings kids, then why does it suddenly stop being fine a full generation later? Not only does it change from one generation to the next, it changes at a point even further removed from the initial stress that 'necessitated' having infertile offsrping!
Second, it doesn't matter how successful a group is. For a mating strategy to propogate, the genes for that trait specifically need to be passed on.
It doesn't matter if having infertile children benefits the group. Genes for infertile children will necessarily be selected against, which means genes for infertile children cannot be passed on. Even if your infertile children benefit the group, other members of the group who don't have the genes for infertile children are the ones will pass on their non-infertility genes, and 'having fertile children' genes will be the only thing inherited by future generations (other than through mutation).
For a trait to be selected for, the genes that code for that trait specifically need to be selected for.
Benefitting the group does NOT allow infertility genes to be passed on. There is literally no possible way that infertility can be selected for. Your infertility genes die out and the most fertile of your group will have their genes dominate future generations, meaning infertility as mating strategy MUST die out.
See? This is the entire attitude and argument in a nutshell. "Comparing homosexuality and paedophilia? But that is so wrong, everyone knows gayness is great and natural and beautiful and kiddly-fiddling is wrong and bad and terrible!"
Biology doesn't care. If a twist of the genes one way gets a result, it'll twist genes into all kinds of shapes. And some of those shapes have more in common than we might be comfortable with. Being exclusively gay so you never have any kind of sex with the opposite sex means no reproduction. Being exclusively paedophilic so that you never have any kind of sex with adult members means no reproduction (until we get into the area of 27 year old men fucking 9 year old girls and knocking them up, which is wrong and bad and terrible but evolution does not care because baby).
Biology does not have a moral judgement about good or bad, ethical or unethical, moral or immoral. Biology judges on "life? more life? continuing life?"
The political angles around "we used to think gay bad but now we think gay good" have nothing to do with biology.
Have you read "the goodness paradox", I think you'd like it. Humans domesticated themselves, and one of the traits that goes along with domestication (less aggressive behavior.) is increased sex... I mean who doesn't remember the dog trying to hump every human leg it saw. (I guess most of our dogs are 'fixed' these days?)
No, I haven't and on your recommendation (I think this is the third?) I don't want to. Your obsession with humping sounds like you need a dose of bromides, or a course of psychotherapy. Obsession is a sign of mental problems.
Oh sorry, please excuse me I didn't mean to offend. The book is not about sex, it's about violence, and this idea that humans self domesticated themselves to reduce reactive violence, but still have (perhaps increased?) proactive violence.
The inquiry for truth is valuable even if victim-cosplayers and special pleaders might complain about it.
Our society's current moral framework excessively valorizes victimhood. A saner society would devalue or ignore it. Instead we celebrate it.
I am an unapologetic gay man. But I don't care about PC and I find this sort of thing tiresome.
It'd MAYBE be one thing if this were being blared into the front page of Big Newspaper circa 1985. But it's not. This is a community of mature adults, I'd like to think. No one reading ACX is going to go on a gay panic rage fueled crime spree.
Let people explore weighty ideas!
You still need some criteria for what mental states qualify as a problem. For instance, right now whether your behavior impacts your ability to maintain a job is a factor we'll consider in whether your mental status constitutes having a mental disorder. It's part of your overall global functioning. If you're just independently wealthy with people hired to manage your wealth, consider yourself lucky.
My area involves people with cognitive disabilities. Because of this, I'm especially sensitive to how surrounding economic conditions are an important variable in what it means to be able to maintain employment given how you think and behave. Macroeconomic conditions, employer attitudes, government regulations, etc. all matter a lot.
There's no brain scan you're ever going to be able to give someone that will tell you someone has a disorder that makes them have difficulty maintaining gainful employment separate from the prevailing economic conditions and culture. Disqualifying traits for employers aren't objective, for example. They're dependent on social context.
How would involuntarily institutionalizing someone who has depression help, exactly?
If your point is that mental disorders are to be treated as a social problem first and suggest involuntary treatment as a go to, then yes, you are disregarding the mentally ill person as a person. There is no way around that.
No - treating mental health primarily as a social problem when considering an individual and treating it primarily to make others feel better around them is disregarding them as an individual.
Well, you can give them meds and prevent them from killing themselves. You can structure their day, ensure that they get enough sleep, get good nutrition, get some sunlight, do some productive work (weeding a garden, building something). There are people who argue not implausibly that some fraction of at least modest depression can be effectively treated by behavior modification. But if the patient lacks sufficient clarity of purpose and motivation -- which is typically the case in depression -- then inducing therapeutic behavior modification by external force might be the kindest and fastest approach in the end.
The same argument is made in the case of alcohol and drug abuse, hence the common preference in the judicial system for coercing offenders with a drug and alcohol problem into inpatient treatment by offering them jail as the only alternative.
I know several people who avoid seeking help, despite being depressed, sometimes suicidally so, because they fear involuntary commitment. Necessarily, if someone like this goes on to kill themselves, they'll be recorded as a suicide that didn't seek help in the system. This isn't necessarily saying involuntary institutionalization is a bad thing in every instance, but if it prevents people who want care from getting care because they fear this mortifying ordeal, it needs to either not happen or be so closely controlled so as to not substantively prevent people from getting help.
I was struggling to write a response to your drugs and alcohol comment but cannot come up with the necessary evidentiary backing to respond - it's a complicated thing. For alcohol specifically, the people being threatened with jail or some form of rehab (12 steps options being cheap) have probably committed some alcohol related crime, like drunk driving. If rehab is the acceptable alternative, why is jail on the table? Not trying to pretend society is a coherent or cohesive thing, but why is "We can either rehabilitate you or punish you" even a choice? If someone's behavior is so dangerous that they find themselves in this situation, shouldn't they go to a jail that aims to rehabilitate? Either/or is a bad solution.
Sure, either choice is going to have collateral damage. That's the nature of the real world. The question is are more people saved by forceful intervention or by avoiding it? I don't have a good answer to that question, but I'm a priori doubtful that either extreme is an optimal solution.
I will say two events tended to push me towards the side of intervention, though. The first is when I read a long story in the Atlantic, I think, many years ago, which reported on a detailed study someone had done of people who had attempted suicide from the Golden Gate bridge. (This was in the context of the endless debate at the time about installing a suicide barrier, the usual objection being "it won't do anything, because if people can't kill themselves from the bridge they'll just do it some other way.") Astonishingly (to me), it turned out almost none of the people who jumped and survived ever even attempted suicide again. A significant number of them took their survival as the affirming miracle that it was, and turned their lives around. One quote from a survivor really stuck with me: "I realized in the moment that I jumped that everything I had thought was insoluble and unbearable in my life could be solved -- except for the fact of my having just jumped." The conclusion of the report was that at least in this particular subset of people, preventing them from killing themselves *on that attempt* could very likely prevent them from doing it at all -- it was a momentary impulse, and if thwarted by force, would *not* necessarily cause them to just find other means. (This is also, I believe, the logic by which people who urge gun control believe fewer guns, even legal guns, would cut down on gun suicides, which is most of them, because if people don't have a gun at hand, they will not, contrary to the opposive argument, just go out and buy a rope.)
The second thing is that I had a good friend some years ago who actually did this thing, he jumped from the Bridge. (He was not one of the rare survivors.) It has definitely occured to me that had he been prevented *on that day* from carrying out his impulse, he might ultimately have been saved. He was just the kind of person who would get carried away by an impulse, but, if prevented from acting on it, reconsider and be more reasonable. It happened in many small things, and then one day, it happend in the biggest thing of all. When people say to me "well, we should just respect his agency, it was his choice to make, et cetera" I tend to hostility. He liked his life, mostly. He was usually happy, but not always, and sometimes dreadfully unhappy. He had good friends, he could hold down a job, and he had a future.
But he also had a disease inside his head that made him sometimes do stupid shit, like go off his meds, not tell anyone, and sit around in a dark apartment until some demon told him to go end it. Abandoning him to that demon seems inhuman to me. I believe in the famous Donne quote[1], we *are* our brothers' keeper, and we let people like my friend down, all the time.
I don't even necessarily believe it's because we venerate free choice so high, as we often say. I think in many more cases the real reason is squalid and unworthy: it's because the mentally ill can be incredibly exhausting, and we just secretly want to wash our hands of them.
Yes, people in the justice system who are compelled into rehab necessary have some punishment hanging over their heads, usually for some minor crime -- petty theft, assault and/or battery, robbery. It's a choice because (1) the system is overwhelmed with cases, and they try to clear their caselog with deals if they possibly can, and if it's clear a drug or alcohol problem is underlying, they think it's worthwhile to try to kill two birds with one stone: put the offender in what amounts to a closely-monitored parole setting *and* try to ensure he doesn't come back, and (2) most judges are actually fairly human people who are trying to help the miserable wretch in front of them straighten out his life. You probably have to be a first-time offender, without a record -- certainly not violent -- and it helps to be young, so the court quails before screwing up your life for a very long time with a criminal record and jail time.
I don't want to romanticize it, however. There is also substantial corruption with the system, and sometimes the treatment programs are abusive and exist just to bleed insurance companies for cash, and sometimes the connection between the court and the program is corrupt. It's a human system, and necessarily imperfect, with dark corners and squalor.
--------------------
[1] https://www.bartleby.com/73/134.html
I don't have anything substantial to add, but I would like to thank you for taking the time to write this heartfelt and well-thought-out comment.
I am sorry that this happened to your friend.
I wrote my comment with the understanding that suicide is often impulsive - when we remove certain convenient methods of suicide, the rate drops and doesn't recover. I believe one of these was a kind of coal fired stove, but it's been years since I read the article and I think I'd have trouble finding it now, so forgive the lack of source. I think there's kind of an error in assuming that giving caregivers the ability to involuntarily institutionalize others they suspect (for what might be very good reasons) of being about to attempt suicide - plenty of people have some level of suicidal ideation constantly for months or years, but picking out the specific moment the impulse strikes me as difficult, if not borderline impossible for a caregiver. I think a preferable solution would be to remove more convenient methods of suicide as a society - netting under bridges and tall, hard to climb fences around rooftops - similar to what you hint at with guns (I certainly don't want to turn this into a gun control debate, this is thorny enough without introducing something else highly contentious).
Shortly - we should not abandon people suffering from depression and suicidal ideation to their demons, but we shouldn't inadvertently aid their demons in attempting to help in a way that causes unnecessary harm. Unfortunately, I think we're also rapidly approaching a point in this debate where even the most measured solutions will have casualties - some from what I fear, which is the folk who cannot seek help from fear of internment, and some from the other direction, folk who could use internment to hold through the worst impulse but are not interned, and then are no longer here.
I think one reason to support free choice as much as possible, even with depression and suicide, is to recognize that we value other human beings as human beings, not just creatures we need to prevent from doing bad things to themselves because otherwise we would feel bad. Other people matter not just because we care about them, but because they have inherent value as individuals with agency, and carrying the threat of internment in anything but the most severe and immediate cases is diminishing them as people. It's easy to think "Oh, I don't matter as a person who makes decisions, just someone who needs to stay alive so that others won't be sad."
As for drug and alcohol addiction - I don't think I have much to add to your points. I would prefer these be treated as social and health problems rather than legal problems, but I would also prefer that petty crimes of other sorts be treated the same way. I'm sorry for not giving this the detail I gave the other topic - there's too much to get out and it's a big enough topic all on its own.
I'm not sure that I disagree, and if so by how much, but I do want to observe that you are talking coercion in either case. Either you coerce people who are mentally healthy -- e.g. by constraining the tools they can own and use, like guns, or by ruining the view from the Bridge, or compelling people to fork over more in taxes to construct suicide barriers -- or you coerce people who are mentally unhealthy. There's no getting around the fact that there is no social solution at all (short of exhortation and prayer) that doesn't involve constraining *somebody*. I don't think it's a sufficient argument that certain kinds of constraint constrain people in ways that aren't readily legible, or that if we spread the burden out among a million people it's a priori better than if it's borne by a few on the other side. These approaches are evasions of responsibility, and do not face the problem squarely.
As I said, I don't have a good answer. I study physical law, because that is amenable to mathematical certainty. This kind of stuff is not, and there's a good reason I did not aspire to a career in it. I'm just arguing for unflinching clarity in recognizing the issues at stake, and the costs in either direction.
I think we can also theorize that survival and prosperity of a group or population MAY be enhanced by a % of homosexuality and evolution of a group could favor that.
You can theorize all sorts of dumb things. The math of genetic group selection doesn't work out, because of variance within groups vs variance between groups (cultural group selection is a different story).
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/group-selection-and-homosexuality/
> And who's to say that there aren't child-rearing and social hierarchy benefits to having population subsets (including grannies) who are not competing for offspring?
Homosexuals are not notable for devoting greater effort for the raising of children. Grannies are grandmothers, as in they have already reproduced and are now devoting their energies for raising the fitness of their existing descendants rather than creating more.
Who said I'm just talking about post-industrial societies? Where is there any evidence in any society of males devoting themselves to child-rearing rather than mating? There are societies in sub-Saharan Africa where a mother will receive more help from her brother than her husband when it comes to raising a child... because in those societies men take many wives to benefit from their labor without expecting sexual fidelity, and thus the maternal uncle can be more confident he's actually related. But those uncles still don't prioritize helping raise their sister's children over pursuing mating opportunities for themselves.
Male chimpanzees don't devote much effort to the raising of children. Henrich's "The Secret of Our Success"* discusses the novel development of fatherhood in one of its chapters.
* Which I reviewed here: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/08/08/the-secret-of-our-success/
You're literally suggesting being a cuck and supporting the bloodline of competing males was an advantageous strategy and that's why homosexuality exists?
The math doesn't even close to work out, how do you propose this altruistic behavior actually evolved?
I think your point would be right on a narrow conception of politics on which it has to do only with elections and parties. But it’s very natural to characterize the French Revolution and liberation theology and Extinction Rebellion as political movements, along with anything that determines how we collectively live as a society.
it's political because it determines insurance policy.
Do psychoanalysts still believe homosexuality is a psychological dysfunction?
I also wonder about it and it would be wonderful to get an answer but for what it's worth I was reading "The Neurotic Personality of Our Time" by Karen Horney (from 1937) and it was implied there that homosexuality is a result of pathological develompent but I wouldn't say it was impiled it was "bad".
I don’t think psychoanalysts are taking a moral stance on homosexuality, but I do suspect they still believe it is caused by pathological development rather than having a ~~genetic~~ biological component, ie nurture rather than nature.
FWIW, I suspect that it *does* have a strong genetic component. But that that's not dominant. Also that in small, highly-related groups (e.g. tribes) it was advantageous to the group. So it was fostered by kin selection.
OTOH, I also suspect that most people have a strong tendency towards homosexuality. There have been studies that indicated that more women than men were homosexual, and men have been known to be focused on .... well, I even heard of one case that was focused on tailpipes, though I'm not sure whether it was automobile or motorcycle. That *CAN'T* have been the "genetically intended target"...but it also can't be anything that he would have chosen rationally (if "rational choice" means anything in this area).
It's *not* "nurture rather than nature", but rather a feedback system involving BOTH nurture and nature, and with a huge helping of random chance.
There's evidence to suggest that women are more sexually-ambivalent ('bisexual') than men, yes, but the vast majority of women still self-identify as heterosexual. Literally one anecdotal case of a man screwing a tailpipe doesn't prove anything about men as a class (honestly, isn't the lesswrong/rationalist crowd supposed to understand statistics?)
Ignoring tailpipes (which can get painfully hot), why the fcuk do we care about sexual preferences, at all? The urge to classify and to try to explain people's sexual preferences seems pathological to me. Is the need to categorize people in the sexual preference categories genetic or learned? I suspect that it's learned, because many pre-modern societies didn't make a big deal about it (though some did). But the need to lump things or people into binary categories seems to hardwired into our brains, and once we start doing it for one set of categories we can't seem to unlearn it.
So guys group themselves into the "I like gals" groups and the "I like guys" groups, and socially they tend to isolate themselves from each other. And the gals who like gals want to hang with gals who like gals while the gals who like guys tend also isolate themselves (but I think less so than the guys). And anyone who likes both are given the hairy eyeball because they don't fit into those predefined categories. And because of our pathological need to lump people into sexual preference categories we build all sorts of stereotypes about the people we place in those categories—many of which tend deindividualize or worse dehumanize people in those categories.
Back in the 80s I remember seeing an interview with Robert Reed (who played the dad in the Brady Bunch) on some daytime talk show. He had at some point publicly came out as gay (even though I guess he was pretty open about the way he swung with the Brady Bunch actors and crew). Anyway, he seemed to have regrets—even though he didn't specifically say that—about proclaiming himself gay because he said he was now the "gay actor" in the Brady Bunch, rather than the actor who played the dad in the Brady bunch—and he felt the label eclipsed his talents. Meanwhile, Jody Foster kept mum about her sexual preferences until the rumor mongers forced her to admit it. Why the obsession with Jody Foster's sexual preferences? Why the need to pigeonhole her? It all seems rather pathological to me, but I don't write the DSM...
Nice try, but hard to believe you don't care!
I'm not sure why we care about sexual preferences either, but I have the sense that we're wired to care. Certainly nature wants us to be aware who is a possible mate, so of course that pushes us in the direction of being alert to the sexual interests of the opposite gender. I believe -- but am embarrassed to say I do not know for sure -- that most cultures make rules about sex and that these rules are taken pretty seriously. It may be that we are driven to make rules about sex because we sense its power and make rules to try to keep order. Many murders, suicides and plenty of crimes are motivated by sexual ambition, sexual jealousy, sexual loss and humiliation. Also, we seem to feel sexual repugnance as easily as we feel sexual desire. Sex acts that do not seem hot and luscious often seem grotesque and repugnant to us. There's not a lot of in between. And that kind of seems like wiring to me too. So while I agree with you that for us, in our era, it's really not important how somebody gets off and who they like to do it with, I think we are wired to care.
Because sexual desire and romantic attraction are some of, if not the most, powerful motivators of human activity (generally speaking), with some of the most powerful intuitions, taboos, and disgust reactions surrounding it; and sexual reproduction is how humanity carries on from generation to generation. It's literally at the core of who we are, how we relate to each other, how we organize our societies, and how we reproduce.
LOL. "Doomscrolling" is a prevalent issue right now, so it's not just sexuality classifications. People are actively hurting themselves over all flavors of "must read how a thing has been described and classified." Apparently in-home cooking appliance classifications is the latest trend.
Yes, and almost all men self-identify as heterosexual. But there's LOTS of variation. IIRC Kinsey used a 9 level scale to figure the degree of homosexuality, but I think that's still wrong, because it's one dimensional.
P.S.: What the guy with a tailpipe fixation proved is that people can fixate as unreasonably as a gosling. They usually don't, but there's no reason to believe that that guy was extremely out of the ordinary except for the particular object class that he fixated on. Possibly because we delay the fixation until much later in life than a gosling. (Though there seems to be *something* about motorcycles and flashy tailpipes that is fairly widely considered sexual signaling.)
A Swedish twin study put the contribution of genetics at 1/3 for gays and 1/6 for lesbians (with shared environment having no effect and non-shared environment making up the rest).
So it's certainly a factor, but it's also the smaller factor.
That was my impression as well, yes.
To my knowledge twin/sibling studies indicate that homosexuality is around 30% genetic, but "non-genetic" is not necessarily the same thing as "produced by nurture"- environmental influences can be congenital and/or random (e.g, produced by random hormone fluctuations in the womb, intestinal flora, role models, or whatever.)
I'm personally willing to take the stance that, yes, in fact, homosexuality is a biological disorder. It's just incurable, and so long as the individual in question avoids spreading dangerous STDs or screaming for the family to be abolished, it's a harmless disorder. Like having a version of OCD that just compels you to always put on red shoes in the morning, or something.
Likewise... yes, gender dysphoria is a disorder of some kind. If, e.g, a biological male wishes to live and pass as a woman, then depending on how you look at it you're either looking at a man with a psychological problem or a woman with a physiological problem- either way, it's a disorder. If there wasn't a disorder of development, they wouldn't have dysphoria!
>or screaming for the family to be abolished
What's wrong with that? Are you against free speech?
Technically, no, but the idea that humans should cease reproducing and/or cease taking responsibility for looking after their offspring is an idea so close to promoting your own society's extinction that I would consider it tantamount to calling for violence.
Would you consider heterosexual non-breeders to be perpetrating a violent act? Or are non-breeders with non-standard sexual preferences or identities the only ones perpetrating violence by not reproducing?
In case you haven't noticed, there's currently no shortage of people on the planet. I don't know whether homosexuality and transsexuality is becoming more common, but if it is I'd wonder if possibly that's nature's way of limiting population growth. It's certainly more humane than killing off a bunch of people via starvation and plagues.
What pushes you towards seeing homosexuality as a biological disorder rather than as a biological variant, in the same category as red hair or left-handedness?
I believe Scott explained it fairly succinctly in the original article, but to reiterate: healthy organisms normally gravitate toward sexual partners they can actually reproduce with.
(Same-sex sexual acts are not that uncommon within the animal kingdom on a sporadic basis, but a stable lifelong attraction to the same sex is actually very rare: it is only documented in humans and male domestic sheep. There's a theory this might be a consequence of self-domestication.)
Well, you and also Scott if he said what you think he did, would need to define quite clearly what you mean by healthy. What are the criteria by which you judge an organ, an entire body or a behavior to be healthy? You mention that homosexuality is rare among other species. Is that how you define a healthy behavior -- one that occurs as frequently among animals as it does in our species?
Here's the thing: I think ourt species is wired to have strong reactions to the sexual habits of other people. My observation is that most people do, and also I think it makes sense that we would have strong reactions. We are social animals, and the way sexual relationships play out can have both very good and very bad consequences for society: It can lead to lasting bonds between sexual partners, and of course it produces children and then the tribe also has the extra stability that comes from having bonded family groups. But sexual ambition, jealousy and disappointment also lead to conflict and misery, and of course that's bad for the tribe. In my experience, a lot of people's objection to homosexuality comes down to their having a very strong EWWWW reaction to certain sex acts and/or to picturing any sex acts at all happening between members of the same sex. I'm inclined to think we're wired to react that way to sexual acts that are a bit different from those we enjoy. So if you find yourself viscerally convinced that homosexuality is unhealthy, you might try on the idea that your EWWW is interfering with fairminded thought.
Nature is replete with healthy organisms that do not gravitate toward sexual partners they can actually reproduce with. Kin selection is such a successful strategy that haplodiploidy has evolved at least 10 separate times, and it's entirely plausible that evolution selects for a certain amount of "take care of your sister's kids instead of having kids yourself."
I think whether you see it as a disorder or not depends on the context in which you're thinking about it.
First, you might think in terms of individual well-being. In 2022 USA, being gay is not a huge impediment to living a good life. But in 2022 Iran or 1922 USA, it's a substantial impediment to living a good life. At an individual quality-of-life level, whether being gay is something terrible that wrecks your life and so you'd really like to be cured of depends on your environment and culture.
If we're thinking about evolution, then it's a disorder to the extent it decreases the inclusive fitness of the genes of the gay person. It seems almost inevitable that being gay decreases your fitness in most contexts (when you get a chance for some extracurricular action, do you go for the kind that *can* leave an extra kid or the kind that *can't*?). But this isn't a moral evaluation or anything, it's just how we can think about evolutionary forces. To the extent homosexuality is genetic, it's kind-of a puzzle, since it seems like it must decrease the number of offspring you leave behind.
If we're thinking in moral terms, then it depends on our moral code. If you believe that homosexual behavior or desires are terrible, wicked, sick, etc., then you're going to see homosexuality as a disorder needing treatment, much like we'd see pedophiles. People with a different moral code will see things differently. And since we don't all agree on moral codes, you can easily end up with people in our society who desperately do not want to be gay, and would like some kind of therapy or something that would turn them straight. I gather this doesn't work too well, but it's not crazy that someone who is convinced that wanting to sleep with dudes makes them an evil person doomed to eternal hellfire would like some help with that.
What does “dysfunction” mean? If it’s about something biological not functioning in the evolutionarily normative way, then it might be a dysfunction, just like ability to shift time zones frequently without experiencing jet lag.
Would you say my computer is dysfunctional if it was operating more quickly than usual?!
Likely yes, because it would likely be generating more heat than usual too. You might have a setup where excess heat generation isn't as much of a problem as the benefit gained by the excess speed, just as someone with a job that involves a lot of international travel might have a setup where the unstable sleep cycle is beneficial, but in the environment both of these systems were developed, they likely ended up with particular normative behavior because the downsides were worse and the upsides were much less.
Ok. I think you know what dysfunctional means.
It depends on the software you are trying to run. For example, some old videogames expect your computer to process at a certain speed and become unplayably fast in modern computers. Modern games don't have that limitation anymore.
In this analogy, a computer operating too quickly is the dysfunction, CPU/framerate throttling was the treatment and videogames are society.
Very droll.
Well, I think the short answer is "no" (since psychoanalysts are probably liberal about such things, and I understand even some early psychoanalysts were), but the question is what one means by dysfunction. I think psychoanalysts think that a lot of behavior or personality is the result of early adaptations that might not make sense in later life, but when do they become dysfunctions? I mean, if all men treat women based partly on their childhood relationships with their mothers, all men are at least a bit crazy (since these women aren't their mothers), but for some of them it works out and for others it doesn't.
I get the impression that psychoanalysts (and a lot of therapists) don't like the DSM style diagnostic system, which is based on somatic medicine and divides mental health problems into discrete disease states.
Most of what I know about contemporary psychoanalysis is based on reading Nancy McWilliams's books (psychoanalyst and professor at Rutgers). They are quite good if one is interested in the subject.
ISTM as an outsider to the field like the need to medicalize everything and make a diagnosis in order to get psychiatric treatment covered by insurance or Medicare or Medicaid warps the hell out of diagnostic criteria.
I think it varies. There are a lot of subschools of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts tend to be artistic, literary and politically liberal. I'm sure these leanings push them in the direction of thinking homosexuality is not a dysfunction, and psychoanalytic theory is so vague and so independent of empirical tests that I'm sure it's possible to adjust one's personal version of psychoanalytic theory to make it consistent with all kinds of ideas that are driven by political leanings, wutz kool at the moment, etc.
I suspect nothing will actually stop the NYT taking you out of context. You’ll probably just get something stupider about the Ns being a dog whistle: “Scott Alexander drops N bombs in article comparing pedophilia to homosexuality.”
What's with the N's? Am I OOTL?
Scott explained it in literally the first paragraph of this post.
Oh right. I was skimming through email and didn't sink into the post until a few paragraphs in. Thanks
The NYT would never call our host "Scott Alexander". That's what started the whole thing after all.
Lol
Witty
I hope it does cause any readers who see it out of context to go back to the original article because its funny as hell.
But also, the idea Scott is writing about is extremely taboo, even in context. People aren't ready for it. We have too much cultural and religious thinking that elevates fatalism, determinism and what's 'natural' as justification for who we are supposed to be.
I just think that is silly and counter-productive. If someone wants to quote this in a hostile way, he or she could simply say that the author is aware of how bad it sounds and so wrote the most objectionable parts in a sort of code with the idea that it would dissuade quotation. But translated back into ordinary English it reads as follows: [insert the text without the extraneous letters]. With that explanation there would be no journalistic problem with quoting the real sentences being communicated without regard to any added characters.
>"You’ll probably just get something stupider about the Ns being a dog whistle: “Scott Alexander drops N bombs in article comparing pedophilia to homosexuality.”
r/Sneerclub did it already.
Did they actually
Just checked yes they did. Bit harsh...
huh. That group seems.. pretty intense. Is ir generally just a "hate rationalism cause its not hard left" thing?
I think there are probably valid crtiqiues of tendencies and ideas that are common to x-rationalist circles andI'm sure there are some sketchy individuals, but they seem like, really really intensely angry that rationalism is a thing.
Yeah it's bizarre... I guess so.
I personally feel like... so what. We know there are people who are going to permute everything through their political tribal lens.
Why should we care anymore that the NYT will do it then that some Muslim will think "these people dont believe Allah is the one true God so they are all evil followers of Satan?"
what is r/sneerclub?
I found the concept of sneerclubs, but what subreddit does this refer to specifically?
oh, nvm, that is an actual name of a subreddit
Yes, this has always been a weird thing about "Born this Way" moral arguments. Each of us is born with certain tendencies we want very much to transcend, some of which would be immoral to indulge. You can't sidestep ethics with appeals to biology.
Well, you CAN, but only if you're willing to adopt a particularly … elegant ethical system.
Might makes right?
I was thinking something more like "Do What Thou Wilt."
But don't do the children.
I believe the reference is to Crowley's Thelema ("'Do what thou wilt' shall be the whole of the Law"), which is literally a Satanic philosophy*. So I think that addition breaks the intended meaning.
*Crowley renamed himself Aleister in order that his name add up to 666, and claimed the title "Master Therion" - "Therion" means "beast" and also adds up to 666.
Sorry, but Crowley's philosophy was NOT Satanic. It was, however, definitely non-christian. And he was making things up as he went along (allegedly with "spiritual" inspiration). If you want Satanic look up Anton Lavey. I found Crowley's philosophy an incoherent mix of anarchism and authoritarianism. This is probably because he drew on multiple sources, including Hinduism.
That said, he *did* work to present an image of a Satanist, but that was pure PR.
Not sure I'd call taking several books to explain that "thou" and "wilt" don't actually mean what they sound like "elegant"...
No, you can’t, because that ethical system is not an appeal to biology. It’s another ethical system.
As she said, “you can’t sidestep ethics with an appeal to biology.” You’re not appealing to biology, you’re appealing to a new ethics.
I interpret "born this way" as an appeal to the same cultural sympathies that helped race relations make real gains in the late 20th century. Homosexuality is at the very least more mutable than race, so your point is taken. But positively affirming the ethics of homosexuality wasn't a winning strategy when progress was being pushed for. I'm not surprised "born this way" got as much traction as it did.
Plus, this isn't like anger issues or nail biting or some objectively bad thing. If someone likes the way they are and they aren't hurting anyone, why change?
People are born unvaxxed and their rights are very restricted if they don't take vaccine. One could say the unvaxxed help virus circulate, but this is at best, probabilistic. Similarly, a great host of diseases are more effictively spread by homosexual men than by heterosexual contacts, due to e.g. alternating passive and active roles (not possible in heterosexuals), greater desire to engage in group sex, etc.etc.
>>alternating passive and active roles (not possible in heterosexuals)
I fear you may be underestimating the sexual creativity of heterosexuals.
No I don't. Most virus-friendly way is to insert penis into anus (and probability of passing infection is depedant on direction), and women lack the former. Dildos, ropes etc. don't change that.
People generally think of "harm" in diffeent ways; direct harm or social harm. Both traditionall moral conservatives and progressives have ideas of "social harm" whereas libertarians tend to foucs on "direct harm".
As an example, there are places where people are not allowed to do things on their own prpoerty. The libertarian view says "the thing this person does on their property doesnt cause me any harm." The social ethical view says "this person lowers my properrty values thus brings me harm" or "brings down the neoghborhood" or some such.
So sexual behavior that is consensual doesnt cause any type of direct harm- the "harm" you're talking about is a 'social" harm, i.e., some forms of sex increase the risk of disease transimision which has negative effects on cost to society etc.
But generally the people who think of "harm" are thinking in two very distinct ways.
Furthermore, the reality is most people in our cultural spheres think of bpth but draw the lines differently- the have their own ideas of what is personal autonomy versus social harm.
I literally just wrote a 1000 words on how WRONG this claim is in the recent “when do we get political backlashes” thread! To avoid you having to refer back to that, let me cut an paste:
I think that at least part of the answer requires an *honest* understanding of why the "losing" side is against whatever the issue is. Such honesty is, of course, not exactly common...
In the case of gay rights, I think the explanation is pretty simple. The issue of gayness (being honest now, as opposed to the usual story) I think was primarily viewed by its opponents as set of anti-bourgeois values and morals. And why wouldn't it have been so? In the late 60s/early 70s gayness presented as an all-party all-the-time lifestyle built on endless drugs, zero personal responsibility, and destruction of the family:
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/michael-bronski-gay-family/
The infamous 1972 Gay Men’s Liberation demands looked to most people like a demand for legalized pedophilia and does the usual political yutting thing of throwing in multiple demands that have zero to do with gayness but an awful lot to do with making themselves unpopular with most of America.
https://thecambridgeroom.wordpress.com/2018/01/16/bostons-gfls-10-point-demands-to-the-democratic-convention-1972/
Read the above document. THAT is what most people thought they were protecting America from in the 1970s, and who can blame them...
What happened in, I guess the 90s, is that a smart enough group of gay people managed to wrest control of the agenda away from these lunatics and worked hard to ensure that the ONLY issue on the table was gayness. Not gayness and how the military sucks. No gayness and how the family should be abolished. Not gayness and drug legalization. NO OTHER CRAP except gayness and laws related to that. And it turns out that, big fscking surprise, Americans did not have a problem with gayness per se, once it was stripped of the lunacy.
To the extent that other agendas like "racism" or "sexism" win without backlash, it would be by following the same agenda. But it appears that both of these are in too deep in terms of having defined a totalizing world view that is anti-bourgeois and anti most of what Americans support (including such basics as decency, honesty, truth, and rationality).
In a sense I think you have the story backwards. Both race and sex got most of what was reasonable in the late 60s and early 70s, but were not content to take the win and build on that; they created a backlash by refusing to take yes for an answer.
Gay rights stand out as being a rare case in history where common sense prevailed, where the winning group was content to accept its winnings, shut up, and stop fighting. If gay marriage had immediately been followed by other items on that 1972 agenda ("Americans remain as homophobic as ever, until they are willing to destroy that most homophobic and repressive institution of all, the family!!!") yes, there would have been, and would continue to be, massive backlash.
More generally, if Y is a more extreme request than X...
...if you actually want Y, bundle X with Y.
...if you actually want X, unbundle Y from X.
This reminds me of a warning to be careful about people for whom your goals are only a mean to achieve their goals. Wasn't obvious why you should care. Even if they care about your goals instrumentally, they will still help you achieve them, right? But one possible problem is they might bundle your requests with their specific requests, because they do not care if it decreases the probability of your requests succeeding, as long as it increases the chance of their requests.
But... if Y is much more prominent than X, then you might want to bundle X temporarily in order to raise it up the prominence ladder to the point that it can stand alone (at which point you unbundle it).
There is a great deal to this. But it misses an important part of the history, which is why the GLF were so radical in the 1970s.
The Mattachine Society had been asking for gay rights on a "just gayness" basis from the 1950s and getting absolutely nowhere. By allying with all these other radical groups, the GLF were able to get gayness onto the radical agenda - if the GLF is demanding an end to the Vietnam war, then supporters of the end of the Vietnam war would be more favourably inclined to the GLF.
What happened afterwards is not so much what you have as the 1990s, but that the existing moderate pro-gay groups (from the Mattachines to the Gay Rights National Lobby of the 1970s to the Human Rights Campaign since 1980) were able to get traction in a way that they hadn't until the late sixties/early seventies - because they got traction in opposition to the GLF and other radicals.
This is a pretty common thing: there are both radical and moderate supporters of a cause, the moderates are unable to bring initial attention to that cause, while the radicals can bring that attention. But it's the moderates who get the cause actually implemented.
There are still plenty of radical anti-family gay activists. It's just that HRC has nothing to do with them and the media largely doesn't report on them.
I'm not too familiar with this, but I do wonder if age played a role - lots of people are anti-family in their youth, then change their mind as they get older. I'm sure there are some people who stick with their convictions, but it wouldn't surprise me if many of the people who were in the GLF ended up becoming more moderate supporters a couple of decades later.
Absolutely. Also many GLFers were just gay people who were angry and "weren't going to take it any more" (as that generation put it) - they didn't endorse the whole agenda, and certainly didn't endorse the linkages that GLF had created. But they endorsed the radical noisy tactics of the GLF, and radical noisy tactics tend to be organised by radical people who are usually keen on multiple radical things and support whatever the current broad radical agenda is.
There are always two issues - why things happened as they did in the past, and what is the relevance to today. I was more concerned with the relevance to today aspect, along with clarifying the history.
Relevance to today is that we see the same over and over again. Consider, for example, BLM.
Let's consider one way BLM could have played out.
BLM advocates could have said "police violence is a problem for all Americans, let's all work together to try to ensure that it is tracked, that it is punished where appropriate, that it is reduced". The slogan could have been, I don't know, All Lives Matter...
But of course that was the path not followed, and people who tried to go down this path, that police violence is a problem no matter what the circumstances were accused of being racist and scorned.
Now how should one interpret this? *I* interpret it (and I think most Americans agree with me) that the real goal here, for the activists, is not police violence, it is "ways to make whitey feel guilty". And so anything that solves the police violence problem but does not make whitey feel guilty (and hell, maybe reduces the salience of some aspect of white guilt) is not a path to be pursued. Leninist "heighten the contradictions" as opposed to liberal "solve the problem as much as possible".
The gay case is interesting because it shows (again IMHO) just how reasonable Americans are when a reasonable case is presented to them. BLM, for example, could have chosen to go down that path. They did not, and I believe they deliberately chose not to go down that path, fully aware of (and desirous of) the consequences.
I guess I understand it differently - that if radicals don't go out and piss a lot of people off, then there's no way that moderates get the political opportunity to achieve something.
I think a large part of the difference between us is that I see this as a battle between two groups (of radicals and moderates or Leninists and liberals or whatever you want to call them) where one is better at getting attention and the other is better at converting that attention into effective action - while you see it as a tactical choice by a more homogenous group of people.
To me, you can't stop the radicals being idiots. Sometimes you have to publicly scold them, sometimes you have to just ignore them and concentrate on doing sensible things, sometimes you have to protect them from an overreaction from the other side. But you're not going to stop there being people who want whatever it is that they want.
What it is that they want is a separate question. I think they are themselves a very varied group, some want white people to feel guilty, some want to abolish the police, some want to abolish the entire concept of enforcing laws, some want to bring the revolution, whether that be an authoritarian communist one or a chaotic anarchist one - and some are just angry at the police for beating up and killing black people and want to express their rage and haven't really got as far as wanting a specific solution.
One of the things I've learned about politics from thirty-something years in various political organisations is that everything is factional, and every statement, every policy, every manifesto, every slogan is the result of negotiations between factions and usually reflects much more the internal dynamics of those factions than it does have anything to do with intent on how people outside will think about it. The ability of any political leader to prioritise how the mass of people on the outside will consider what you are saying/doing/proposing over the internal factional dynamics is what generally makes for effective political leadership, and it's a rare talent - you have to both know what will be effective messaging and policy and also be able to win the internal faction fight to let you use it.
You're right that you can't stop stupid. But you don't have to valorize it!
We have enough experience from history to know how these things work out.
The Whigs gave us 1688, the Jacobins gave us 1789. The progressives and the Fabian Society gave us Social Democracy, communists gave us the USSR. MLK gave us the passage of the civil rights laws, Malcolm X gave us the backlash that persists.
I don't see why society (broadly understood) is making excuses for why these people are "valuable", let alone treating them as heroes. They are dividers, not uniters, and I reject the very premise that they "accelerate" change; instead they create precisely the environment where change is not possible until catastrophe.
("These people" is not left or right; it refers broadly to people of the "my way or the highway persuasion", people who are unwilling to accept either compromise or allies with only limited overlapping aims. These people are poison to the entire project of politics because they are conceptually opposed to the compromise that is the essence of politics, and enjoy the act of burning down the world by labelling as enemies anyone who is not 100% committed to every detail of their current ideology [which can, of course, turn on a dime. There's a reason the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was a touchstone for identifying the type, or why tankie is such an effective [and accurate...] insult.])
Black Lives Matter was specifically focused on the problem of police misconduct as it relates to its disproportionate impact on black people. This isn't to dismiss the issue of police misconduct and subsequent impunity generally, but to to focus attention specifically on racial discrimination. It's an assertion that the rights and well being of black people matter too. Responding to this with, "well, all lives matter" at best misses the point, and more nefariously was adopted by people as a counter-slogan meant to actively dismiss and mock their concerns.
There is no indication that american blacks are disproportionately impacted by 'police misconduct' once the frequency of black crime rates are controlled for. (They're somewhat more more likely to be subject to use-of-force when arrested but actually less likely to be killed during arrest, relative to whites, and unarmed men of any race in the US are more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by police.)
https://necpluribusimpar.net/reality-police-violence-us/
practically speaking as an anti-poloice activist, I do se the point that prior to BLM there was an increasing consensus from americans of all stripes the police wer out of control and had to be reigned in, whereas BLM practically ahd the effect of making it more of a tribal racial issue that probably increased racism (a racist who sees an american or a human have their rights violated might start to have more sympathy when they think "that could happen to me or smeone I carr about"- by making it a "this only happens to black people and not white people" (which isnt true, though true proportionally) the movement was hurt and more people supported the police and became more racist.
This was my practical observation, and I think part of the reason was you had people sort of attach other political agendas to the poice reform movement which were less palatable, i.e., the "woke" agenda, as the practical organization of BLM groups became domiated by these politics and there were cases for example where libertarian police reformers were explicitly harrassed and kicked out of blm groups for being opposed to the police bot not supporting the broader poltiical agenda.
As someone who was long an anti-police activist, I was personally quite willing to let the racial issue "take the lead" so to speak but this often wasnt enough and people who wanted to support the caiuse were harrased for not agreeing with seperte politival issues.
I agree that the normalisation of gays and lesbians played a big role in their public acceptance. Obviously opinions will differ within any movement, but from what I've heard gay marriage was initially a controversial proposal within the movement - the more radical members didn't even want it and had other concerns, while the more pragmatic saw it as too far out of the Overton window. The idea of gays and lesbians wanting to marry probably did change people's opinions on the movement, challenging some previous preconceptions of who they were and what they wanted - in many ways it's a very conservative demand to make!
"Gay rights stand out as being a rare case in history where common sense prevailed, where the winning group was content to accept its winnings, shut up, and stop fighting"
It sure doesn't seem like it. What about the "rainbow bombardment" of our children these days? Not content to have each person do their own thing in their own bedrooms (which I think 99.99% of us are all in favour of), we are now trying to force the teaching of homosexuality and transsexuality as equally biologically normal and equally morally valid as heterosexuality... in public schools... to six-year-olds... apparently to make sure that no one feels bad about themselves...
Given that, as Scott mentions above, there is little evidence so far to support a wholly genetic or congenital cause for homosexuality, this means it's cause must be at least partly sociocultural. This does not mean it is a choice, just that some genetics, together with an unchosen set of environmental factors seem to be the most likely cause. And if homosexuality is even partly decided by sociocultural factors, parents should be free to not wish that lifestyle to be encouraged in their children (as atheists might wish, in a public school, to not have religion taught to their children, or vegetarians might not wish for their children to be taught to eat meat).
So if the gay movement had stopped at the achievement of being treated with respect in doing what they want to do in the privacy of their own homes, that would have been great and everybody would have been happy with that. But that hasn't happened. There is not an episode of any new Disney series which goes by where my young children don't get homosexual themes explicitly thrown in their face. It has become an ideology which must be imposed...
This is correct, but I think it doesn't quite get to the real point.
As I get older, I keep getting more convinced that the relevant dueling values are between 'sex is for entertainment' and 'sex is for reproduction'. There's always been tension between the two, or at least for as long as the 'oldest profession' has been in business, and I don't think any society can claim to be entirely one side or the other. Neither can claim to be totally correct, but there is enough fundamental behavioral truth to them that neither is wrong. As such, there are strong reasons 'sex is for reproduction' has stayed around, most of which are probably associated with unchanging truth that sex is an act which may have life-long consequences for everyone involved, and treating it casually is a recipe for potential tragedy.
The LGBT community is a focal point for the underlying entertainment/reproduction debate in that basing your identity around who you want to have sex with implicitly assumes 'sex is for entertainment'. The government weighing in on this via the schools thus firmly puts a massive finger on one side of the scales. What this has generated is people that were told 'sex is entertainment' and when hit with the natural consequences supporting 'sex is reproduction' (or just the internal contradictions in 'sex is entertainment') they push even harder.
That is fine, but I just want to say that 'entertainment' isn't the right word for me. Sex as an itch that must be scratched, is closer, but still not quite right.
I agree with this. The biggest problem with LGBT activism isn't the bad behaviour of a minority of gay men with respect to STDs and borderline-pedophilia (though that's not a trivial problem.)
The biggest problem is that destigmatising LGBT lifestyles means that your wider society has to collectively pretend that having children isn't the healthy and normative thing to do (something that gay men, lesbians and transsexuals intrinsically have a harder time with), and/or pretend that there's nothing special about the nuclear family (as if stable pair-bonding or the protective instinct of biological parents was irrelevant to childrens' safety.)
Equality is nihilism. The only way we can all have equal value is if nothing we do matters.
>having children isn't the healthy and normative thing to do
>there's nothing special about the nuclear family
Yes and yes. Both are things people get pressured into just because. People should be free to choose the type of family, including the number of children, based on whatever works for them, and not because their parents demand grandchildren or something like that.
"There is little evidence so far to support a wholly genetic or congenital cause for homosexuality, this means it's cause must be at least partly sociocultural"
Twin or sibling studies don't rule out congenital causes, and 'environment' doesn't necessarily mean 'sociocultural factors'- it could just mean random hormone fluctuations in the womb, for example.
With that said, I broadly agree that the "lunatics" name99 refers to don't appear to have disappeared anywhere and it certainly doesn't look like their 60s/70s PR tactics were purely instrumental.
Leaving aside transsexuality for a moment, since most people have a harder time with that one, it seems like homosexuality /is/ equally biologically normal and morally valid as heterosexuality. Not as common perhaps, but neither is being left handed vs right, which was once persecuted more than homosexuality.
We're teaching six-year-old kids in public schools about sex /already/, often by government mandate, so everyone's faux-shock about this issue is pretty ridiculous (or insidious). Acknowledging the fact that some people like to have sex with others of the same sex is /not/ advocating for children to start doing so, any more than teaching them about sex is advocating for them to start.
Just like teaching that many people believe in different religions is not the same as advocating or preaching religion, and explaining how it's perfectly fine that some people eat meat is not the same as forcing vegetarian children to eat it.
You seem to think that people want children to be forced or argued or even encouraged into homosexuality, which has never been on any school's agenda, and no advocate would tell you is an actual goal, it's just a weird strawman conservatives are madly fighting against.
People just want to be acknowledged for who they are and not stigmatized while they aren't hurting anyone. Which is /absolutely/ a thing that six-year-olds should be taught in all arenas, which includes sex, since we're already teaching them about that anyways.
"Leaving aside transsexuality for a moment, since most people have a harder time with that one, it seems like homosexuality /is/ equally biologically normal and morally valid as heterosexuality."
I'm not sure why I'm being notified for this remark, but... again, as Scott explained fairly clearly in the original article, that's probably not true. Biologically speaking homosexuality and pedophilia are likely to be both be "sexual targeting errors", and can be considered maladaptive insofar as they reduce the reproductive fitness of the host.
The main counter-arguments don't add up. (Kin selection isn't supported empirically. And although homosexuality is more common than would be expected given the fitness penalty, you could easily say the same for colour-blindness or endometriosis. We don't have to *persecute* people for being colour-blind, but at the same time nobody bends over backwards to explain how colour-blindness must be 'normal'.)
Huh, all I can say to that is we are working from different meanings of the word "normal" here. I think that if we treated homosexuality the same way we treated my slight color-blindness (which is extremely common and, in my usage of the word at least, super-duper normal), then that would be fine.
There's basically no stigma associated with most common-but-mildly-maladaptive traits, as you mention, and that seems like it fits the fairly colloquial meaning of normal I'm familiar with at least. No bending-over-backwards required. No one is trying to say it's /ideal/, it's just perfectly normal. Replace with "common and acceptable" if you like.
If I had an A/B selector for my own child, I wouldn't choose homosexuality, since dating and relationships are hard enough as it is without that wrinkle. But since no-one has that selector, I certainly want my child growing up in a culture that thinks it's perfectly fine, just in case that's how he turns out, through no choice on anyone's part.
And, for what it's worth, language does have power, and classifying that group of people as "abnormal" does not seem to lend itself to creating that culture, despite it being true for some meanings of the complicated word normal. I would love to see the negative connotation taken away from the concept of "abnormal", but that's a dumb hill I certainly don't want to die on.
As to the morally valid part, I assume we both believe there is a vast gulf between pedophelia and homosexuality on that score.
eh, there are still some of us lunatics around. I'm not personally against families, but I tend to see issue sof sexual ethics that way.
yeah, reading that dcoument it mostly sounds reasonable to me. Now, I dont support forcing people not to discriminate, but i think they shouldnt, and the rest sounds fine.
If someone likes the way they are, and they aren’t hurting anyone, then why does it matter whether they were born the way they are, or they chose to be this way, or it happened in some way other than genetics or free choice?
It turns out that a lot of people aren’t convinced by that question, so “born this way” is a rhetorically effective move. But it is morally problematic because it conditions acceptance on an empirical claim that could easily be false, rather than on a better moral theory.
+1
I think partly this is an arguments-as-soldiers thing. It was historically easier to argue for gay rights by framing homosexuality as something you were born with, rather like race. And at least some arguments for widespread societal acceptance of homosexuality would be undermined by arguments that homosexuality is heavily affected by environment and social pressure. But neither of those tell us that the born-this-way explanation is correct or incorrect.
Seems like most of it is easily solved by just accepting that "born this way" is really just a stand-in for "didn't choose this", which is the reality. Either way, the same acceptance should apply.
Very much so. It doesn't matter where desire comes from, only whether one acts on it.
I think the "Born this way" argument is more a counter-argument against people who shout homosexuality is unnatural. The default opinion is that any behavior is morally neutral; you have to argue why a behavior is morally wrong. "Born this Way" are counter-arguments to homosexuality being wrong; not an argument that homosexuality is right.
Without supporting the sexually conservative viewpoint I'd like to take a minute to explain the notion of Natural Law because the "Born this way" argument consistently uses a strawman of the Natural Law position.
Natural Law was a moral movement that influenced the Sophists and other ancient Greek philosophical groups and was basically adopted by early Christian apologists who wanted to use the hip lingo of their day. The terms of Natural Law are not used with perfect consistency, but the question of whether something was 'natural' or not never had to do with whether or not that thing was found in nature. So the constant litany of examples of this or that behavior being 'natural' because someone found an animal doing it are missing the point, either accidentally or deliberately.
Natural Law is an attempt to construct a system of ethics which is higher than convention or the status quo, and can therefore be used to criticize the status quo.
If you find animals defecating next to their drinking water, this is not proof that getting poop in your drinking water is 'natural.' However if you find proof that defecating near drinking water spreads disease in humans and makes them sick then you can argue that allowing poop in the drinking water is 'against nature.' And you can still make that argument even if the king himself or a majority vote or a thousand-year-tradition has determined the position of the outhouse.
Your framing of Natural Law doesn't seem to make as much sense at first blush. Specifically, it seems like you'd have to assert that getting sick is against nature (can I use "unnatural" here? Not sure...). But getting sick and being sick seems like a very natural thing for humans to do from time to time.
Yeah, you haven't quite got it.
It is "natural" for people to get sick in the sense that getting sick is a thing that happens.
It is "not natural" to be sick because a living things "natural" state is to be well: the only way we recognize a difference between sickness and health is that sickness is an abnormality that is different from the "natural" functioning of an organism.
Natural in this sense means "According to somethings nature" and not "the oppisite of artificial." So, for instance, a dog "naturally" has four legs because part of the nature of a dog is that it is a four legged animal. The fact that some dogs are born with two or three legs doesn't change the fact dogs are "naturally" four legged.
Well, then apparently it's either not natural to be a ginger, or completely natural to be gay, as these two things have about the same prevalence in the human population.
Whether something is natural or not in this scheme has nothing to do with frequency but is about whether it is in line with the Teleology of the species.
With the difference that being a ginger is 100% genetic while being gay is, according to the evidence so far, not...
"It is "not natural" to be sick because a living things "natural" state is to be well"
Is it, though? I would bet that a large majority of living animals at any given time is suffering from at least one significant injury or disease. Organisms that are completely healthy must be a rarity in nature.
That is, unless you interpret "natural state" to mean "best possible state", in which case "natural" becomes just a synonym of "good", and Natural Law degenerates into a tautology.
You will indeed better understand "natural law" if you interpret "natural" to be "best possible state", although that goes a smidge too far in the other direction.
A dog is "naturally" a creature with four legs, eyes, nose, digestive system, waggy tail, etc. If the dog gets cancer and his digestive system is blocked and no longer functions he has moved away from his "natural" state into an "unnatural" one. One way we know this is that the purpose of the digestive system is to turn food into nutrients that the body needs, and if cancer is blocking his intestines so that the food cannot pass and the nutrients cannot be absorbed then the digestive system is being frustrated in accomplishing it's "natural function".
Actions that make you sick might be said by some to be opposed by nature. Getting sick would generally be a negative *consequence* of an action, not an action itself.
I'm not saying that Natural Law is a good or coherent system or a rigorous system, especially as the ancients conceived of it. I'm saying that people keep going back to trying to define 'Natural' (a term of art with a distinctly non-modern meaning, in context) as 'that which is commonly observed' rather than 'according to an intended higher purpose' (Catholic) or "that which avoids harmful consequences." (more sophist/pagan)
If someone wanted to make a natural law argument in favor of same sex relationships it's not enough to say "bonobos are often observed having same sex relationships so such relationships are natural." You'd have to argue that such relationships were *purposeful* or *adaptive.* Which you could do. People argue that same sex relationships in bonobos help diffuse tension and promote bonding, for example.
TBH the argument that "homosexuality is unnatural" should not be counter-argued; it should never even have been taken seriously in the first place.
(Cannibalism is found in umpteen species. The use of wheels is found in only one.)
Dung beetles?
It would be reasonable to define wheels in a way that requires some sort of axle used to make the wheel support something.
Well then it's not wheels that are the magic invention, it's bearings.
In which case you'd need to consider the molecular machinery of a rotating flagellum on some single-celled organism as possible prior art, along with hip joints, and that one type of flea which uses interlocking gears to ensure symmetrical leg motion when jumping.
I don't really find this convincing.
My impression is that the majority of people break under torture. If one person is being tortured into giving up the location of the rebel base, and another person isn't, then the torture is really the most morally important fact here. I don't think it's fair to say "everyone faces temptations to give up rebel bases, I don't know why you [who are being tortured] couldn't resist them like I [who am not being tortured] did." This is true even if the second person is being tortured in some kind of incredibly weak way (like being in a room 5 degrees warmer than is comfortable) such that there is no clear yes-being-tortured vs. not-being-tortured distinction.
I also don't think this metaphor depends on "literally everyone breaks under torture" to work. If one in a billion people can avoid breaking, does the metaphor still hold? One in a thousand? One in ten?
I thought that's what moral heroism is. People who eat meat enjoy eating meat, but if you think not eating meat is ethically positive despite losing out on eating meat, then you're doing something good. You still might have the same desire, but you choose not to act on it. If someone has a very strong desire, as in desiring to stop being tortured, it would still be ethical for them to not erm, give up the rebel base.
Based on Israel's and America's experiences dropping torture from police interrogation, I would say: torture reliably makes people *talkative* but doesn't reliably make them *honest.*
You don't get more *honesty* by using force, just more *verbosity*. Your captives remain perfectly aware that they can lie to you, and continue to lie, no matter how much you beat them, as long as they think you've no way to tell the truth.
In some situations, you can reliably check tortured confessions more easily than obtaining the information independently. For instance:
"Where did you bury your ex-girlfriend's body?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
*torture*
"Where did you bury your ex-girlfriend's body?"
"Under the house."
*digging*
"Your ex-girlfriend's body isn't under the house."
*torture*
"Where did you bury your ex-girlfriend's body?"
"Dumped it in the lake."
*search*
"Your ex-girlfriend's body isn't in the lake."
*torture*
etc.
Same mostly goes for passwords, although auto-locks after a number of failed passwords can somewhat frustrate that.
That might work *if* you've taken the right guy in the first place. If the suspect actually doesn't know where the body is, your scenario plays just the same, until you find the body by sheer accident or the prisoner dies from the torture.
Yes, of course. I'm merely making an existence claim.
Fair enough, then I agree. I apologize if I interpreted your post as more general than it actually was.
I can absolutely guarantee that you will get my debit card PIN code out of me through _very_ brief torture. Presumably this holds true for virtually everyone else as well.
This seems trivially true. Muggers exist and work from the theory that *threatening* bodily harm is a great way to get people to hand over their wallets. People could try to lie and say that they don't have one, or whatever, but mugging is very successful anyway.
I think society has developed some kind of need to pretend that torture doesn't work because a society where torture is an option is a society where torture is overused and we're dealing with a lot of traumatized people. I think the alternative is a society that toughens up and a wide range of petty tortures (getting punched, someone screaming at you, etc.) are ineffective for most people. This appears to be the norm in prior generations, maybe up until the 80s or 90s.
Of course, these previous generations were less psychologically healthy in other ways, so there's some give and take involved.
Yeah, this is weird. We can all agree that torture is at the very least _almost_ always wrong, and the problem is _that_ it often works - if it didn't, it would be far less of a problem, after all, as there'd be no point.
Current society seems to have this bizarre idea that evil things also don't work, and you're wicked for suggesting they might, as though efficiency and moral quality were the same thing.
Shades of 'Against Murderism' here.
Where did you get your statistic that torture often works?
Bruce Schneier, whose job I suspect requires him to know, makes the opposite claim. I doubt torture works like regular people think it works.
The only reason it persists is to satisfy the sadistic nature of humans who have an out-group in their custody.
Meh, current society seems more like it's (correctly) arguing against a policy that allows torture, and will, via some motivated cognition, take any ammunition they can get. The story of humanity. I think most people would agree that mugging is effective.
Still, torture for actually usueful purposes (i.e. not some random civilian's PIN #) is probably only effective in some pretty specific types of situations, and cases where it's the best (not just the most expedient) option are surely vanishingly rare and nearly impossible to correctly identify.
In Stalin's Russia, about 1 in 50 condemned officials resisted all torture and refused to sign the confessions drawn up for them.
So "1 in 50" is my guess for how many people completely resist even pretend cooperation with their torturers.
For "reveal the rebel base" or "kill your own mother while I watch" scenarios, where the cooperation is much less superficial than "sign this confession," I'd expect a higher number.
I think this probably depends entirely on how painful the torture is vs. how bad doing what they want would be, and how much the victim believes in their cause. I'm reluctant to put any generic numbers on it.
Definitely a lot of variance by scenarios, in the evidence on torture.
Is torture helpful in getting people to recite false confessions? Moderately supportive evidence.
Is torture helpful in getting people to be more honest and not just make things up? Moderately opposed evidence.
Is all torture data super confounded by the regimes that choose torture and their differing agendas? Oh heck yes.
> Is torture helpful in getting people to be more honest and not just make things up? Moderately opposed evidence.
Torture as a threat ("tell me what I want to know or I'll continue to torture you") doesn't shield against people making things up (presumably, to stop the torture at least for a while).
I wonder if the following was tried: 1) assign tortured person cognitively demanding task (like a video game), automatically give them (more or less intense) electric shocks if they don't perform well enough. 2) while they're playing, ask the questions.
Lying is cognitively taxing, so it might be ~impossible if torture-game's difficulty is set properly for a given person (but make it too difficult, and they might not be able to tell you even the truth).
Compulsive liars will lie more easily in this scenario. People who have to stop and think through their lies will struggle to lie. This is the same theory that goes into interrogation using loud noises, bright lights, people yelling at them, etc.
The confessions almost always included confirmation of false accusations against others, and the balance between «those we will kill no matter what» and «are you an enemy of the people that you let the now-known crimes of X slide?» in the works of the system is probably still unknown (and from some evidence prisoners seemed to err on the side of the latter), so the difference with «reveal the base» is less in superficiality and more in the risk for captors to be lead into a literal minefield.
But doesn't context matter to the sample? A condemned official in the USSR in 1935 would know that there are zero even theoretical limits on what the secret police can do to him, etc. Russia had zero cultural history of anything but totalitarian government, etc. His situation is hopeless -- complete resistance is basically "suicide by cop" -- and everybody knows it. So only the most truly stubborn and/or pain-resistant and/or suicidal individuals would stick with complete resistance.
Whereas someone in a different cultural/historical context but in the same sort of room with the same sort of investigators demanding at him to give up the info -- say a Brit or an American -- might not be as completely convinced that the situation is hopeless. They might keep demanding a lawyer no matter how many times they're told by the interrogators that nobody knows where they are, they have no rights, etc. Just because they grew up with a different baseline expectation -- however unrealistic it may be in the moment -- than a 1930s Russian did.
It doesn't seem clear that the resistance rate in Stalin's USSR would map into other less-extreme cultural contexts, in other words.
> would know that there are zero even theoretical limits on what the secret police can do to him
Most likely many of them did believe (usually mistakenly) that police still tries to keep the investigation in some contact with reality.
> Russia had zero cultural history of anything but totalitarian government
No recent history of non-absolutist government, yes (short fluke was quite clearly a fluke…). However if we are talking about court system, Russia had half a century history of a trial by jury system where lawyers openly argued for jury nullification with nonnegligible chances of success. It was clear, of course, that Bolshevik court system was willing to just kill for «interests of revolution» reasons; however early red terror did include announcing who and why, for some values of «why», is persecuted. Switching to the mode where it is OK for an accusation to be beyond forgery and all the way into absurdist prose was a change many missed…
> complete resistance is basically "suicide by cop"
Some did not know, some had no chance to survive either way, though…
(Not sure what fraction of people initially destined for a non-lifelong prison term refused to sign a confession and still got a non-lifelong prison term, that probably also has happened)
> They might keep demanding a lawyer no matter how many times they're told by the interrogators that nobody knows where they are, they have no rights, etc.
Those might break at the stage where interrogators start torturing their relatives before their eyes (which the 1930's USSR political police have done at least in some cases — not sure how often things reached that stage).
Was this a case of "you will be shot anyway", or did they have a chance of survival if they held out against the torture? This makes a giant difference, after all.
Note that torture was applied not only to those they planned to shoot, but also to those they planned to imprison. I wouldn't exclude existence of circumstances where the confession reduced the eventual prison term, and existence of other circumstances where it made the sentence harsher. (Of course what the people under torture believed themselves about this is hard to establish…)
I've heard it claimed (can't vouch for this, though) that a weird legalism was in place, where convictions often required proof (which was difficult and annoying, especially when someone was innocent) or a confession (much easier!). So the confession might not have been just window-dressing.
Not dissimilar from some *actual* witch trials, come to think of it.
I would make the point that the religious conservative perspective doesn’t exactly excuse heterosexuals from needing to resist sexual temptation.
Nor for that matter are people excused from resisting the temptation to commit other sins, regardless of how much they naturally want to. If you happen to be born with a particularly bad temper, too bad, Thou Still Shalt Not Murder.