Back around 1982-83, a friend noted that victims of AIDS tended to belong to the Four H Club: homosexuals, heroin addicts, Haitians, and hemophiliacs. Later on, homosexuals seized control of the history of AIDS, so now the standard line has become that it was, somehow or other, the fault of Ronald Reagan and other homophobes. Not having gays in the military had something to do with it, too.
The other H's don't have that kind of political muscle to rewrite history.
But here's a new scientific history of AIDS that explains the connections among the Four H's. The article spends a lot of time on the "paternalistic" French colonial doctors who went around innoculating Africans against diseases and occasionally, when the power went out, they could only boil their hypodermic needles instead of fully sterilize them. But, eventually, it gets to how AIDS became a massive disease, and, reading between the lines, you'll see that AIDS was more or less the disease of the "1960s on the March:" decolonialization, the UN, the Black Power Duvalier regime in Haiti, gay sex tourism, drugs, gay lib and so forth.
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But here's a new scientific history of AIDS that explains the connections among the Four H's. The article spends a lot of time on the "paternalistic" French colonial doctors who went around innoculating Africans against diseases and occasionally, when the power went out, they could only boil their hypodermic needles instead of fully sterilize them.
Oh yeah, that's pretty much certain. AIDS was probably around for quite a while, but effectively contained, before mass inoculation campaigns in the 60s. Add to those new roads, increased mobility, and urbanization in Africa and it was bound to break loose.
It's really a wonder that something even worse didn't come out of that milieu.
But lest we get carried away here, smallpox, a deadlier scourge by far, was effectively eradicated right about the time AIDS emerged. So it was probably worth it.
Why does Pépin posit that Haitians spread AIDs to the U.S. by two routes, plasma exports AND supposed gay sex tourism?
Occam sez: White gays were their own "amplifier" once one Gay American got a transfusion with the dirty plasma.
The fact that Haïti appeared in the Spartacus guide is a stretch. What nation isn't?
Of course, you have to wonder what Lush Rimbaugh is DOing over there in the Dominican Republic...are the girls for sale, too?
I wonder what one is to make of this passage in the NYT piece:
'Blood and tissue samples stored in freezers in Africa and in European hospitals that treat Africans — a few going back to the 1950s — form a map of AIDS viral subtypes, which is surprisingly complex. For example, white and black South Africans have different subtypes. “Few homosexual Afrikaners have sex with heterosexual Zulus,” Dr. Pépin notes. The whites’ subtype is common among gay European and American men; the one most common among blacks moved south through Zambia.'
As I read the excerpt, the difference is first stated as a categorical one: "...white and black South Africans have different subtypes." Then it suddenly gets hazy: it's about habits--the failure of many homosexual Afrikaners to have sex with heterosexual Zulus. So at the end, it's a question of what's more or less common in the two racial groups, not what's categorically the case.
Is this just sloppy journalism? Or is there something to the initial categorical claim? Or am I misreading this entirely?
Another question: what exactly does this imply:
"The next link was Haiti. Because white Belgians never trained an African elite, only about 30 Congolese outside the priesthood had university degrees at independence."
Think about the implied exclusion of the priesthood from the ranks of educated people. Catholic priests are typically pretty educated people: there are those ancient languages you have to learn, for example. What's with that intentionally offhand bit of disrespect?
Of course, we now have a badly managed massive multiyear international intervention in Haiti. Peacekeepers brought cholera to Haiti, but I bet they will be bringing back HIV to countries all over the world.
@ slumber _i:
The lack of educated people outside the priesthood in the post-independence Congo was a major drag on the country's economic development. Educated priests weren't able to contribute much give the nature of their jobs.
Peter
Think about the implied exclusion of the priesthood from the ranks of educated people. Catholic priests are typically pretty educated people: there are those ancient languages you have to learn, for example. What's with that intentionally offhand bit of disrespect?
I suppose the assumption is that priests already have jobs and aren't typically available to build the new, African civil service (and likely end up in exile or a in shallow grave once things go to hell, but never mind).
Cennbeorc
"...the fault of Ronald Reagan and other homophobes"
That was the recurrent theme of Randy Shilts' (long, but chilling) book "And The Band Played On." It was like the film Contagion, except with people working as hard as they could to get the bug.
Years after it was obvious why they were all dying gruesome deaths, the gays just Would Not Stop hooking up in bath houses. It was their civil right, you see.
As Roissy said, "There's no getting between a gay man and his hedonism."
(Randy Shilts is no longer with us.)
"Is this just sloppy journalism? Or is there something to the initial categorical claim? Or am I misreading this entirely?"
You have difficulty understanding things that aren't absolutes, basically.
Steve has talked about this before.
"“But I was unexpectedly surprised,” Dr. Essex said."
Is he often expectedly surprised? Or does he unexpectedly find his prejudices confirmed?
What a whirligig of astonishment and ennui he must inhabit.
"As Roissy said, "There's no getting between a gay man and his hedonism."
So true--seems the partners of gay men on meds for HIV are not too afraid of catching the darn bug. Idiots.
From Science Daily :
"Why HIV Infection Rates Are On the Rise"
from "Science Daily" (Aug. 25, 2011):
"Since HIV infection rates began to rise again around 2000, researchers have been grasping for answers on what could be causing this change, especially in the homosexual community. The rising numbers are a stark contrast to the 1990's, when infection rates dropped due to increased awareness of the virus. A new study in Israel reveals that the number of new HIV cases diagnosed each year in the last decade saw a startling increase of almost 500% compared to the previous decade, and similar trends have been reported in a number of other developed nations, including the U.S.
"According to Prof. Zehava Grossman of Tel Aviv University's School of Public Health at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Central Virology Laboratory of the Ministry of Health, a new approach to studying HIV transmission within a community has yielded a disturbing result. By cross-referencing several databases and performing a molecular analysis of the virus found in patients, an astonishingly high number of newly-diagnosed men with male sexual partners were found to have contracted the virus from infected, medicated partners who are already aware of their HIV-positive status."
The rest of the article can be found at
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110825091931.htm
Having just watched Audrey Hepburn in "A Nun's Story" (one of her favorite movie roles, apparently), I am now under the impression that the Belgians were not all bad in the Congo.
But it sounds like no good deed goes unpunished.
It is nice that the author debunks the AIDS hysteria in the heterosexual Western population.
Back in the 80s and 90s, Big Gayness was hammering on the "it could happen to you, too!" nonsense with a 16 pound sledge.
I tried to clue the white folks I know into the utter unlikelihood of their ever getting AIDS ... to little avail.
Given our current straight hook-up culture it's clear AIDS paranoia for straights has almost evaporated in the last couple decades.
So what was the change? Why the current indifference to AIDS among straights? Once homosexuals got free taxpayer AZT they no longer needed to bang the drum and gin up straight hysteria?
The connection between gays in the military & AIDs seems easy to explain. Had a significant proportion of gay men served in the armed forces when AIDs struck them down, it would have become a military health problem - the state would have allocated military doctors, medical researchers & hospitals to treat the afflicted soldiers, sailors and airmen. AIDs would have been portrayed as a threat to the military readiness of the nation and during the final years of the Cold War no less.
Failure to criticize gay behavior spread AIDS more than anything.
I have to disagree with “milam command’s” comments about Randy Shilt’s book “And the Band Played On.” As “The Path of AIDS” is a scientific history of AIDS, “And the Band Played On” is the finest social history of AIDS. Shilt, who was HIV positive at the time, did a very balanced job of reporting. He placed some blame on the Reagan administration (certainly not on the researchers trying to figure out what was going on) but most of his blame, and his primary cause for the spread of the disease, was the lack of concern/involvement by the gay community. The gay community hid behind civil rights and sexual discrimination while carrying on such an aberrant sexual lifestyle (multiple, unknown sexual partners), that even lesbians distanced themselves from gay males and the use of “gay” to refer to female homosexuals. The gay community attitude was personified by the man identified as “AIDS patient number 1” who, when told that he was highly infectious, had given the disease to hundreds of men and should not have unprotected sex, his attitude was that someone had given AIDS to him so why should he care about giving it to someone else? That attitude seems to continue into today….along with the entitled attitude of free treatment for something that is still very preventable.
Shilt rightly points out that if the gay community had listened to the medical experts, and if the federal government had isolated infected patients (like it had done with highly communicable diseases like TB in the past), the spread of AIDS would have been greatly limited. However, he does slightly imply that perhaps some people had a “goal” of ensuring that AIDS become a heterosexual, not just a homosexual, disease. That’s what finally caused the massive investment in research and treatment. (BTW, Cuba decided to isolate HIV positive folks in a “gilded cage” i.e. a sanatorium, to limit the spread of AIDS. Seems that the Cubans had a better grasp of human nature than the US. They figured out that telling someone who was HIV positive not to have unprotected sex didn’t work. Isolation did.
It worked until people in the US started claiming the Cubans were involved in human rights violations.
Interestingly enough, Randy Shilt’s balanced perspective changed once he developed full blown AIDS. Read any of his follow-on books and you see much different reporting. Finally, if you ever get a chance to watch the made-for-TV program or listen to the audio book….DON’T. These do not reflect what was written in the book. These are where you will see attempts to rewrite history. These are focused on blaming the Reagan administration and diverting any blame away from the gay community.
If you want another metric for the 1960s transformation, check out the suicide statistics by age group. Basically, since the mid-1960s, suicide rates for older people have declined dramatically, while suicide rates for young people have exploded. About what you would expect as adults became liberated from family obligations and protected financially in old age.
Here's what cheeses me off about AIDS; it's preventable. Except for those poor kids who catch it from their idiot prostitute drug using mothers, it is entirely preventable. I don't count those folks who caught it from bad blood back in the eighties.
That is something the gay community has to own up to. If we treated AIDS like any other killer disease we would have quarantined them until we found a cure or it burned itself out.
Instead we spend more money on it that Alzheimers and way more folks die of Alzeimers every year. Just wait until Obamacare hits. Folks with Alzheimers will be given a little pamphlet about death with dignity and a pill.
The article is interesting throughout. I loved this insight:
In the 1920s, machine-made glass syringes replaced expensive hand-blown ones, and the Belgians and French attacked many diseases in their colonies, both out of paternalism and to create herd immunity to protect whites.
....
So when the evil white colonialists vaccinate their subjects to prevent sufferings and deaths from horrible tropical diseases, the motivations are still suspect. It's just paternalism or to prevent the white people from dying. Never give the imperialists and colonialists any credit at all!
I don't think the failure to steam-sterilize the syringes had much to do with the spread of HIV. The virus is fragile and very sensitive to heat. The World Health Organization recommends boiling for 20 minutes but also notes that the virus is quite heat-labile. It's hard to imagine that HIV would survive even a short exposure to boiling water.
More likely is that the nurses giving the injections reused syringes without boiling them. I saw this when I visited hospitals in the USSR in the 1980's. Stopping to boil the syringes is so much trouble - better to just reuse them.
"The next link was Haiti. Because white Belgians never trained an African elite, only about 30 Congolese outside the priesthood had university degrees at independence."
replace never trained with could not train. The congo didn't have schools period before the Belgians got there.
"The Belgians were complete bastards. Their colony in Africa was founded as a personal possession of King Leopold, not of the belgian nation. His agents ruthlessly exploited the Congo, not bothering even with the pretense of bearing the White Man's burden, as the British and French did. They were perhaps as bad as the Germans and the Japanese were with their colonies."
Don't believe everything the left tells you:
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,866343,00.html
It is nice that the author debunks the AIDS hysteria in the heterosexual Western population.
If the millions spent on stoking AIDS hysteria among heterosexuals had been used to promote cultural change among gays, fewer would have died.
What they needed was some version of Uganda's ABC policy: abstain from anal sex; or restrict yourself to one partner; or use a condom.
Cennbeorc
I worked in a hospital in the early 80's and remember being told that it was bigoted to even whisper or hint that AIDS had any connection to homosexuality. That was part of our official instruction, to pretend not to know what was becoming obvious.
Later, of course, we were bigots for an opposite reason.
Big Bill:
It wasnt crazy to suspect that a nasty STD that went like wildfire through an extremely promiscuous gay community might spread more slowly through the much larger straight community. We got really lucky that HIV is so hard to get through normal sexual transmission.
Wikipedia's article on HIV includes s table of transmission probabilities. Blood transfusion has something like a 90% probability of transmitting the infection, having a baby and breastfeeding it has something like a 50% chance, and f--king someone up the ass has only a 1-2% chance of transmitting it. This suggests two things: Either the gay male community that started the spread of the outbreak was *incredibly* promiscuous, or the virus was easier to transmit at the beginning, or both. (From what Ive read, those guys were *serious* about their anal sex with strangers. Everyone needs a hobby, I guess.)
It just doesnt transmit very easily. In developed countries (decent sanitation, few coinfections with parasites, different genetics--who knows?) its seriously hard to transmit HIV by male/female sex. But until that was known for sure, it was absolutely sensible to assume HIV would be like herpes or syphlus, and spread widely.
We got incredibly lucky. If HIV spread as easily as the common cold, the surviving human population would probably be down in the hundreds of millions by now, if that, and God knows what the world would look like otherwise.
"This suggests two things: Either the gay male community that started the spread of the outbreak was *incredibly* promiscuous, or the virus was easier to transmit at the beginning, or both."
The first one.
"We got incredibly lucky. If HIV spread as easily as the common cold, the surviving human population would probably be down in the hundreds of millions by now, if that, and God knows what the world would look like otherwise."
Omega Males would inherit the earth.
Either the gay male community that started the spread of the outbreak was *incredibly* promiscuous,
I worked with a young gay man in 1980. One Sunday morning he told me with a self-satisfied leer, "I had seven last night." 7 on one Saturday night. You can do the arithmetic. Oh, he also told me
he's f***** Elton John at some club in L.A.
"Failure to criticize gay behavior spread AIDS more than anything."
Please explain why your sentence began with "Failure to criticize" rather than the words "Here in America".
"the gay male community that started the spread of the outbreak was *incredibly* promiscuous"
this.
the more i learn about it, the more it boggles my mind just how much sex they actually have, and how obsessed they are with it.
what i want to know is how likely are you to get your own HIV infection if you swallow HIV semen. because that's what they really do, even more than anal sex. any microbe which could spread that way would spread like wildfire among men who have sex with men, because that's their primary sex act by far.
In developed countries (decent sanitation, few coinfections with parasites, different genetics--who knows?) its seriously hard to transmit HIV by male/female sex.
In most third world, (or whatever we're supposed to call them now) countries HIV doesn't spread efficiently by PiV sex. Central America, South America, China, India...For some reason(s), HIV does spread efficiently among blacks. If I had to guess, I would be with (by our standards) indiscriminate promiscuity not limited to heterosexual intercourse: a shit ton (pardon the pun) of black men are bisexual. Another possibility is that for some reason female to male transmission is much more likely when one partner or the other is an african.
OTOH, it's not like AIDS is the first std ever. It has roughly the same risk groups as gonorrhea, syphilis, genital herpes.(though that one may be more prevalent in black women than men) prolly they have similar patterns for similar reasons.
Wade Davis' book The River has one of the main characters contract HIV through a dirty needle at a Colombian border crossing....so no surprise, really.
Incidentally, Haiti had an ostensible swine flu epidemic in the mid 1980's that called for complete eradication of the creole pig. I know people who participated in the campaign...curious to know if inocculations for the new IOwa pigs were administered...total fuck up of a program.
The Haiti Vampire was just one of many medical experiments that have gone on over the years....new birth control implants, to AIDS vaccines, to who knows what....
It has indeed been empire's workshop. Course the human experiments on prisoners around the empire are indicative of much..
Interesting article and some interesting comments. I do detest the supposed use of statistics in this manner however: "a closely studied band of prostitutes in Nairobi: In 1981, 5 percent of them had the virus; three years later, 82 percent did."
This suggests two things: Either the gay male community that started the spread of the outbreak was *incredibly* promiscuous,
Homosexuals who got infected via sodomy also have other STDs which usually made transmission easier - same goes for Africa, where 'dry sex (women and man) is popular.
"Having just watched Audrey Hepburn in "A Nun's Story" (one of her favorite movie roles, apparently), I am now under the impression that the Belgians were not all bad in the Congo."
Nobody or nothing is ALL bad. While it's true Belgians did exploit that region mercilessly, they did try to make up for past wrongs by building schools, hospitals, and etc in the 20th century. By the time Congo won independence, the Belgians had done some good work. But one might it was too late.
Anyway, better Nun's story than Buns' story.
Is there a word for when morality is determined by what kind of people one sympathizes or sides with?
In the US, morality seems to revolve around being pro-Jewish regardless of whether Jews do good or bad. What matters if being pro-Jewish itself. There is also moral points for being pro-black. I think being pro-Indian mattered a lot in the 60s--when Westerns were still being made(and John Wayne was still a big star)and when liberals were drawing parallels between cowboys and Indians and the Vietnam War--, but no one really cares about Indians anymore. They are not intellectual, athletic, nor musical.
I think this ethno-morality or ethmorality is determined by a combination of history(of victimhood) and cool factor. Jews have the Holocaust and cachet of being intellectually/culturally brilliant(and funny as comedians and good at composing music). Blacks have slavery/Jim Crow and athleticism/sexualism/funky-musicalism.
Similarly, what animals receive sympathy determines on how they excite us. Though pigs and whales have equal intelligence, we favor whales(even ones that aren't nearing extinction)cuz they are said to be 'majestic' but while we don't give a crap about pigs cuz they're said to be dirty and piggish. Though we accuse Nazis of having judge races by looks, beauty, and aesthetics, we make moral judgments like that all the time. If Jews weren't smart/creative and blacks weren't musical/athletic, I don't think we'd be so obsessed with the Holocaust and slavery. A special kind of guilt is based on the unspoken notion that the SUPERIOR race was murdered or enslaved.
When we morally condemn China, we care far more about Tibetans than about Uighurs though the latter are oppressed just as badly. Tibetans have the thing with Shangri-la stuff and Dalai Lama hyped by hip/cool celebrities in the West.
So, we don't really have universal morality but ethno-morality. Who is the oppressor(worse if white--though Muzzies and Chinese are not far behind) and who is the victim determine the moral worth of the issue. If whites had killed 800,000 blacks in Rwanda, that would have been outrageous. But, it was blacks killing blacks, so oh well. Black-as-victim conformed to western ethmorality about noble blacks but blacks-as-mass-murderers violated that narrative.
Recently, gays are big winners in ethmorality though it's more like sexmorality. Being pro-gay is good and of itslef cuz the media have painted gays as wonderful, saintly, nice, kind, funny, cuddly, and oh so sweet.
What kind of morality is this? This is different from tribal morality where one thinks 'what's good for us is good'. Ethmorality sympathizes with people outside one's group, but the rules favor certain groups over others: like Jews over Palestinians, or blacks over poor whites, and Mexican illegals over white natives, and gays over sane people.
There is also histo-morality which is related. This says a certain group is morally superior based on its history. This is a form of 'racism' since indivdual worth doesn't matter.
Suppose Anne and Sue are friends as equals. Suppose Anne finds out she's Jewish and Sue finds out she's German. Thus, Anne, by virtue of selective history, is the saintly Holocaust victim while Sue is a the Nazi killer EVEN IF WWII happened long ago and Anne and Sue grew up under same circumstances and advantages. When history is used to tag people this way--possibly permanently--, it's just a new kind of bigotry. It's historist if not 'racist'. Anne is to be favored over Sue cuz she is historily superior. With morality such as that, who needs immorality?
Jody:
The linked wikiledia article has a table. Even being on the receiving end of anal sex from an infected man only has a one or two percent chance of transmission, and oral sex is much less likely to transmit it.
Anonymous:
There is a small minority of people who are extremely resistant to HIV infection (they're missing a coreceptor on their T cells that the virus needs), and another that often lives a very long time keeping the infection under control and not getting sick (their MHC molecules can bind an unusually wide range of T cell receptors, and so it's harder for the virus to evolve around their immune response). I suppose those minorities (and there are probably others) would have ended up as the ancestors of the whole human race. The virus might also have coevolved to be gentler on its hosts, but I kind of doubt it. Being infected with one strain doesnt protect against others, so I dont think there would have been a fitness advantage to evolving for less virulence.
One thing is clear: medical science in the late 70s and early 80s wasn't remotely going to cure this or find a vaccine in time. We still cant get a vaccine or cure to work, despite spending vast amounts of money and genius on the problem, and we know a hell of a lot more about the inner workings of cells, viruses, and the immune system than they did back then.
not a hacker @ 3:46 said:
"I worked with a young gay man in 1980. One Sunday morning..."
Who works on a Sunday?
"Anonymous said...
Don't believe everything the left tells you:"
I don't. That was what, among others, Joseph Conrad told me.
Don't believe everthing you want to believe simply because it confirms your world view.
It wasnt crazy to suspect that a nasty STD that went like wildfire through an extremely promiscuous gay community might spread more slowly through the much larger straight community.
It had been shown by 1986 or 1987 that that was not possible because transmission from woman to man was too difficult.
For some reason, I don't find any of you to be trustworthy wrt AIDS or the behavior of homosexuals. Also I'd posit some gays get laid often others, not so much.
In the late 70s I worked with a gay guy who blew my mind(nothing else) with his bathhouse stores. He would proudly announce that last night he'd had unprotected anal sex with four different guys and he didn't even know what they looked like. He described it as a huge room with guys sitting around naked with cans of Crisco and towels. He died of AIDS in the early 80s.
I think the fact that gays have no future in the form of kids is a huge factor in their suicidal sexual hedonism. If the world ends with you you might as well use everything up, including your health.
I think this kind of futureless eschatological thinking, in a more diluted form, also plays into Jewish actions. But here it has almost the opposite effect. Since culturally they have no after life, they have a tendency to posit and try to create Utopias on earth. There is a fevered rush to get it all done here and now, without regard for human inertia.
Samuel Butler wrote a book about Utopias. It was titled Erewhon.
On the same theme I think our present financial crisis is caused by drinking too much Schlitz beer. You remember the beer commercial... "You only go around once so you grab for all the gusto you can." Judgement Day and God's unceasing witness are forgotten in a haze of foamy beer suds and we leverage ourselves up the butt, like a gay guy in a bathhouse.
Gays are less likely to have children and family so they have more time on their hands. Thus, more time to write books, do art, and be creative.
If Paglia had been a traditional Italian woman with lots of kids, she could't have written SEXUAL PERSONAE.
And so, heteroes are just 'breeders' while gays are the 'readers'.
By the time Congo won independence, the Belgians had done some good work. But one might it was too late.
Indeed. I think the record shows that in 1960 (the date of Congolese independence) the Congo had a better educational infrastructure than South Korea did at the same time. Probably a better infrastructure all around (roads, utilities, ports).
"Is there a word for when morality is determined by what kind of people one sympathizes or sides with?"
Yes. Amorality.
"I don't. That was what, among others, Joseph Conrad told me.
Don't believe everything you want to believe simply because it confirms your world view."
My world view, such as it is, is to acknowledge reality.
Even wikipedia will spare a qualified sentence to mentioning social and economic improvement in the Belgian Congo.
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/15/world/kikwit-journal-once-a-colonial-jewel-a-city-hurtles-backward.html
Again wiki has sparse information, but mentions that the population in 2004 is 294k, 100,000 less than in 1991.
I present this not to gloat over what is happening there, it is absolutely horrible, but it is not our fault. There is likewise nothing that can be done about it from our side short of doing exactly what the Beligans did eariler.
"For some reason, I don't find any of you to be trustworthy wrt AIDS or the behavior of homosexuals. Also I'd posit some gays get laid often others, not so much.
I'm friends and acquaintances with plenty of gays. Some are reasonably chaste. The less promiscuous gay men I know seem to have the same opinion of most gays as most people here - that they are extremely fickle and hypersexual.
Many (most?) gay men have as many partners in a month as most straight men have in a year or more.
For straights, a hookup leads to an exclusive relationship more often than it does for gays. Gay men mostly have no intention of ever raising children, so there is none of that psychology guiding the selection of partners.
.For some reason(s), HIV does spread efficiently among blacks.
Some researchers believe that Europeans have greater resistance to the HIV virus because of that population's past encounters with the bubonic plague.
Both diseases attack the immune system in similar ways. So, past brushes with the Black Death may have selected for Europeans somewhat resistant to HIV.
Had a significant proportion of gay men served in the armed forces when AIDs struck them down, it would have become a military health problem - the state would have allocated military doctors, medical researchers & hospitals to treat the afflicted soldiers, sailors and airmen. AIDs would have been portrayed as a threat to the military readiness of the nation and during the final years of the Cold War no less.
So, you agree that encouraging homosexuality in the US mil. is bad for military readiness.
On the same theme I think our present financial crisis is caused by drinking too much Schlitz beer. You remember the beer commercial... "You only go around once so you grab for all the gusto you can." Judgement Day and God's unceasing witness are forgotten in a haze of foamy beer suds and we leverage ourselves up the butt, like a gay guy in a bathhouse.
Sincerely, that's a great post!
If Paglia had been a traditional Italian woman with lots of kids, she could't have written SEXUAL PERSONAE.
If Camille C. had had lots of kids, some of her descendants would remember GrandMa or Great-Grandma. On the other hand, who will read SEXUAL PERSONAE a generation or so from now?
Another forgotten book by a forgotten author ... Move that old library book to long-term storage! Nobody has checked it out in decades.
being on the receiving end of anal sex from an infected man only has a one or two percent chance of transmission, and oral sex is much less likely to transmit it.
Guys, some basic math here. That's 1-2 percent PER A**F*CK. That's not so different from chance a woman getting pregnant PER F*CK.
Thought experiment about a contra-factual reality:
Suppose fundamentalist Christians had some sexual practice that rendered them as vulnerable to HIV/AIDS as gays are in this reality.
Suppose gays were as little prone to HIV/AIDS as fundamentalist Christians are in this reality.
How Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, et al react? Would they be saying that it was further proof of the evil nature of Christianity/religion?
But as things are, we can draw no conclusions about the differing susceptibility of the two 'communities' mentioned above.
N.B. I'm not arguing that one can conclude from HIV/AIDS that gay sex is 'evil' -- just wondering what Dawkins & Co. would say in that contra-reality.
"Anonymous said...
My world view, such as it is, is to acknowledge reality."
And who thinks otherwise? You think I think any differently? Who goes around saying to themselves: "What nonsense can I believe today?"
"Even wikipedia will spare a qualified sentence to mentioning social and economic improvement in the Belgian Congo."
Right. Don't believe everything you read, kid. Except Wikipedia - that's solid!
But what are the chances your partner of the night is HIV+?
It doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how many partners each HIV+ person has.
How does the epidemic ramp up and explode?
At 7 acts per night, 1% chance of transmission per act (optimistic) and 2 nights out per week (optimistic), each HIV case generates a new HIV case about every 7 weeks. The rate of HIV infection would go up in excess of of 16,000 percent per year among that population; essentially, everyone susceptible is infected before major symptoms appear. The spread is only limited when contacts with the uninfected become infrequent.
The truth about the fatalities resulting from Gay Lib is one of the great taboos of our age.
I'm not arguing that one can conclude from HIV/AIDS that gay sex is 'evil' -- just wondering what Dawkins & Co. would say in that contra-reality.
There is a difference between evil and maladaptive / dysfunctional.
"The linked wikiledia article has a table. Even being on the receiving end of anal sex from an infected man only has a one or two percent chance of transmission, and oral sex is much less likely to transmit it."
so is this per instance? so if you had anal sex every week for a year with a guy who had HIV, you get close to being a coin flip on contracting your own HIV infection. rolling the dice every time, 52 times a year?
now what about how many penors some of these guys suck? i mean over time the odds add up here man.
How much gay male promiscuity is due to homosexuality per se, and how much is due to male horniness unrestrained by female chastity? (Yes, I know women are more promiscuous than they used to be, but in fact straight men still have nowhere near the opportunity for frequent sex with different partners that gay men do.)
Also, being a passive partner doesn't require an erection, so passively inclined homosexual men can have lots of partners in one night.
I agree with the idea that knowing they won't have children encourages male homosexuals to live hedonistic lives.
On the other hand, if straight men had as much sexual opportunity as gay men and could get it up for seven encounters in a single night, wouldn't they have a lot more partners on average than they do now? And a subset of unknown size would have hundreds or thousands of partners in their lives.
None of that changes the contribution of gay promiscuity to the AIDS epidemic, but I do wonder how much homosexual male behavior, sexual and otherwise, is primarily the result of not needing women for sex or affection.
"Also, being a passive partner doesn't require an erection, so passively inclined homosexual men can have lots of partners in one night."
And then there's multipartner sex. Three or more straight people can't be naked together in a room without at least two feeling a little uncomfortable. Six naked gay men in a room, however, won't have any problem at all.
I get the idea that part of the message is "Blacks are inherently incapable of ruling themselves", something I don't agree with.
Your agreement or disagreement means nothing, Evergreen. Only the facts mean anything, and those facts aren't kind to... your kind.
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