[R.M. Schultz]That Axis History Forum Guy Again...

[Ghost Rider]

Just flushing down, because honestly he's blithering and wants to defend his honor by going "How dare you naughty people..."

[Big Orange]

Did I receive a PM from R.M. Schultz, but he deleted it? I received email about it, but I can't see anything in my PM inbox...

[Hotfoot]

It's entirely possible. You can edit a PM as much as you like until the recieving party actually reads it.

[Darth Wong]

It's entirely possible. You can edit a PM as much as you like until the recieving party actually reads it.

Schultz seems to be clueless about using the software. He sent an E-mail to board yesterday afternoon asking how he's supposed to read his PMs if he was blocked. Yesterday evening, he posted. He thought he was banned, even though he wasn't.

[Surlethe]

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I've been working upon a theory similar to that of R.M. Schultz. Here it is.

Having disclosed that let me offer an excursus upon the idea that it is internet posting habits, not orientation that is central to sexuality. I call this the Single Board Theory of Sexuality

The first thing I think we should keep in mind is that the nature/nurture debate has been going on for thousands of years and is not likely to be decided anytime soon. We should also note that I am making no claims that internet posting habits are innate, just that they are the determinant.

The next thing we must keep in mind is that an hypothesis claims not truthfulness, but usefulness. The question we must always ask is: does it have predictive value? In light of this I would ask you to try an experiment. Go to a gay bar (not some piano bar, but a real hard-core leather bar) and ask the boys if they are Axis Forum members. The young ones will say they post occasionally roles (the uncertainty of youth), but once a man is past twenty-five he is almost certainly either does regularly or doesn't at all.

Not-at-alls outnumber prolific posters by a factor of five to one. (This is not just my estimate, it comes from my estimate of the population of the Axis History Forums.)

And guess what? Pretty soon you can sort them out without asking. You can sense the ego-strength of the Post-all-the-times, you can see the deference they are given, and you can feel right away that they are men of substance. And then ask the Post-all-the-times: “Have you ever done women?” They probably have and, if they are really honest with you, they will tell you that they prefer men because the sex is better. By this they mean, not that they are not attracted to women, but that men can be relied upon to want sex, be orgasmic, and not get caught up quickly in emotional entanglements. Then ask them if they have a fetish. . [By “fetish” I mean a sexual practice that one must perform for satisfaction. A sexual practice that merely appeals to you, but is not necessary, is just a “kink.”] Odds are they don’t, they just play along with what the Post-not-at-all wants.

Similarly, if you talk to Post-not-at-alls you will find that they almost all have fetishes. I will even postulate a corollary rule to my Single Board Theory: the less prolific on the Axis History Forums someone is, the narrower their field of sexual desire is. Proof of this can be found in the simple fact that heterosexual masochists must usually pay to get a good beating.

If you begin to look at your homosexual friends from the perspective of Post-lots and Post-not-at-all, very quickly you will find that this gives you a tremendous way of analyzing the whole of their personalities. The method proves itself by use.

Similarly, most Heterosexual relationships work best when the man is more dominant that the woman, but not so much more dominant that he will become bored with her or dominate her into such an abject submission as to obliterate her personality. (This has everything to do with the penetrative nature of the sex act and little to do with the supposed “patriarchal” nature of our civilization.) Again, using the paradigm of Post-a-whole-lot and Post-not-at-all, I invite you to think of all the couples you have known over the years and to see that the ones that are “well matched” are close in terms of dominance, yet with the man predominating. Use this method of analysis at the next wedding you go to and predict how long the marriage will last: you will find it to be a much better predictor than shared interests, or similarity of personality type.

The Single Board Theory also explains why there are huge numbers of gays insisting that they were “born gay.” The math is simple: 80% or more of gays are people who don't post on the Axis History Forums that cannot fundamentally alter any aspect of their lives, so of course they would claim to be innately gay!

The “Homosexuality Is Innate Theory” cannot be used to explain my experience, of the experience of myriads of people who post at the Axis History Forums who make their sexuality into what they want, not what a supposedly immutable nature has imposed.

[Big Orange]

It's entirely possible. You can edit a PM as much as you like until the recieving party actually reads it.

Well the emails came in at least four times this afternoon, notifying me that I received a PM and then I go to my inbox and it's empty. Maybe it is R.M. Schultz taunting me in some way.

[Wyrm]

My credibility is decreased because I took umbrage at an underhanded attack upon my good name?

No. If you were already a member here and participating in good faith in the rest of the BBS, then you would be justified in your umbrage and response. But you are not. You joined this BBS specifically to respond to Big Orange's perceived snipes at you. That's the fact that is glaring at me as I look at your postcount: as of this time the number of times you have responded in this thread is four posts. Your postcount is four. That means your only "contribution" to this forum is in this one thread. You have admitted you have waited three weeks for your account to be approved. Just for this thread. Out of thousands of more amusing ways to spend your time here, you choose to spend it on this one fucking thread.

That's simply pathetic, by any definition of the word.

Now, if you had any intelligence, you would've realized that BO was being told to shut up about his jousts with you. I submit the following proof (from this post).

but am I wasting my time here with this halfwit? Am I more or less talking to a brickwall here?

To put succienctly...yes. If you can't recognize this, then nothing we say will convince you otherwise.

After which, Big Orange agreed on the issue and said nothing further on the subject. And there the thread stayed... until it was reopened by thee. You showed up with, as BO had put it, your "own brand of stupidity", and correctly predicted that you would be HOSed. Want to go for the full Parting Shots treatment?

[R.M. Schultz]

Interesing ad hominem(s) thrown in with complete bullshit. (Oh no!! He called me a PC Liberal and a communist!!!!) Dumbass.

What are you talking about? I asked Big Orange if he were a liberal, and I commented on the communist origin of the phrase “horizontal recruiting.” Here you take umbrage at two words not directed at you, yet somehow I am thin skinned for reacting to sustained personal attacks. Such hypocrisy!

Directed at me or him the context in which you use the term liberal is clearly meant as an insult and ad hominem. By dismissing the arguments as "liberal propaganda," or some similar line of thinking, you engage in the ad hominem fallacy. Further, by using the reference to Communism in the manner in which you do, you subtly invoke a connection between the Scary Reds and us/him/whoever, thus engaging in a second ad hominem.

Let’s get ourselves a definition and how this fits:

Argumentum ad Hominem (abusive and circumstantial): the fallacy of attacking the character or circumstances of an individual who is advancing a statement or an argument instead of trying to disprove the truth of the statement or the soundness of the argument. Often the argument is characterized simply as a personal attack.

Informal Structure of  ad Hominem
Person L says argument A.
Person L's circumstance or character is not satisfactory.
Argument A is not a good argument.

Where did I say that Big Orange’s argument was invalid because he was a Liberal? I merely wanted to find out whether he was an interested party (e.g. an homosexual) or acting out of an abstract philosophy (i.e. was he just being “politically correct.”) Similarly, I was merely pointing out that the phrase “horizontal recruiting” was of communist origin — as are many other serviceable phrases or expressions! Furthermore, I used the word to describe my own terminology — was I supposed to be making an ad Hominem attack upon myself?

new study shows that gay men respond differently from straight men when exposed to a suspected sexual stimulus found in male sweat.

This is more likely a conditioned response, just as how wine drinkers might salivate at the smell of grapes while beer drinkers would be less likely to. I’ll bet if we could test pre-revolution Chinese mandarins they would have an hormonal response to bound feet and, by your logic, it would “prove” that a taste for mutilated appendages was “innate.”

And your basis for this would be what?

The fact that homosexuals respond to male sweat has all the characteristics of a conditioned response and in no way “proves” that homosexuality is innate. The ability to induce a counter-intuitive response through conditioning has been well known and understood since Pavlov and his famous experiments with dogs.

I repeat: So... rather than actually responding to the points within the article I posted you instead attempt to claim that your personal experiences take precedence over the results of a scientific study without demonstrating any flaws within said study's methodolgies or conclusions?

I think what we have here is a fallacy of False Cause:

Post hoc ergo propter hoc:  (literally "after this, therefore because of this") the fallacy of arguing that one event was caused by another event merely because it occurred after that event.

While there is a correlation between a group and an effect, there is no evidence of causation. That is: it is just as logical to say:
He is homosexual because he likes male sweat.
As it is to say:
He likes male sweat because he is homosexual.
The directionality of the causation has not been proved, nor even attempted to be proved.

Sexuality is one of life’s great intangibles. “Evidence,” such as it is, is both necessarily subjective and prone to falsification. The history of supposedly “scientific” sex surveys is replete with anecdotal selection (e.g. Krafft-Ebing’s “Psychopathia Sexualis”), special pleading (e.g. “The Hite Report”), and out-and-out falsification (both Kinsey Reports). There is also pressure to make views of sexuality conform to societal norms, religious teaching, and political agendas. What I am offering here is an hypothesis — one that I have used for years to know and understand sexual dynamics. I believe this hypothesis has predictive value (it certainly has for me) and I think it can be best evaluated in what is perhaps the least repressed arena of sexuality, the homosexual leather bar.

In more than one discussion on the Third Reich Forum I have contended that Genocide (persecution by genetic group) is worse than Democide (persecution by social group) because someone can take measures to avoid Democide, but not Genocide. That is to say the execution of Edith Stein is morally worse than the suicide of Alan Turing because Turing could have kept his pants on and avoided persecution while Stein was killed for being racially Jewish even though she had become a Catholic nun.

Explain what moral system you subscribe to. It is obviously not utilitarianism, because utilitarianism does not make any such distinction. It is obviously not humanism, because the concept of human rights makes no such distinction. What does it mean when you say something is "morally worse" if we have no idea what you think defines morality?

It's not really that hard to make moral distinctions if you think about it logically. Intentionality has been a central tenet in the evaluation of guilt in Western philosophy since the time of the pre-Socratics. This shows up in our legal system which differentiates between pre-meditated murder (first degree homicide), crime of passion (second degree murder), assault with no intention of murder that results in a death (first degree manslaughter), and mere negligence (second degree manslaughter). That's not too tough to understand, is it? Using similar reasoning we could limn out similar degrees of mass murder as our legal system does for individual homicide. Such a system might be as follows:

First Degree Atrocity: Volitional slaughter of wholly innocent groups. This would include:
— Genocide, the killing of a group by race (e.g. the Final Solution, the Armenian genocide)
— Slaughter for Profit, the kill of masses of people for economic benefit (e.g. the Belgian exploitation of the Congo, the Spanish occupation of Santo Domingo).

Second Degree Atrocity: Volitional slaughter of self-selected groups. This would include:
— Democide, the killing of religious, political, or social groups.

First Degree Mass-Manslaughter: Killing non-combatants as a by-product of wartime conditions. This would include:
— Strategic Bombing
— "Counter Insurgency" measures

Second Degree Mass-Manslaughter: Unintentional deaths as a by-product of bad policy. This would include:
— Political Miscalculation (e.g. the Ukrainian Famine, the Great Leap Forward)
— Barbaric Conditions (e.g. the Trail of Tears, the Gulags)

Of course, there are advantages to lumping things together. If we do not distinguish among degrees of guilt, then Eichman and Eisenhower can stand before us equally "guilty."

A persecution you cannot escape is self-evidently more oppressive than one you can escape by changing your behavior.

And what if you can't achieve an erection for a girl? Oops. Saying that people can escape your clutches if they fool you into thinking they're not on your hit list does not make you a better person.

Victims of Nazi Democide were targeted because of their actions (e.g. Homosexuals were arrested for soliciting, Communists for having joined the KPD, Jehovah’s Witnesses for refusing to take an oath of allegiance) and, at some point, they had been free to take different actions. Whereas victims of Genocide were condemned simply for being Jewish, or Romany, or Slavic and at no time could any of these persons have done anything differently to avoid persecution. Anyone with a basic sense of fairness ought to be able to see the difference.

[Raesene]

Victims of Nazi Democide were targeted because of their actions (e.g. Homosexuals were arrested for soliciting, Communists for having joined the KPD, Jehovah’s Witnesses for refusing to take an oath of allegiance) and, at some point, they had been free to take different actions. Whereas victims of Genocide were condemned simply for being Jewish, or Romany, or Slavic and at no time could any of these persons have done anything differently to avoid persecution. Anyone with a basic sense of fairness ought to be able to see the difference.

that following a political idea or having a different faith or having a certain sexual orientation does not permit other to send you to death does not occur to you ???

if you can kill communists for joining the KPD, would it be okay to send you to a KZ because you are an intolerant asshole ?? you were, after all, free to act differently...

GO TO HELL !!!

[R.M. Schultz]

that following a political idea or having a different faith or having a certain sexual orientation does not permit other to send you to death does not occur to you ???

if you can kill communists for joining the KPD, would it be okay to send you to a KZ because you are an intolerant asshole ?? you were, after all, free to act differently...

GO TO HELL !!!

Okay — how tough is this to get?

I have never said that Nazi Democide was in any way justified!

Moral distinctions are not black-or-white but contain shades of gray. You are willfully misrepresenting my position as I have never made any justification for Nazi crimes, but only asserted that some of these crimes are worse than others.

Would you say that all Nazi crimes were equal? Would you say that ALL of the following crimes are EQUALLY repellant?

• Genocide (the outright killing of groups by birth) against Jews, Gypsies, and the Polish Intelligentsia.
• Democide (the killing of self-selected groups) against Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Communists.
• Semi-Genocide (the imposition of conditions leading to inevitable death, such as artificial famine, confinement under inhumane conditions, enforced over-work, etc.) against Eastern and Southern Slavs.
• A war of annihilation against the Soviets.
• The use of slave labor.
• The looting of a continent.
• Forced attendance at lengthy and boring Thingspiels.
• Heresy and paganism.
• Repression of political liberty throughout a continent.
• A coordinated and sustained propaganda campaign against smoking.
• The bilking of everyone who bought a VW on lay-awy

Would you not concede some hierarchy of malevolence in these actions?

[Raesene]

For me, saying

[...] they had been free to take different actions ...]

is apologetic, because you compared senseless killing to senseless killing.
you were not comparing forced attendance at a party rally to Himmler's paganism, so don't tell me later that there were 'less evil' crimes when you first compare murder to murder.
There is no excuse possible for these crimes, and I read in this sentence a certain casualness in dealing with this aspect on your part, which I consider distasteful and unacceptable.

[R.M. Schultz]

For me, saying

[...] they had been free to take different actions ...]

is apologetic, because you compared senseless killing to senseless killing.

Did you see where I pointed out that Western law makes these comparisons? Here, look at it again:

It's not really that hard to make moral distinctions if you think about it logically. Intentionality has been a central tenet in the evaluation of guilt in Western philosophy since the time of the pre-Socratics. This shows up in our legal system which differentiates between pre-meditated murder (first degree homicide), crime of passion (second degree murder), assault with no intention of murder that results in a death (first degree manslaughter), and mere negligence (second degree manslaughter). That's not too tough to understand, is it?.

So you see there exists a well established moral precedent for the distinctions that I have made and, instead of calling me names and saying that I am “unacceptable,” why don’t you either:
— Attack the Western legal/moral tradition ouright,
— Show my analogy to be false,
— Own up to being a moral relativist who makes no moral distinctions,
— Or just admit that you are too dull to draw such fine moral distinctions.

There is no excuse possible for these crimes ...

Hey, did j’see the part where I said this:

I have never said that Nazi Democide was in any way justified!

I even put it in really big type so that you would notice it. I could post it again in even bigger type if that would help.

[Raesene]

I would like an answer from you to this:

what is the difference in sending someone to a death camp because of being gay or being a jew ? which one is the lesser crime in your opinion ? which one do you consider second degree murder, or is one of them only manslaughter for you ?

BOTH are planned, no killing in a KZ was a "crime of passion"; these first/second degree murder/ manslaughter do not apply; or do you tell KZ survivors their relatives died because of mere negligence ?

I do not think a jehova's witness beat an SS-man so that his comrades could apply a "crime of passion"-clause when they shot him/gassed him/worked him to death.

I object strongly to the implication that sending someone to a KZ is acceptable/less wrong because he was

[...]free to take different actions [...]

[Wyrm]

I repeat: So... rather than actually responding to the points within the article I posted you instead attempt to claim that your personal experiences take precedence over the results of a scientific study without demonstrating any flaws within said study's methodolgies or conclusions?

I think what we have here is a fallacy of False Cause:

Post hoc ergo propter hoc: (literally "after this, therefore because of this") the fallacy of arguing that one event was caused by another event merely because it occurred after that event.

While there is a correlation between a group and an effect, there is no evidence of causation. That is: it is just as logical to say:
He is homosexual because he likes male sweat.
As it is to say:
He likes male sweat because he is homosexual.
The directionality of the causation has not been proved, nor even attempted to be proved.

What difference does it make? We theorize about the origins of sexual orientation by comparing them to the only other group of people attracted to men: straight women. We find that the same neuralogical pathway activates in homosexual males as in heterosexual females when sniffing man-sweat.

Now, consider that in contemporary American society, smelling of old sweat is very much frowned upon. If responses to the smell of sweat was learned, then sweat would be universally reviled by all with about the same frequency. This study shows otherwise.

Indeed, "He is homosexual because he likes man-sweat," is the likely biological basis for homosexuality: the little gay boy learning, through the smell of testosterone tickling the back of his mind, that men are the objects of his desires, and thus becomes homosexual, the same way little straight girls learn men are the objects of their desires through the same mechanism. If I may go further out on a limb here, I could say that one of the jobs of androgens during foetal development is to suppress the development of woman-like response to man-sweat and to stimulate a man-like response to woman-sweat (if there's a comparable mechanism in hetero men).

Regardless of what is really happening, something biological is going on in homosexuality.

The history of supposedly “scientific” sex surveys is replete with anecdotal selection (e.g. Krafft-Ebing’s “Psychopathia Sexualis”), special pleading (e.g. “The Hite Report”), and out-and-out falsification (both Kinsey Reports). There is also pressure to make views of sexuality conform to societal norms, religious teaching, and political agendas.

Conspiracy theories: that's the rhetoric of a discredited position. And I don't like your face either. You're pretending that we don't learn from the failings of past studies.

What I am offering here is an hypothesis — one that I have used for years to know and understand sexual dynamics.

What, without testing it first?

I believe this hypothesis has predictive value (it certainly has for me)

Your anecdotal evidence are not sufficient proof.

and I think it can be best evaluated in what is perhaps the least repressed arena of sexuality, the homosexual leather bar.

And here's the classic "Gay guys are alienz!" position. Do you have any guarantee that the homosexual leather bar is in any way representative of homosexuals in general?

Explain what moral system you subscribe to. It is obviously not utilitarianism, because utilitarianism does not make any such distinction. It is obviously not humanism, because the concept of human rights makes no such distinction. What does it mean when you say something is "morally worse" if we have no idea what you think defines morality?

It's not really that hard to make moral distinctions if you think about it logically.

What makes you think DW or any of us aren't think about moral distinctions logically? DW, and indeed I, reject the moral distinction between mass murder of a race and mass murder of a social group on the basis that they both cause equal harm to society when the targeted groups are of equal size.

True, there is an academic difference between the two, but the two are equal using the metric we have chosen to evaluate morality. DW is asking what metric you choose to evaluate what it means for one action to be "morally worse" than another.

Intentionality has been a central tenet in the evaluation of guilt in Western philosophy since the time of the pre-Socratics. This shows up in our legal system which differentiates between pre-meditated murder (first degree homicide), crime of passion (second degree murder), assault with no intention of murder that results in a death (first degree manslaughter), and mere negligence (second degree manslaughter). That's not too tough to understand, is it? Using similar reasoning we could limn out similar degrees of mass murder as our legal system does for individual homicide. Such a system might be as follows:

First Degree Atrocity: Volitional slaughter of wholly innocent groups. This would include:
— Genocide, the killing of a group by race (e.g. the Final Solution, the Armenian genocide)
— Slaughter for Profit, the kill of masses of people for economic benefit (e.g. the Belgian exploitation of the Congo, the Spanish occupation of Santo Domingo).

Second Degree Atrocity: Volitional slaughter of self-selected groups. This would include:
— Democide, the killing of religious, political, or social groups.

Interesting distinction there, fucknut. It seems that self-selected groups are somewhat at fault for selecting themselves into these groups, and therefore, in some way, deserve to be fucked over.

Please note that the intentionality that is referred to in distinguishing between manslaughter and murder is based on the intentionality of the one committing the murder. The intentionality of the victim does not enter into it (unless the murderer is claiming deadly force was justified in the name of self-defense). First degree murder is distinguished from other degrees of murder by premeditation. In mass murder on religious, political, or social groups, premeditation is just as much a part of the equation as it is in mass murder of groups by race. You are still selecting out a specific group of people for slaughter.

Also, legality does not imply ethicallity! You can do something completely legal yet ethically questionable or even ethically reprehensible.

A persecution you cannot escape is self-evidently more oppressive than one you can escape by changing your behavior.

And what if you can't achieve an erection for a girl? Oops. Saying that people can escape your clutches if they fool you into thinking they're not on your hit list does not make you a better person.

Victims of Nazi Democide were targeted because of their actions (e.g. Homosexuals were arrested for soliciting, Communists for having joined the KPD, Jehovah’s Witnesses for refusing to take an oath of allegiance) and, at some point, they had been free to take different actions.

Please note, that homosexuals were not selected out for any specific harm to the Nazis. They were selected because they "solicited", as if that was proof of morally degenerate behavior.

Whereas victims of Genocide were condemned simply for being Jewish, or Romany, or Slavic and at no time could any of these persons have done anything differently to avoid persecution. Anyone with a basic sense of fairness ought to be able to see the difference.

Not to anyone whose "basic sense of fairness" is based on harm done to society and not merely being willfully different from the rest of society. Just being different from me (willfully or otherwise) does not cause me harm, and therefore does not justify my killing such people different from me in any way. What justifies a response is if they do me harm: a Jew wielding a knife threateningly at me would justify leathal force in my self-defense because this person is wielding a knife threateningly at me, not because he's a Jew. Cigar-smoking homosexuals should be summarily booted from bars because of their obnoxious cigar smoke is eroding the health of the waitstaff and getting into the upholstery (thus making it unplesant for other patrons), not because they are homosexuals.

[Surlethe]

Sexuality is one of life’s great intangibles. “Evidence,” such as it is, is both necessarily subjective and prone to falsification.

Why?

[Simplicius]

Would you say that all Nazi crimes were equal? Would you say that ALL of the following crimes are EQUALLY repellant?

• Genocide (the outright killing of groups by birth) against Jews, Gypsies, and the Polish Intelligentsia.
• Democide (the killing of self-selected groups) against Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Communists.
• Semi-Genocide (the imposition of conditions leading to inevitable death, such as artificial famine, confinement under inhumane conditions, enforced over-work, etc.) against Eastern and Southern Slavs.
• A war of annihilation against the Soviets.
• The use of slave labor.
• The looting of a continent.
• Forced attendance at lengthy and boring Thingspiels.
• Heresy and paganism.
• Repression of political liberty throughout a continent.
• A coordinated and sustained propaganda campaign against smoking.
• The bilking of everyone who bought a VW on lay-awy

Would you not concede some hierarchy of malevolence in these actions?

You will note that, on the whole, these things can be arranged heriarchically because their outcomes are different. However, the first two items cannot - murder is, no matter how you examine it, murder. The outcome is the same, and thus the immorality is the same.

Did you see where I pointed out that Western law makes these comparisons? Here, look at it again:

It's not really that hard to make moral distinctions if you think about it logically. Intentionality has been a central tenet in the evaluation of guilt in Western philosophy since the time of the pre-Socratics. This shows up in our legal system which differentiates between pre-meditated murder (first degree homicide), crime of passion (second degree murder), assault with no intention of murder that results in a death (first degree manslaughter), and mere negligence (second degree manslaughter). That's not too tough to understand, is it?

It does not take a genius to realize that a legal code and a moral code are not equivalent. There is no moral difference between first and second degree murder, and variance in punishment meted out has no bearing on this.

[Frank Hipper]

Heresy and paganism?

SS cultists imposed their fantasies on Europe?

[Raesene]

Heresy and paganism?

SS cultists imposed their fantasies on Europe?

Himmler was fascinated by the old germanic cults and tried to revive them, if I remember correctly there was a cult room in a castle he had rebuilt - by KZ-prisoners, of course to save labor cost.

[Big Orange]

— Own up to being a moral relativist who makes no moral distinctions,

Why do you keep on accusing people of being "moral relativists", R.M. Schultz?

[Pint0 Xtreme]

I like the way he poorly criticizes the evidence for the biological basis of sexual orientation and yet produces no evidence whatsoever for his theory other than useless anecdotal conjecture.

[General Zod]

• Democide (the killing of self-selected groups) against Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Communists.
Would you not concede some hierarchy of malevolence in these actions?

So tell me. If sexuality is a choice, or as you so quaintly put it, "self-selected", when did you choose to be straight?

[Big Orange]

Plus he thinks that the Nazis killing non-Jews was supposedly not as evil as killing Jews, when murder is murder, torture is torture - the regime was still killing homosexuals, the disabled and Jehovah’s Witnesses for pathetic ideological reasons, even though those groups committed different "crimes" to that of the Jewish people. Why the supposed distinction between the different evil acts?

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Plus he thinks that the Nazis killing non-Jews was supposedly not as evil as killing Jews, when murder is murder, torture is torture - the regime was still killing homosexuals, the disabled and Jehovah’s Witnesses for pathetic ideological reasons, even though those groups committed different "crimes" to that of the Jewish people. Why the supposed distinction between the different evil acts?

Maybe he's trying to justify the mass murder of the 'self-selected' groups. If so, he if slime of the lowest order and deserves a brick to the face.

I like the way he poorly criticizes the evidence for the biological basis of sexual orientation and yet produces no evidence whatsoever for his theory other than useless anecdotal conjecture.

I think it can be considered strong evidence he knows he is wrong but is trying desparately to bend the truth to his will by fiat. Again, he is slime of the lowest order and now deserves TWO bricks to the face.

[LordShaithis]

I can see why, if you were a gay Jew, you would rather they went for gays than Jews. Simply because it's easier to fake a different orientation than a different ethnicity. But I don't see how this makes for any sort of moral distinction on the part of the ones doing the killing.

[R.M. Schultz]

I object strongly to the implication that sending someone to a KZ is acceptable/less wrong because he was

[...]free to take different actions [...]

Does free will enter into your moral calculations at all, or are we just automatons bounding around like atoms in the void? Were not Pastor Niemoller, Father Kolbe, and Dietrich Bonhoffer elevated to being heroes (instead of mere victims) because they chose their fates voluntarily?

Are there not degrees of innocence as well as of guilt? Many petty criminals were sent to concentration camps as well. Now, they were actual criminals, so they weren’t innocent, yet they were being punished wildly out of proportion to their crimes. So, in this case would you concede that these criminals were less innocent than Jews or Homosexuals?

"He is homosexual because he likes man-sweat," is the likely biological basis for homosexuality: the little gay boy learning, through the smell of testosterone tickling the back of his mind, that men are the objects of his desires, and thus becomes homosexual, the same way little straight girls learn men are the objects of their desires through the same mechanism.

This would be persuasive if it could be shown to be causative, however if we can prove that it works both ways then it is merely correlative.

And I offer you an example of the reverse process taking place. I know a woman who identified strongly as straight all through high-school, enjoying virtually every form of heteroeroticism short of actual intercourse. She went off to college, drank too much at a party, was raped in her sleep, and ever afterwards has identified as a lesbian. I’ve known her for several years now and, whenever she’s with her lover she is constantly leaning over and sniffing her lover’s arm-pits (it’s really cute!) because, so she says, “It’s just like the smell of sex!” Now — if this is not an example of a conditioned response, then I don’t know what is.

The history of supposedly “scientific” sex surveys is replete with anecdotal selection (e.g. Krafft-Ebing’s “Psychopathia Sexualis”), special pleading (e.g. “The Hite Report”), and out-and-out falsification (both Kinsey Reports). There is also pressure to make views of sexuality conform to societal norms, religious teaching, and political agendas.

Conspiracy theories: that's the rhetoric of a discredited position. And I don't like your face either. You're pretending that we don't learn from the failings of past studies.

I’m sorry — where’s the conspiracy? Did I accuse Dr. Kinsey and Shere Hite of being in cahoots, or did I merely point up that, due to the subjective nature of sexuality, the bias of researchers, the reticence (or dishonesty) or respondents, and the hurdle of overcoming societal norms preventing true objectivity, it is almost impossible to be genuinely scientific in conducting such a survey.

Probably the best study to date is seriously flawed. The U of C’s Edward Laumann’s "Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors,” has been seriously questioned by Jacques Stern, at the Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique and P. Cameron in the journal “Psychological reports” 1998, vol82. In a letter,Laumann himself admitted to me that at no time did this study look at the problem of sexual dominance and wheather it contributed to orientation. (At least this study finally seems to have put to rest Kinsey’s wildly inflated 10% figure for homosexuality!)

and I think it can be best evaluated in what is perhaps the least repressed arena of sexuality, the homosexual leather bar.

And here's the classic "Gay guys are alienz!" position. Do you have any guarantee that the homosexual leather bar is in any way representative of homosexuals in general?

“Aliens?” How do you get that? My best friends are leather-tops, we routinely meet for drinks in leather bars, I never miss IML, I like homoeroticism! I just think there are better ways of spending one’s life.

The only reason I would recommend making observations on homosexual behavior in a leather bar is because here the veneer of respectability is completely stripped away, the pretense of men looking for relationships (as opposed to sex as such) is absent, and this rarified atmosphere brings out what the true dynamics of homosexuality are.

What makes you think DW or any of us aren't think about moral distinctions logically? DW, and indeed I, reject the moral distinction between mass murder of a race and mass murder of a social group on the basis that they both cause equal harm to society when the targeted groups are of equal size.

True, there is an academic difference between the two, but the two are equal using the metric we have chosen to evaluate morality. DW is asking what metric you choose to evaluate what it means for one action to be "morally worse" than another.

The equivalence you are drawing is a functional one. Without moral distinctions that take into account intention, means, and the rule of law, one very quickly ends up advocating a “means justify the ends” position.

Interesting distinction there, fucknut. It seems that self-selected groups are somewhat at fault for selecting themselves into these groups, and therefore, in some way, deserve to be fucked over.

If they have the option of selecting themselves out of the group then they are not really trapped are they? Edith Stein became a Catholic nun, yet she was killed by the Nazis for being Jewish, whereas, during the Soviet collectivizations, thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of Kulaks simply moved to the cities, became proletarians, and thus escaped persecution. If you cannot see a moral distinction between these two policies then I really have to wonder if you have any sense of fairness whatsoever.

Also, legality does not imply ethicallity! You can do something completely legal yet ethically questionable or even ethically reprehensible..

I never said that it did. My point was that the idea of degrees of guilt and innocence are so inherent to Western moral thought that they have been incorporated into our legal system.

Not to anyone whose "basic sense of fairness" is based on harm done to society and not merely being willfully different from the rest of society. Just being different from me (willfully or otherwise) does not cause me harm, and therefore does not justify my killing such people different from me in any way. What justifies a response is if they do me harm: a Jew wielding a knife threateningly at me would justify leathal force in my self-defense because this person is wielding a knife threateningly at me, not because he's a Jew. Cigar-smoking homosexuals should be summarily booted from bars because of their obnoxious cigar smoke is eroding the health of the waitstaff and getting into the upholstery (thus making it unpleasant for other patrons), not because they are homosexuals.

Well that’s quite a rant, but I have to wonder who you are addressing it to, because:

I have never said that Nazi Democide was in any way justified!

So tell me. If sexuality is a choice, or as you so quaintly put it, "self-selected", when did you choose to be straight?

Hard to say exactly. I guess shortly before my twenty-first birthday I really got to thinking about what I wanted to do and accomplish in my life and, gradually, came to see that the most important thing would be getting married and having kids. From that time I dated only women, in fact, only women whom I could see being the mother of my children. There were, of course, a few stray liaisons with men in my early twenties, but I can say without a doubt that I have only been sexually active with women since I was 23, and that have been in a monogamous marriage for the last twenty years.

On the whole, I would say it was less a matter of deciding to be straight than simply clarifying my goals in life and adjusting my habits to fit those goals.