R.M. Schultz wrote:Wyrm wrote:"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.
Oh, how
cute! More anecdotal evidence!
The mechanism I proposed was mere supposition, but at least it was a mechanism. What do you have? An anecdote! The variance on an anecdote is absymally high, you know.
I think your reverse process is nothing more than a bisexual girl swearing off men forever. As for claiming that the armpit smells "just like the smell of sex", I think she's bullshitting you. Armpit smells like armpit, and it's not very pleasant no matter who it comes from. The only thing that makes it pleasant for your friend is that it comes from your friend's lover, but I bet if you give her a blinded test, she can't tell her lover's sweat from Adam's. I also doubt that even a significant fraction of female rape victims switch teams after being raped, and I strongly suspect the "switch hitter" fraction is close to the rate of bisexuality among women.
Here's why I think her attraction to women isn't conditioned the way you think. If you read carefully
the report on the pheremonic response of gay men, you'll find that, in addition to the subjective responses (which, contrary to your friend's claim, do not say that they think any particular sweat is pleasant to sniff, just that they have preferences), there was also PET scanning of the volunteers. Here's the relevant passage:
Pheremone Report wrote:When they sniffed smells like cedar or lavender, all of the subjects' brains reacted only in the olfactory region that handles smells.
But when confronted by a chemical from testosterone, the male hormone, portions of the brains active in sexual activity were activated in straight women and in gay men, but not in straight men, the researchers found.
The response in gay men and straight women was concentrated in the hypothalamus with a maximum in the preoptic area that is active in hormonal and sensory responses necessary for sexual behavior, the researchers said.
Do you know what this means, moose-brain? An ordinary smell activates the olfactory cortex only. When the man-sweat is given to straight women and gay men, an
additional, very primitive pathway is activated. Why emphesize "very primitive"? Because the primitiveness makes the pathway very hard to condition.
Let's take a less primitive pathway, a pathway connecting the visual cortex directly to the amygdala. If this pathway is ruptured, then you will suddenly believe that your house and possessions are fakes, and your own mother is an imposter. The reason why is because the accustomed emotional response to seeing your mother is completely absent when this nerve is ruptured, so your higher mind rationalizes that this must be some doppelganger that only looks like your mother. Until she speaks, because the connection between the auditory cortex and the amygdala is just fine and the mother's voice evokes the familiar emotional response.
You would think that you recognize mother as genuine on a conscious level and that conscious awareness evokes an emotional response. This pathology puts to rest that notion. The emotional response comes first, when the amygdala recognizes your mother directly, then comes the recognition of that person as your real mother. This pathology is completely immune to conditioning. You can learn to wait until your mother speaks before accusing her of being an imposter — you can learn to cope with the lack of emotional response, but the emotional response never comes to you on sight alone.
If it is hard to change your feelings based on this more recent pathway, what about an older pathway? Laughable. This pathway is DEDICATED to sniffing out man-sweat, and only active in gay men and straight women; it is completely SILENT in straight men. The power of ancient neural pathways trump conditioned responses.
Also, please note: This is a PET scanner. Ie, NOT SUBJECTIVE!
R.M. Schultz wrote:Wyrm wrote:R.M. Schultz wrote: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?
Didn't you get the memo? It's the Evil Gay Comspiracy out to make all straight men poofy! You've already met Brother Snowman. I'm Not-Gay-Yet Associate Gimp-Boy Wyrm. On the dicipline rack, New Recruit!
R.M. Schultz wrote: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.
Dishonesty and subjectivity all in the same direction? Smells like conspiracy to me.
R.M. Schultz wrote: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!)
Oh, so if this
flawed study knocks down Kinsey's 10% figure, you suddenly believe that part, fuckstick? At least we now have a name where you came up with this ridiculous dominance/submissive bullshit.
R.M. Schultz wrote:Wyrm wrote:R.M. Schultz wrote: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.
You nevertheless think that leather-tops are in any way representitive of typical homosexual behavior. How many gays
actually frequent leather bars, fucknut? Don't know? Then how do you know such a sample is representative of all gays, rather than just gays who frequent leather bars?
What about the gay guys who play Quake to pass the time instead of going to leather bars? They're obviously missing from your sample. What about the ones who go to fancy restraunts with their dates? To the movies?
Oh, by the way, "My best friends are X" is scraping the bottom of poor defenses for your arguments. We want reasons, not who your friends are.
R.M. Schultz wrote: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.
O RLY?! You realize that homosexuals frequenting leather bars are more likely to display behavior associated with leather-tops, don't you? Obvious selection bias. You lose, Tweedledum.
R.M. Schultz wrote:Wyrm wrote: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.
Classic strawman of utilitarianism, matress wipe. The end
does not justify the means in utilitarianism, because utilitarianism takes into account the
entire end, even the harm you cause along the way using the means. If the utility account at the end of your action is negative, then the action is ethically unjustified in utilitarianism, even if the "end" is good.
Undermining the rule of law is bad when those laws create positive utility, like traffic laws promoting the smooth and swift flow of traffic. Utilitarianism can support the rule of law when the law have utility. Utilitarianism disallows laws that are of bad utility and calls for them to be abolished. Then again, a worthless or harmful law
should be abolished, right?
Intention can play a part in utilitarianism. The engineer didn't
intend for the bridge to fall down and kill that many people, but he is no less culpable for his poor design. On the other hand, if the engineer intended for the bridge to fall and purposefully designed it that way, it shows an inclination to cause harm that should be addressed.
You may now shut up about utilitarianism.
On the other hand, without some kind of metric that tells you the ethicality of actions, moral rules become "just so", which is not any good reason to subscribe to them. Until you tell us what your metric is, we can't see any justification behind your arbitrary views of morality.
R.M. Schultz wrote:Wyrm wrote: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.
So if you can sever yourself from a group, then killing off that group is less atrocious than killing off a group you can't sever from?
What the fuck kind of morality are you parading around, shitcock?!?! See, we
sane people believe that it doesn't matter what group you belong to, murdering
any group of people, wholesale, is
wrong!
Yes, if you happen to be a part of a severable group, and that group is being persecuted, then the smart move is to sever yourself until the persecution dies down.
But that does not excuse the persecutor for their singling out a group for liquidation!
What insane asylum did you escape from to think otherwise, skullfucker?!
R.M. Schultz wrote:Wyrm wrote: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.
Okay, but I'm not seeing how Western moral thought justifies the distinction between between genocide and your democide, because it amounts to
blaming the victim for being a part of a severable group. You can choose to not be a Buddhist, so if you are one during a Buddhist purge, then the atrocity (and hence, culpability to the perpetrator) is lessened because you can choose to not be a Buddhist?
You know, blaming the victim is also frowned upon in Western moral thought. Moron.
R.M. Schultz wrote: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! <- Smallified! -Wyrm
That's right. You didn't. You just said it was
less attrocious than genocide. Oooo, big diff! Thee hast truely pwnd me!
![Wanker :wanker:](./images/smilies/wanker.gif)