Artist Quits Superman Book Over Orson Scott Card Furor

[Lovely Mixture]

Despite how it might look I'm not trying to have the last word, simply trying to withdraw while giving it to someone else.

Actually I meant to say that I wasn't trying to get the last word.

I just happen to keep getting pulled back in by seeing something I feel I should answer myself.

Fair enough.

That said, the thing is your not really "countering" anything, merely re-stating an opinion as if it's fact, and trying to draw me into a more in depth debate which I am setting out to avoid for the moment as it would go on for months with nothing being resolved. What you happen to think is fine, but understand that a lot of what your saying is based on the assumpsion of acceptance of other points you try and make.

I explained to you why your surveillance scenario is flawed because it's not equal. I've explained to you why your middle-ground is not middle-ground because you're advocating different treatment. I've explained to you that you don't judge people based on their sexual preference because that is discrimination.

Your position is based around the idea that homosexuals are entirely harmless and as a group tend to spawn more dangerous deviants than the norm. This allows you to "logically" follow through with arguements based on it being simple discrimination.

When you cut through the chase we are simply not going to agree, because at the end of the day I believe gay men are far more likely to be pedophilles than anyone else. You do not.

Yes, I believe people are people who can do good or evil. Try as I might not to, I might judge them on cultural background or sexual orientation, but my judgements are not law

You tend to believe political studies conducted by those setting out to prove equality that say this is not true, and based on what gay people tell you to your face.

No, I believe in judging people as individuals and not collectives. Just because I've had bad experiences with gay people or Chinese people does not give me the authority to say how they should be treated.

I on the other hand am someone who was not only a victim, but also happened to have gone through things like Code Adam training, and then had to go out and use that training in the real world and actually chased away/caught a whole heck of a lot of creepy gay guys trying to lure young kids over an extended period of time. I've also had access to the reports by actual professionals, and also engaged in surveillance and such with a kind of pseudo-authority that goes beyond what anyone conducting these studies could do. I also know that most people who do "serious" security work, police work, corrections, etc... having dealt with tons of them, wind up becoming extremely bigoted due to experience, both towards gay men, and also towards certain minority cultures. It's not a matter of these tendencies being there to begin with but what the job, authority, and the kind of information you get with the training and using it day after day to see "behind the curtain" constantly makes you that way.

The irony is that the information gained by the people who can actually gather it, is not something that can be put out in official studies due to the policies intended to limoit this kind of information gathering even when it happens. No study conducted by politicians, university students, professors, etc... can ever really give you the real picture because they don't have the authority to gather it. To really find the truth of matters like this you need to be able to really dig into a of a lot of people who are unaware they are being observed.

At the end of the day the bottom line is you, or others I'm argueing with need to either accept what I'm saying since it comes from personal experience and observations, OR flat out call me a liar. If you think I'm a liar, then we have nothing to talk about.... the end. Entire debate concluded.

You make gay men out as if they are another race or something. Experience and information are two different things.

And if they "don't have authority to gather it" then you're also questioning accuracy the reports you talked about. What is "authority" ? You can't know if someone is capable.

Speaking for myself, one of the reasons why I mentioned tracking and suerveillance is because I kind of know what will happen if people ever really look behind this curtain. I think on some level everyone does. After years of wearing those "colored glasses" of training and experience... on a lot of subjects, I've come to the conclusion that people are simply happier with the illusion, and don't want to be forced to confront the truth. A lot of it is that accepting the truth on a lot of touchy matters would require change throughout society, and even worse, people to actually do something. Blind acceptance and enforced ignorance is very much the path of least resistance.

To me it sounds like you're making up "the truth" in order to justify your position, cause the actuality of the situation is more complicated. You can't know how people are. It's funny that you mention "enforced ignorance" because your stance seems more ignorant than rational, I'd say blind faith in that "truth" is also a path of least resistance.

At any rate, the point is that while I state my opinion in brief in threads, there is nothing to discuss. You have nothing to counter or dispute here. At the end of the day either everything you say is wrong, or I'm a liar. There is
no room for discussion. That said, while you might "know a lot of gay people" or whatever, how many of those people have you ever spied on (and who trained you/provided the equipment to do it?)?. Have you ever been assigned to keep a bunch of kids safe in a high traffic, public area? How many years did you do that? Who trained you for it? What authority did you have (even if just on paper as was my case)?

We all wear masks. If we judged people on who they were in private then I would be arrested for various thought crimes.

And I won't call you a liar, I'll call you ignorant like I did before.

Chances are you don't KNOW anything, you've just been told things, and probably by people who had their own agenda and didn't have the authority or abillity to ever really know anything themselves.

Ditto to you. How do you know those you've talked to didn't have their own agenda? That they really knew anything themselves? That they just didn't just dislike gay people?

"Chances are you don't know anything." is an incredibly arrogant thing to say.

Let me ask you this. If someone said your ethnic group was more capable of doing such and such and needed to be monitored....Would you be ok with it?

 

[Mad World]

Being intolerant of someone's bigoted beliefs is not hypocritical. It is wrong to unfairly discriminate against others for things they have no say over. Gender, race, disabilities....these are uncontrollable things and punishing someone based on them is ignorant. But a person's choices....THAT is perfectly okay to persecute. Religion is a choice. Racism is a choice, and OSC being a homophobic douche-canoe is a fucking choice. And choices, opinions and beliefs are fair game to be shot down and the holder of those beliefs to be punished.

OSC made the choice to hold those beliefs, and so the consequences against him are perfectly fair.

Marrying someone of the same sex is a choice, and that is what Card is against. Being against someone simply for being gay is one thing, but there is nothing wrong with being opposed to gay acts.

 

[James Joseph Emerald]

snip

I've studied anthropology, where a lot of emphasis is put on moral relativism.
So I can appreciate your objective approach in so far as not dismissing anyone's beliefs outright.

However, the idea of "compromising" between dissenting opinions is problematic.
Obviously, you can't humour every opinion. What about a group of people who believe young children should actively engage in homosexual sex rituals (I'm not making this up btw [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etoro_people])? Surely that's the actual opposite end of the "homosexuality is wrong" side of the spectrum, in which case merely accepting homosexuality as a lifestyle is the compromise.

Beliefs and opinions arising from personal experience are notoriously unreliable and unscientific, which is why proper scientists strive to remove or minimise all forms of bias.

Scientific consensus is that homosexuality is not harmful to society, and occurs naturally even among other animals.
The idea that all first world governments conspire to suppress dissenting studies is conspiratorial and requires a lot of logical leaps, so can be safely disregarded as per Occam's Razor.

Thus the objective conclusion is that homosexuality should be about as much concern to a person as eye colour.


As an egalitarian, I respect people's right to eschew the objective conclusion in favour of their own personal biases which they have accumulated over their lifetime. However, attempting to affect other people's lives without a very large amount of data backing your personal beliefs is draconian and unacceptable.

This means that if there is an issue where scientific consensus hasn't been reached, the default solution should be to minimise the immediate impact a given issue has on people's lives; civil liberty should take precedence over preventative measures.