Funny events in anti-woke world
- Thread starter Agema
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Either you do not understand the basic point being made, or you are suggesting that gay people dying from a disease they could not have known about and/or were intentionally misinformed about is not a tragedy because they brought it on themselves by having sex. Which is it?
I feel like you're projecting. Because while I can certainly see how a 13 year old might find having to read such a passage to be a bit embarrassing, that is kind of the point and is a big part of the reason why teachers sometimes make students read things out loud. Once children leave school they will often need to actively put themselves out there and take risks in which there is a chance of them being embarrassed, and they need to learn that being embarrassed isn't a big deal.
One more time.
Conception is not the same thing as birth.
The rate of births to teenage girls fell quite dramatically during the 1980s and has been generally falling ever since, but the rate of pregnancies did not. In fact, in both Britain and the US the rate of teenage pregnancies rose during the 1980s. The policy changes that have lead to the dramatic reduction in teenage pregnancies occurred in the UK when the Labour party under Tony Blair took power in 1997. Since then, rates of teenage pregnancy have more than halved. In fact, even though a far higher proportion of teenage pregnancies end in abortion, actual rates of teenage abortion are significantly lower than in the 1980s.
You have fundamentally misunderstood my point, and why I'm telling you this. I don't place any great moral value on the fact I was born, because I'm not delusional enough to believe I have that kind of importance. Had I ended up flushed down a toilet somewhere, it's not like I'd be around to be sad about it. The "bad thing" as you put it is not my birth but my conception. It is sad that a 13 year old girl ended up in that situation, and it's sad that her environment didn't prepare her to face it. It is sad that a child's carefree life was interrupted by the horrifying reality of pregnancy, shame and social ostracism. I bring her up because she is a real person who deserved better, and while the evidence may be firmly with me sometimes it's better to see that evidence through the lives of real people.
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Just going to lean fully into homophobic stereotypes, then, and refuse to acknowledge the disastrous damage done by anti-contraceptive policies (as well as outright misinformation).
Moralising at people that they should abstain from sex outside of the Catholic interpretation of marriage is a complete dead-end of a public health policy. Its a catastrophic failure.
Not to mention how insanely narrow it became. Sex outside of marriage was disallowed-- leading to Catholic institutions interning unwed mothers against their will, and abducting their children. And of course same-sex marriage was also disallowed, meaning that gay people were expected to be completely abstinent. This is simply an unrealistic expectation for millions upon millions of people with basic biological urges who do not subscribe to your specific brand of moralistic belief. And on top of that, public information about the transmission of STIs was also suppressed, distorted, and misrepresented by the Conservative governments and religious institutions.
These institutions fomented a catastrophic failure of public health through unrealistic expectations, negligence, misrepresentation, repression and abuse. To victim-blame people for having sex after that is pretty disgusting.
I'm suggesting that if people followed conservative sexual morals, even allowing for homosexual relationships, there would be no AIDS pandemic outside of Africa. To blame conservative sexual morals for the things they would have prevented if followed is willful self-delusion.
It's like, conventional wisdom is you don't drive in a snowstorm. If someone crashes in a snowstorm, I'm not saying they deserve to crash, I don't know their situation, driving may have been the best choice they had available to them, and there may have been a likelihood they'd be fine. BUT imagine someone arguing "well, if everyone was more accepting of driving in snowstorms, there'd probably be more public funds for snowplows, and that crash might have been avoided (maybe), so really it's conventional wisdom's fault!" Do you see how convoluted that is?
There may be some technical truth to this, but it conceals actual truth.
The 1980's inherited a culture that had rapidly increasing teen pregnancy rates, and it basically flatlined. You can say truthfully that there were more teen pregnancies in 1990 than 1980, but nobody could look at that graph and say public policy from the 1980s caused the rate of teen pregnancies.
I'm not sure how, but you managed to make a claim that contradicted the evidence, flip 180 degrees, and still contradict the evidence.
You've found every possible excuse to make the people you support victims and the people you don't like abusers, and it's a bit sad, because in order to make the conservative entities with influence seem abusive, you've pretty much characterized everyone else like animals that weren't spayed or neutered.
But you're not animals, you're people, so you don't get to blame those who didn't stop you from causing yourself trouble.
I mean, they've only been trying it for two millennia. Give it some time to kick in!
I wonder how much more luck they'd have if they were trying to persuade or promote or encourage, rather than demand people do that.
Ha ha ha, imagine being so much of a twat that GB News are going to have to sack you.
The "people I support" in this case being people who contracted HIV at a time when the government was suppressing information about it so the risk wasn't widely understood. And that includes millions who were monogamous, victims of rape, children of affected parents, or just those who took part in normal amounts of consensual sex-- protected or otherwise.
What on earth is wrong with someone, for them to see that some people were promiscuous, and then to insinuate that they all-- whether actually promiscuous or not-- deserved the devastating pain and suffering they experienced after contracting a disease that they could not have realistically understood?
You know, you sometimes appear pretty polite-- including to me-- and it's easy to forget the staggering callousness and disdain you hold towards people like me. It's moments like this that remind me of that.
If you see adults taking part in normal sexual relationships outside of your narrow conception of marriage as "acting like animals", that says more about your absurd puritanism than it does about me.
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There she goes.Yeah, its not just Republicans who have one-foot in the grave politicians:
A confused Dianne Feinstein tried to give a speech in the middle of a Senate hearing vote and was told to 'just say aye' instead
"Just say aye," Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Patty Murray repeatedly pleaded to Feinstein during the vote. Eventually, Feinstein did just that.www.businessinsider.com
Stumbling, mumbling old coot still holding on for a paycheck while her colleagues just tell her to vote yes and she'll get her pudding.
Oh those poor staffers milking that ol' bag for every drop. Now who will go on expensive private dinners with lobbyists while the crone eats her banana pudding in the corner, quietly mumbling about the day the Big Bopper died.
Well, that's kind of a moot point isn't it. Your "conservative morals" don't allow for homosexual relationships.
In gay culture, looking for casual sex is called cruising. Historically, this meant going to a particular area, often an isolated place like a park or woodland, and walking or driving around until you met someone else doing the same thing. This practice evolved because the vast majority of gay and bi men, even in the 70s and 80s, were closeted. They could not have committed relationships with men because being outed would destroy their entire lives. That's the reality of this "orgiastic gay culture", it was a culture built around the necessity of closeting and the need for anonymity, secrecy and deniability.
This is bad analogy on so many levels. In order for it to be accurate, some people would need to live in an area, let's call it snow-land, where snowstorms are constant so driving in snowstorms is the only way to leave the house. A large proportion of the people who don't live in snow-land are also driving in snowstorms in secret anyway, and in fact very few people who drive in snowstorms actually crash their cars. Instead, a group of previously unheard of aliens who hate snow show up one day and drop a bomb on snow-land, killing many of the people there.
Also, it later turns out the government knew about the aliens, but covered up their existence and their hatred of snow and didn't think to warn anyone living in snow-land about what might happen. In fact, the government refuses to help the survivors of the bomb and has instead spent all its money building a wall around the ruins of snow-land to try and keep all the snow inside, which predictably doesn't work. Meanwhile, it turns out someone already built a new kind of car decades earlier which is completely safe driving in snowstorms and also highly resistant to bombs, but the government actively works against recommending or making these cars available to people living in snow-land because making it safer for people to drive in snowstorms would go against the "conventional wisdom" that you don't drive in snowstorms..
So, you notice how the rate in 1975 seems really low. Let's add a bit of context..
You can see the baby boom at the end of the second world war, after which rates stay really high through the 50s before suddenly dropping off in the 60s. And yes, there's an event that happened in 1960 that might explain this trend. Can you guess what it is?
Let's look at the clues. As you can see, the drop in pregnancy rate is much more pronounced among 18-19 year olds. So, what could have suddenly lowered the rates of unwanted teen pregnancy that girls aged 18-19 might know about or have been able to get access to, but that younger girls wouldn't?
I'll spoil it this time. It's the contraceptive pill.
The drop in teen pregnancies between 1960 and the 1980s is entirely due to increasing awareness and availability of contraceptives. Again, this is supposedly the most permissive era in history, and yet teen pregnancies are continuously falling.. until the latter half of the 1980s. Wow, isn't it weird how the Reagan administration institutes an abstinence-based sex education program that explicitly bans any "positive" mention of contraception, and suddenly more teenagers are getting pregnant again. What an improbable coincidence noone could possibly have seen coming..
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How dare you make light of such a tragedy!
Buddy Holly and Richie Valens were on that plane too, you know!
That's the thing about towering twats like Fox, or Milo Yiannopoulos: in the end, they tend to burn themselves down.
His collaborator, Dan Wootton (who let's remember is currently under investigation for using a pseudonym for trying to get colleagues to send him nude pics of themselves, because that's not dodgy as hell) has also taken a tumble.
Err, no, he was the representative of the Republican party.
I feel there's a story here that you forgot to link. Or was it shared on an earlier page?
It's just a group of grown men being such silly little bellends that even the right-wing GB News is having to can them: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66963562
That's not my point. You are treating the "victims" of a wide variety of things as actors without agency. A pet dog is not responsible for itself, the owner is responsible. People aren't like that, people can make their own decisions, people can be responsible for their own actions.
Here's a moment to practice actual empathy, to actually try to understand, rather than just pity. I guarantee there are many who contracted HIV sexually who take responsibility for their own actions, who can say "I didn't intend this, but my actions brought me here." I don't think many people with AIDS think to themselves "I had no power over my actions, it's really Ronald Reagan's fault." And maybe most importantly, the former group is almost certainly happier than the latter.
If someone made a truly informed decision, with all options truly available to them and without undue pressure, they had full agency.
This is not the situation we are presented with. Their access to information was purposefully suppressed and distorted, so the risk was not widely known. Realistic alternatives-- such as safe sex-- were denied to them. They were pressured to the point of violence into remaining hidden.
You are not exhibiting an iota of empathy. You are telling me that I should remain abstinent for my entire life, and that if I fail to do so and catch a disease-- even if my partner lied about his status, even if I practiced safe sex and it failed, even if I caught it through abuse-- then its my own fault. This is not an empathetic position-- it's hate.
It was amusing reading Calvin Robinson leading a spirited defence of Wootton... and getting suspended too for it. His argument boils down to "If we can't crudely hurl abuse at people on our TV channel, what's it for?"
No, it's respecting your intelligence, and your ability to make informed decisions. Every decision has consequences, there are infinite ways you can do far worse damage to yourself, you could decapitate yourself in a car accident just driving down the road, but that's a decision just about everyone makes all the time.
Setting aside "caught from abuse", of course. If somebody rapes you and infects you with an std, that's different. And also not particularly relevant. If someone else burns your house down, that's not your fault. If you burn your own house down, it probably is. We're not going to give blanket absolution to everyone with a burnt house because we can superficially compare their situations to victims of crimes.
Your context is is a sharp decline in teen birth rate... in the US... when abortion was being legalized.So, you notice how the rate in 1975 seems really low. Let's add a bit of context..
Do you remember a single one of the arguments you've made in this thread? You just run face first into all of them.