Death Is Bad

You know that Freedom of Speech thing we like? If there was a country in the Western Hemisphere that was jailing people for saying mean things about its politicians, which country do you think it would be? (yes, merely asking the question gives away the answer. It’s us)

“Shuler’s is the only name listed from the Western Hemisphere in the Committee to Protect Journalists’ list of imprisoned news workers around the world.”

As Robin Hanson has pointed out  (and actually many people make this point, but Robin Hanson is my favorite contrarian, so I’m reference him) – speech can do far more damage than sticks and stones. Words are potent weapons, and we let these weapons run rampant with very little regulation.

Sometimes I wonder if our freedom of speech fetish goes a bit too far. Fred Phelps seems a good example of the sort of asshole who’s sadistic attacks on the grieving we shouldn’t protect. Even more potent, Tobacco companies that spread lies which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths for billions in profit drive me to moral outrage/insanity. Oil companies doing the same with global warming denial are just as bad. Millions will die, for the sake of easier profits. And on a personal level, just a few days ago I was involved in an exchange where I made it clear that I would not engage anyone who used a particularly malicious form of verbal attack.

From all accounts, it looks like Shuler is a “crazy, creepy, vexatious, hypocritical asshole”. 

However his jailing is an unabashed raw abuse of power. We in the West have decided that allowing everyone to speak is the best way to ensure that the truth eventually makes it to the surface. And that the benefits to human civilization of access to the truth outweighs the harms done to individuals. Aggregated over enough time, the benefits to everyone are so great that even those initially hurt by this rigid defense of freedom of speech would have to admit they are better off on net than if there was no such freedom. This leads to one of the fundamental rules of society. As Eliezer says:

 “There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.”

Otherwise our knowledge is limited by what those with the most guns want us to know, and not by the truth. In our society, those with the most guns are the government. Which is why this story must be spread, and this sort of thing must be stopped. Freedom of Speech isn’t just The Law, it’s also a damn good idea. Reblog either the Salon or PopeHat article (PopeHat is much more informative and simply a better article, but there are things to be said for Salon as wel), or share it on Facebook, or whatever. This abuse should not go unchallenged.

And if you have a few dollars, maybe throw them to the ACLU. They’re making moves on this, and they do good work.

Hey check it out! My first troll! I know you’re not supposed to feed them, but it’s my first one! When I get tired I can just ban him anyway.

Here we go!

From The Property Model of Marriage

>Marriage is defined widely by different people but come to the common understanding that it is representative to the union of the two bodies as one. […] If you are married, you, in a sense, are that other person. Do you own your foot? Then you own your significant other and vise versa.

No, that’s silly talk with no actual basis in reality. No matter what kind of mystical mumbo-jumbo you recite, after the ceremony you still have two separate people in two separate bodies with different ideas, dispositions, desires, and emotions. Her body is not yours, you can’t use it as if it was (and vice versa). Generally invoking this language is just an excuse for the asshole in the relationship to force dominance on the person he’s victimizing. (Not that it’s always a “he”. But usually.)

>So if you’re married to someone and you don’t want to walk around fucking everything in sight, as an extension of yourself, through your unity of marriage, you wouldn’t want your significant other walking around fucking everything in sight

Most people can understand the difference between being open to sexual relationships with more than one single person forever, and “fucking everything in sight.” I’m sorry if you’re suffering some form of social-induced brain damage that prevents you from grasping such a simple concept. I, for one, have no problem with that, and wouldn’t want to restrict my SO from that either.

Also you’re again showing this disturbing trend of calling someone else an extension of yourself. You don’t seem to have grasped what personhood is.

And finally, fucking everything in sight might do you some good. You should give it a try. ;)

 > There is also the real risk of disease and ailments due to such a promiscuous nature that should legitimately concern any rational mind that is concerned about it’s own well being and safety ,and by extension, through marriage, the well being and safety of their significant other

Oh. I see our education system has failed you. :( There are protections nowadays, you should read up on them.

> it sounds like your main problem with this concept is the idea of human ownership as I’m sure it’s on par with slavery to you

Yes. I will take the valiant(!) and radical(!!) stance of suggesting that owning humans is bad!

From Finding excuses to hate

>How interesting it is that you feel the “funamentalists” should be educated by a book written by man.

I’m not sure how to address this? I didn’t say that, I didn’t quote any books, and do you know of any books written by something other than man? In short, what are you talking about? In fact, almost everything stated in this comment makes no sense at all. Did you even read the post you’re replying to? I’m assuming you’re drunk. This is less fun when the troll is drunk. /sigh

> Is it wrong to point out that you have shit on your dick?

WOAH!!! What the fuck are you doing in my bedroom, and why are you looking at my dick?? I did NOT invite you in here! What the hell is wrong with you people, do you not understand the concept of CONSENT? You get access to my genitals IF and ONLY IF I allow it! This is tied up with your inability to understand that you can’t own people, isn’t it? Jesus, someone seriously fucked up when they were raising you. To reiterate: you don’t own people. Ever. They are not objects. And that is why you get their consent.

This is why no sane people leave their children alone near you.

And finally from Jesus loves you thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis much!

>As for your assumption that there are no good real-world reasons to hate gays… well… you’re not thinking outside your own box well enough then. I could hate a gay for their hair cut…

Yeah, that’s not a good reason. That’s exactly the point I was making.

On reflection, I’m disappointed in the quality of this troll. Started out interesting, but rapidly degenerated into incoherency. I understand the desire to get blasted and troll a bit, I’ve done my share of it in the past. :) But c’mon, at least hold on to enough sobriety to give us a show. Troll earlier in the evening, while you’ve got the wicked buzz going, and save the black-out sessions for Xbox Live or YouTube.

Yesterday, January 1^st 2014, marijuana became legally purchasable for recreational use in Colorado. It’s now basically as legal as alcohol and tobacco, at the state level.

There’s a story (can’t find the reference right now, so treat is as apocryphal) of a psychologist in the early 70s, back when homosexuality was considered a mental illness. He treated many gay patients, all of whom were pretty screwed up, and he concurred with the popular opinion that homosexuality had serious negative effects. He himself was gay, but he kept it quiet and figured he was an aberration. As pressure was increased to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness he came out to a few of his colleges, confessing that he must be some strange breed of gay. To his surprise, several of them were gay as well, and had thought the same thing. It soon turned out that actually homosexuality didn’t contribute to deviance – they simply had a very skewed sample. Every gay person that he saw was already fucked up some way, or he wouldn’t be coming in to see a psychologist. He perfectly normal, regular gay folk went unnoticed because they were in the closet, and since the psychologists classified their illness on what they could see they didn’t realize the two were unrelated. Even the gay ones were fooled.

It’s often been said that the greatest tool for gay acceptance has been the massive coming-out campaign. You can argue with people forever and they’ll never change. But when their sister, their son, or their dear family friend comes out as gay, they suddenly realize that they know and love perfectly normal gay people. That gays are not deviant outsiders to be shunned – they are some of the people you love most.

Six percent of the population are regular marijuana users, and ten percent of the population have used marijuana at least once in the last year. Yet there are still people who lose their shit about pot-heads. People who think they are all criminals, junkies, and degenerate freaks. They often think that because that’s the only kind of smoker they see. My parents have a relative with emotional troubles who can’t hold down a job. He is out about his pot smoking. I know that they’ve met at least a couple people who are fine upstanding members of society, but who are closeted about their marijuana use. With full knowledge, they would see that function pot-smokers outnumber dysfunctional ones. But instead they have a well-supported 100% correlation between pot use and dysfunction.

So if you’re a fine upstanding member of society, and you smoke pot on weekends, or at parties – let the world know. Or, if you’re worried about losing your job, at least let your close friends and your family know. (It’s not like they can un-family you, and they already see you’re doing fine in life). Don’t let the only people who represent you be the scum of society. Be the light that illuminates their minds!

The person I was conversing with in my last post went on to claim that she doesn’t hate Teh Gays, her church is just trying to save them from a self-destructive lifestyle. She then listed rates of STI’s among gay men. This is for her.

/sigh. So much to unpack.

First, almost every issue you have listed for gay men is due to them being MEN, not due to them being GAY. If women had the same sexual proclivities that men do, the straight community would have the same problems. For example, body image problems and eating disorders are quite common among straight women – because they are trying to attract men. For another example, lesbian women have the lowest STD/STI rates of all populations. In fact, “According to the CDC, there are no confirmed cases of HIV from female-to-female transmission.”

The conclusion is clear – if you are concerned about STIs you should be demonizing anyone who has sex with a man, rather than the gays. You should forbid marriage with men, and only allow it between women.

Furthermore, you should be preaching from the pulpit that anyone who advocates for abstinence-only education is as bad as thieves and adulterers. Because as it turns out, communities that enact abstinence-only education have the highest STI and teen-pregnancy rates in the country. “Specifically, in communities where more than 20% of young adults had taken virginity pledges, STD rates were 8.9% compared to 5.5% in communities with few pledgers”

I could go on, but my point is this – it’s not really about the STI rates. Any sub-group will have a number of variances from the general average, some which are better and some which are worse. Racists often latch on to the fact that minority communities have higher crime rates to demonize whichever minority they despise. The anti-gay-crowd managed to find a statistic about a group they dislike that is worse than the general population, and so they latched onto that. We can tell they don’t actually care about that issue because they aren’t against it in the general case.

As a question: if gay men had the same STI rates as gay women – that is, significantly lower than the straight population – would you be pro-gays? Or would you find something else to attack?

There are things that are statistically better about the gay community as well. On the average they are better educated than us straights, have a higher income, and families headed by a gay couple have a near-zero rate of child abuse. All of these are arguably more impactful to society than a person’s STI status.

And finally, if we are to believe the claim that they are just concerned about someone’s self-destructive behavior, we are compelled to ask – do the fundamentalists TRULY believe that the best way to end this self-destructive behavior is to refuse them the right to marry, to preach about how god is disgusted by them, and to bully and harass them at every opportunity? Because if so, the fundies are in desperate need of an education in human psychology.

Some friends have been deriding the recent ruling that ordered a local cake-maker to serve gay couples, saying it is against the principles of the country. It is anti-freedom, or anti-liberty, or something similar. These are fairly liberal friends. I believe they are wrong.

In the legal sense, this falls in line with the Federal Civil Rights Act. It guarantees all people the right to “full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.“ And now society is expanding that to include sexual orientation. If you want to discriminate you get to make your business a private members-only affair.

One of the main functions of government is to protect its citizen’s rights. Part of the social contract as most people understand it is the right to walk into a public business and exchange your money for whatever they’re selling without discrimination (within reason). You have the arbitrary and unlimited right to not deal with anyone you don’t want to on a personal or private basis. But if you’re running a public-facing business, you get to treat all Americans equally.

For random Joe Baker to refuse to serve an orderly customer is for him to announce that he is above the government. He refuses to recognize whom the government has designated as a citizen. He will, using his own metric, decide who he deems worthy of citizenship regardless of what the government has decided.

This is a challenge to government power which the government cannot let pass. The government demands a lot from its citizens – taxes, military service, adherence to laws – and in exchange it provides certain benefits. A major one being the assurance that all citizens will be treated equally. If someone has made the sacrifices and met the conditions that citizenship requires, and then the government fails to enforce these rights, there will be much less incentive to be an American citizen. The title must be worth something, and this random schmuck is trying to degrade its value. No strong government can let this sort of challenge go if it wishes to keep people interested in being a part of it.