jay pettitt on 10/5/2012 at 13:39
Even if this is new and exciting for the US, given that different nations already have different approaches to whether being gay is evil or not and we've got good outcome data from all of them for the last 50 years or so that we can compare, I think we can hazard a guess. (ie there's no evidence that liberal countries and gay parents mess you up, there's lots of evidence that other things like diet, poverty and inequality do.)
I think the argument is more likely to be that there isn't one, but that doesn't alter the fact that some people are going to find it hard to stomach when you tell them that their long held traditional conservative principles and religious values direct from God have been wrong all this time - and they will push back.
Queue on 10/5/2012 at 14:07
Quote Posted by icemann
Well it doesn't matter where you go in the world,
there will always be people.
Fixed.
Look, the only way to make the world full of the people one believes it should be is to become a mass murderer. As much as I hate the notion that the world is jam-packed with ignorant and backward thinking dolts that don't deserve to inhabit the planet (... hell, every time I ride on a plane, I make sure to get a seat in the very back, so I can sit there try to will the sucker into taking a noise dive into the ground -- sure I'd die too, but I'd laugh my silly ass off all the way down knowing that this cargo load of fucks will eat dirt a millisecond before I do, and that for one moment the world will be a better place), they do and will always be. The irony, they think that those who don't agree with their views are just as ignorant, full of hate, and ill-informed; or need to accept Jesus into their hearts, so they can find peace and love.
I hate that there are people on this planet that actually believe in Noah's Ark, that the Earth is only six-thousand-odd-years-old, or that man once road Dinosaurs like horses. What is this, the fucking Flintstones? Hey, now they have the chance to explain away the extinction of the dinosaur as being that Noah couldn't fit them on the Ark. For me, it's unfathomable that there could still be people on this planet with the mentality that predisposes them to believe that an old book full of short stories/parables is to still be taken as gospel because it's supposedly the teachings/laws of God. That's ancient thinking, right?! But, look at how we got Scientology...a lame science fiction writer took on a bet, and became a messiah. Wallah, a new religion in modern times.
They can't help it.
Certainly, I hate that there is bigotry and mistrust among the populace; just as much as I hate that there are fat bastards with an IQ of 60 riding around the aisles of Wal-Mart on motorized scooters who can't properly wipe their own ass. I told one the other day that looked so miserable, "Don't worry, Dear. Death is coming soon," then went on my merry way shopping for motor oil and Turmeric capsules. But I should also be angry with myself for hating, while understanding that the religious lunatics, the dolts, the idiots, the hate-mongers of the world can't helping being what they are -- simple humans driven by an ancient survival instinct. As humans, it's hard-wired into all of us (though an ever increasing number of us have left this part of our thinking behind through conditioning or evolution) to want to believe in a deity. It's seated in some part of our brain that we must believe in what couldn't possibly, or doesn't seem to be, real so we can find the danger in our surroundings; which, ironically, is the same instinct the brain that allows for the belief in ghosts, ESP, fortune tellers, conspiracy theories, and any sort of sensationalism over rationalism. It's safer to be "stupid" because someone will lead you and protect you. It's smarter to be reactionary because you will be one step ahead of danger, even if that danger really doesn't exist. It's better to be part of a group, because then you will only have to worry about existing. These people can't help mistrusting what doesn't come across as "normal" (like gays and gay marriage...in their mind, if everyone suddenly became gay, then the human race would end because no one would would be fucking to make kids anymore--thus, a deep seated survival instinct) because some part of their brains hasn't quite evolved enough and prevents them from moving forward. They are still stuck in a species-driven form of collective thinking. For this, I understand and can commiserate their fears; and only hope that one day we will all have finally evolved enough, or have been conditioned enough, to no longer act like a pact of idiots just out to survive and exist, and consume.
Even knowing this, I still hate them all, and wait anxiously for the giant asteroid to finally cleanse the earth of the one animal that Noah probably should have left off the boat.
But it doesn't make judging them right.
demagogue on 10/5/2012 at 14:25
Quote Posted by Sombras
Really interesting, demagogue. Didn't know that marriage was considered a fundamental right in the legal sense.
Yes under "substantive due process", 14th Amendment, they established a "fundamental right" to private and family life ... stuff like the right to birth control (the first one that established the trend), right to have children (not be sterilized) or right to adopt, right to have an abortion, right to have anal sex, right to live with people you're not married to, right to marry whomever you want. In all these cases you had states trying to make it illegal and the Supreme Court overturning them.
Although in the case of gay marriage banning laws, what's really doing the work isn't SDP but Equal Protection (also 14th Am), the problem of giving a right to one group and not to another; does the state have a fair rationale for discriminating the two groups for the right? Then the level of how strong the right is just gives you the yardstick of how big the government reason has to be for the differentiation to be valid. If it's not a big right then the gov't just has to be rational in discriminating the two groups; but if it's a fundamental right the gov't interest has to be compelling.
The criticism you hear on the Right is that all these "privacy" rights are "read into" the US Constitution; You don't see the word "privacy" in the Constitution; the Founders themselves wouldn't have seen these things as rights, and there's been no Amendments adding them to the list (along with right to speech, religion, etc. that are there). But you know the thing about language & culture is that values and meaning evolve over time and the language of Constitutions have to keep up.
It might sound like heresy, but from a lawyer's perspective our Constitution is pretty archaic and not the way you want to write one if you did it today, a clear lesson we learned in the 1990s with all the new constitutions getting drafted for the new democracies from East Europe and South Africa. The German Constitution is probably the most influential and contemporary model on the block. It has the right to marriage as fundamental right in the text. I don't know if there's been a case on its application to gay marriage. There wasn't when I took comparative Constitutional law, and my final project was actually a argument applying it to gay marriage. (I'd post it but it's like 10 pages, and since I'm not as strong on German const'l interpretation as US, not sure how helpful it is anyway).
DDL on 10/5/2012 at 16:04
Quote Posted by Queue
Look, the only way to make the world full of the people one believes it should be is to become a mass murderer....
...As humans, it's hard-wired into all of us (though an ever increasing number of us have left this part of our thinking behind through conditioning or evolution) to want to believe in a deity.
Re: mass murder, education will achieve the same thing, really. It'll just take longer.
Fucktardism isn't actually hardwired, it's not like there are people cursed by their genetics to be believers and others that have mutated to transcend this. Evolution doesn't work on a timescale compatible with wholesale neurological architecture shifts being present/absent in the same generation.
Humans are bright. Very very bright. We can make logical associative leaps that leave other species in the dust, which has proved highly useful in our rise to dominance. We're capable of abstract thought, and empathy: we can construct within our own heads a model of how someone ELSE is thinking. Of course, there's no real off-switch for this ability, so we're equally capable of constructing within our own heads a model of how the angry mountain god is thinking. It's a model, it needn't be accurate, but it provides a nice explanation for why the ground is shaking all of a sudden.
And of course, it comes with self-awareness and the knowledge that we will, one day, die. Which is some scary shit.
Anyway, long story short is that the tendency to believe in silly things and make ludicrous associations even when we're ostensibly rational beings ("I've got a job interview, better wear my lucky tie") is universal, but education is not. Kids don't know they should "hate them homos" until they're taught to do so, so we could effectively eliminate all this idiocy within two or three generations, no mass murder required.
(this appears to be what's happening anyway, by and large, but far far more gradually)
Of course, by the time they're adults it's usually too late, so I guess if you
really wanted, you could still murder some peeps.
Quote Posted by Queue
But it doesn't make judging them right.
Oh, of course it does: they're idiots. It's not necessarily their fault they're idiots, but one can only teach someone that their views are retarded so many times with no success before you write them off as idiots and move on. The nice thing about an entirely pragmatic worldview is you can assess people more objectively: none of this 'hate the sin, love the sinner' bullshit or whatever, it's "person who believes in nonsense despite all evidence to the contrary is objectively stupider than person who does not".
CCCToad on 11/5/2012 at 02:04
Quote Posted by BEAR
Not really. I know a lot of highly intelligent people that simultaneously believe totally absurd bullshit. I know several engineers that are conservative Christians or raging libertarians. They can be very intelligent about things they know about. My thesis adviser is like that, very "show me the proof" and down to earth about most things, but will turn around and accept some things entirely on faith with zero proof whatsoever.
Faith and ideology trump intelligence when faith and ideology get there first.
The thing is that most people decide these positions not based on pure logic but on an either an emotional basis or social pressure. Seems common sense but it is worth reiterating that people generally choose belief systems that let them feel good about themselves. I had one ex who was against premarital sex until it happened, then her view changed to being that it was OK as long as you were loyal. Its only one example. Another is that one my Girlfriend's friends now suddenly changed from Catholicism to Lutheranism because of a guy. In college I observed several people switch from Atheism to Christianity (and vice versa) because they wanted the ego boost of being accepted by the group they viewed as "cool".
For both sides there's an obvious emotional appeal. Being an Evangelical means you get to be part of the cool "saved" club whereas Atheists get the benefit of being able to pat themselves on the back for being much more intelligent than the sheeple in Jesus's flock.
Point is, all bets are off with belief systems because they aren't usually chosen for logical (or quite often, intelligent) reasons to begin with. Any attempt to analyze the inherently illogical in a logical matter is doomed to failure.
demagogue on 11/5/2012 at 02:28
Quote Posted by CCCToad
The thing is that most people decide these positions not based on pure logic but on an either an emotional basis or social pressure. Seems common sense but it is worth reiterating that people generally choose belief systems that let them feel good about themselves. ... Point is, all bets are off with belief systems because they aren't usually chosen for logical (or quite often, intelligent) reasons to begin with. Any attempt to analyze the inherently illogical in a logical matter is doomed to failure.
I think most of us understand that. When I hear people going off on things like this, it's so easy to tell they just haven't gotten out and seen how the real world works and it's just their emotion talking and justifying whatever worldview they want to love and cherish. But it doesn't make it right, and it's our job, the rational ones, to patiently explain why they're wrong anyway, even knowing they won't take it in -- and after that, either expose them to the real world until they concede defeat, or just ignore them and go about the business of being right while they stew in their comfortable vacuum.
CCCToad on 11/5/2012 at 03:16
Quote:
I think most of us understand that. When I hear people going off on things like this, it's so easy to tell they just haven't gotten out and seen how the real world works
Because they deliberately avoid things that make them uncomfortable.
demagogue on 11/5/2012 at 03:29
Yes it's a chicken-egg issue. They're willfully ignorant to shield themselves from challenging experience, but it's precisely the challenging experience that breaks down that shell of willful ignorance.
In my experience the way to break someone down is either somebody with real integrity that they really personally trust exposes them to it and they respect the person too much not to let it slip in a little, or they travel to another country expecting the people to be basically the same as them, and suddenly realize that their values are completely different, suffer serious value-dissonance, but now they're in a foreign country & it's everywhere and they can't leave, so it breaks down their foundation in their childhood values (even if the new culture is conservative in their own way; it's not like you become conservative like them now. You suspect all values and it's like once that shell is broken down you can't go back to that innocence.)
heywood on 11/5/2012 at 06:52
One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is parents' fear that their kids might turn out to be gay. That's typical even among secular parents and causes otherwise tolerant adults to support discrimination purely to shield their kids from homosexuality. In addition to the "can't relate" aspect, people are afraid that if their kid is gay, they will grow up depressed, socially outcast, and suffer mental or physical abuse.
I don't know about the rest of you, but childhood homophobia was rampant where I grew up. Gay jokes started in like the 4th grade and being homophobic and mocking gay people was part of being a "normal" child. I can't recall a single person who was out of the closet in my high school graduating class of ~580, and the kids suspected of being gay or lesbian would get ostracized, sometimes ridiculed, and generally had a shitty time of it. Some of the meatheads openly talked about getting drunk and going on gay bashing (beating) rampages. I don't know if they really did that stuff, but the perceived threat was there. And no, I didn't grow up in Texas. I grew up in the burbs of the relatively liberal, relatively gay friendly city of Rochester, NY where homosexuality was generally well tolerated among adults. The homophobia I experienced growing up definitely didn't come from the church and didn't really come from parents either, although I can sort of blame parents for not correcting it.
Vasquez on 11/5/2012 at 07:10
Quote Posted by heywood
In addition to the "can't relate" aspect, people are afraid that if their kid is gay, they will grow up depressed, socially outcast, and suffer mental or physical abuse.
They surely will, as long as the parents and the whole society show negative reactions to homosexuality. But the sad thing is, kids will always find a reason for cruelty, if it's not GAY it's red hair, eyeglasses, different colored skin, unfashionable clothes or whatever. And if we start giving free hair dye and Lasik surgery and all-body-makeup to children, and ban poverty and make fashion slavery mandatory, they'll just find some other reason to pick on each other.
I think fucktardism
is hardwired, we're social animals so there will always be something of a hive mind telling us what's "normal" and what is not, just as there will always be the sort of characters who refuse to tolerate the "not normal", who want to dictate to others the correct way of living. It's depressing how often those who prefer following to leading choose to follow the intolerant one rather than ganging up to defend his victim. I guess that's where the "greater cause" comes into play - it's easier to get the group on your side if you have some all-powerful supernatural entity backing up your opinions.
