91–100 of 178 posts
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The world is so weird. I never understood the motive behind tyrannizing other people. How is that winning at anything other than being an asshole? Why don't people just leave other people alone? Is it so much different to tyrannize a woman for being feminine, or just being attractive? Most of us are instinctively disgusted by that--or at least claim to be?
How about tyrannizing "far-right fascists"? Anti-abortion folks?
The phrase "legalises gay sex" is surreal and otherworldly to me. We recent fought for marriage in Australia. Shocking to think they were and are still so backwards as to make that headline possible.
I've heard that there are a number of US states in which some fairly common sex acts are officially illegal. The difference, of course, is that there is little chance of anyone being prosecuted for those offences in the US, while, if I've understood correctly, the Indian section 377 law was being used in practice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world is so weird. I never understood the motive behind tyrannizing other people. How is that winning at anything other than being an asshole? Why don't people just leave other people alone? Is it so much different to tyrannize a woman for being feminine, or just being attractive? Most of us are instinctively disgusted by that--or at least claim to be?
How about tyrannizing "far-right fascists"? Anti-abortion folks?
As a gay Indian this is a great news! but it is one thing to decriminalize it legally and complete different thing for societal acceptance and leading a normal life as gay person in India. For an average gay person in India this doesn’t change much. There is still a long way to go. This law was never a problem for me but my family and relative and neighbors are. But it is a good progress.
The world is so weird. I never understood the motive behind tyrannizing other people. How is that winning at anything other than being an asshole? Why don't people just leave other people alone? Is it so much different to tyrannize a woman for being feminine, or just being attractive? Most of us are instinctively disgusted by that--or at least claim to be?
e.g. If one culture hates dogs and kills them on sight, you might say that culture has a prejudice against dogs. If 95% of cultures hated dogs and killed them on sight, you should start to think there is a deeper reason for that (especially considering how useful dogs can be).
In the case of gay-shaming, the obvious common cause is evolutionary: It's people trying to have more grandkids.
If your kid is gay, and decides to go off and have gay sex for the rest of his/her life, he/she won't reproduce. Your gene line ends.
However, if you pressure/shame/tyrannize your gay kid into a reproductive relationship, your genes replicate into grandkids (who likely won't be gay themselves). Your gene line continues.
This also applies to brothers, sisters, and other kin. The reproductive benefit of pressuring a gay relative to act straight is comparable to saving them from death, since the outcome of 'acting gay' and 'dead' is evolutionarily similar. (Of course a living gay relative can help other relatives raise their kids, so it's not identical to being dead. Some have argued that the "helpful gay uncle" effect would counteract the evolutionary cost of homosexuality. But the math doesn't work; a childless relative isn't so much more helpful than a relative with kids that deliberately childless individuals replicate their genes better than ones who have their own kids.) This explains why the pressure to act straight is so strong and vicious - it comes from the same place as the pressure to not die.
So, given a population of people, some who have a gene that makes them pressure gay kids to act straight, and some who don't, over time the pressuring gene will spread through the population. And here we are.
And just to ward off the reflexive moralizing and personal attacks: There's no moral content to our evolutionary history, any more than there's moral content to a lion eating a baby gazelle alive. Please don't fall for the naturalistic fallacy and start attacking as though I'm saying natural equals good. Lots of things that are natural are not good. Understanding the world requires us to be able to separate rational understanding what is, from a moral judgment of what we should do. We should be adult enough here to make that distinction.
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There is more history to this. The introduction of the law relating to making gay sex illegal "... dating back to 1861, (that was) introduced during the British rule of India (modelled on the Buggery Act of 1533) criminalised sexual activities "against the order of nature", including homosexual activities" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_377_of_the_Indian_Pena... It is the truth for a lot of countries that were…
> Colonial powers left their mark behind in so many unfortunate ways that are just too complex for countries to deal with even today. What does that even mean? They are free countries. No one forced India to hold onto that law. No one forces other countries to hold onto colonial era laws. If they don't change it that's their choice, their decision and their problem in the end. Not that of some long gone boogeyman.
Not so easy. Once you have a law in place you have vested interests who want to oppose any changes to the law. Either you need a dictatorship to make any changes you desire or respect democratic principles. You can't have both. Once a law was codified, albeit in a previous era, that itself becomes an excuse for vested interests to latch onto and demand that the law continue to be in place.
In my opinion, no social norms should be codified as laws as societies change and so do people. That creates more harm than good. This should serve as a lesson to all that laws should be generic in nature and not targeted towards one community/religion/caste/creed (be it either as a benefit or otherwise). This is again a by-product of Colonialism as British crown used personal laws to keep the country divided. Hopefully India fixes that next by codifying the Uniform Civil Code[1].
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The world is so weird. I never understood the motive behind tyrannizing other people. How is that winning at anything other than being an asshole? Why don't people just leave other people alone? Is it so much different to tyrannize a woman for being feminine, or just being attractive? Most of us are instinctively disgusted by that--or at least claim to be?
Homosexuality is disturbing to people because their brain cannot find relevant patterns that have to do with homosexuality-related experiences (sights, images etc). And when the brain doesn't find good pattern matches, it alerts the person of something very strange and potentially dangerous going on. Morality systems come on top of this fundamental fact, because morality systems are just the conscious justifications…
I'd like to echo this. A while back, a coworker and friend of mine who is homosexual took me to a coffee shop that caters primarily to homosexual men. I had never been with him before in that social context, but his actions did fall within the stereotypes and I did feel myself uncomfortable with the situation. It wasn't that big of a deal, as I recognized my response.
What was more "eye-opening" was that later, he has the same reaction to those situations when he's with his heterosexual friends. He even went so far as to say he finds the concept of heterosexual sex as digusting.
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The world is so weird. I never understood the motive behind tyrannizing other people. How is that winning at anything other than being an asshole? Why don't people just leave other people alone? Is it so much different to tyrannize a woman for being feminine, or just being attractive? Most of us are instinctively disgusted by that--or at least claim to be?
Homosexuality is disturbing to people because their brain cannot find relevant patterns that have to do with homosexuality-related experiences (sights, images etc). And when the brain doesn't find good pattern matches, it alerts the person of something very strange and potentially dangerous going on. Morality systems come on top of this fundamental fact, because morality systems are just the conscious justifications…
This is a serious claim, one that moral philosophers (even those inclined towards moral fictionalism/nonrealism) have issues with. Just two of them:
* This account fails to distinguish between moral beliefs and cultural taboos. Individuals tend to think that they can justify both, but challenging taboos is more likely to result in confabulation -- individuals are willing to concede hypothetical concerns in their moral beliefs, but remain committed to their taboos even in the face of good evidence against them.
* Moral philosophy, as it exists today, doesn't seek to provide justification to homophobia, gender discrimination, &c. The dominant metaethical views don't give any consideration at all to these particulars, but rather accept as conclusions (via utilitarian calculus, via a supreme principle, &c) that homophobia and the rest are all morally unjustified. Where does this fit into the pattern matching to feelings to confabulated justifications pipeline?
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Isn't the original purpose of society to control access to sex?
No, the original purpose of society is for its members to leverage each other to achieve more / be safer etc than as lone individuals. Controlling access to sex was one of the ways societies found to achieve those goals. For a simple example, communities with much laxer sex rules, found themselves frequently torn by relationship related feuds. Requiring (and punishing non-adherence) to sticking to some fixed husband/…
Plausibly, in the good old days before washing machines when keeping a home together was a gargantuan task, the economic equilibrium just happened to be 1:1 male/female pairings.
Examining the substance of marriage law in England, for example, suggests that most of meat of law and custom revolves around inheritance law. People get swallowed up in the pageantry, but the legal trouble starts when assets are involved.