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Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)

nytimes.com

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Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)

#101

Post by andrewcooke »

mhurron wrote: post #67
bruceb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Major Dan was getting it on with prostitutes but he doesn't get aids. It also showed the anti war guy just happens to be a women beater...

Are you saying anti-war protesters can't be women beaters? That liberated women can't get AIDS? That in the late 70's prostitutes were guaranteed ways of getting this disease that wasn't widespread yet? Forrest Gump had very real characters. Jenny had a shitty life, which continued to be shitty by her choices. This really happens to people from shitty backgrounds because they don't recognize shitty situations as shit…

"Are you saying anti-war protesters can't be women beaters?"

can you really not see the argument being made? the original post was not saying no women got aids, or that no anti-war protesters are wife-beaters. it was arguing that there is a systematic bias.

i don't know if that's true or not, but wilfully misunderstanding or misrepresenting the argument doesn't help anyone.

Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)

#102

Post by downandout »

andrewcooke wrote: post #100
newnewnew wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's really going to blow your mind is the statistics on who gets HIV infections in the United States today: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/basics/ataglance.html What an un-PC virus. Doesn't it know we're living in 2013? I'm told reality is supposed to have a liberal bias now.

i don't understand. heterosexual women are way down the list. what are you trying to say? (i haven't seen the film so perhaps i am missing something, but i thought the argument from the original comment was that being a sexually active woman wasn't a major risk factor).

She was a promiscuous drug user. Sharing needles, engaging in high risk sexual activity, etc. The original comment is saying that they were annoyed that the movie perpetuated the stereotype that these activities increase the chances of contracting HIV. Those of us that are annoyed by this person's annoyance are saying that indeed these behaviors are scientifically proven to increase risk of HIV infection.

Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)

#103

Post by andrewcooke »

downandout wrote: post #102
andrewcooke wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't understand. heterosexual women are way down the list. what are you trying to say? (i haven't seen the film so perhaps i am missing something, but i thought the argument from the original comment was that being a sexually active woman wasn't a major risk factor).

She was a promiscuous drug user. Sharing needles, engaging in high risk sexual activity, etc. The original comment is saying that they were annoyed that the movie perpetuated the stereotype that these activities increase the chances of contracting HIV. Those of us that are annoyed by this person's annoyance are saying that indeed these behaviors are scientifically proven to increase risk of HIV infection.

oh, ok. didn't know about the (iv) drug use. thanks.

Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)

#104

Post by acangiano »

bajsejohannes wrote: post #8

I recommend the movie How To Survive a Plague, which also shows the beginnings of AIDS in New York. Must have been a frightening time. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2124803

We were here (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1787837/) was also very informative and touching.

Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)

#105

Post by DanBC »

kmfrk wrote: post #31
seiji wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, got it. At first I thought you were one of those crazy people saying AIDS isn't caused by HIV.

Those people exist ? This world, man ...

Those people have had positions of power in the South African government and have caused very great harm. Admittedly, this is mostly mid-2000s, and not today, but still. Estimates suggest over 300,000 people died because of delays in introducing anti-retrovirals.

(http://www.irinnews.org/report/73892/south-africa-new-report...)

(http://www.irinnews.org/report/93411/africa-the-crazy-things...)

EDIT: Anyone interested in AIDS / HIV in the developing world might like to read PlusNews (http://www.irinnews.org/theme/hiv/hiv/aids)

Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)

#106

Post by ownagefool »

bencollier49 wrote: post #97
GhotiFish wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always though cancer was an umbrella term for when a cell mutates in such a fashion to lose it's reproductive throttle, and consequently starts consuming as many resources as possible, eventually fragmenting and spreading throughout the body. What kind of cancers don't fit this definition?

Oh, they all fit this definition, but the mutation isn't always spontaneous. For example, cervical cancer is often caused by HPV, which is why school-age girls are routinely immunised against it in the UK.

I'd be suprised if any cancers were completely spontaneous rather than us just not knowing what causes them.

Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)

#107

Post by lolcraft »

newnewnew wrote: post #79
bruceb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was pretty obvious. Was also a tad annoying as because she was liberal and anti war and was a sexually liberated woman...well then she is a whore that will get her payback by being given aids. I thought it was a good movie but it had touches of right-wing propaganda.

What's really going to blow your mind is the statistics on who gets HIV infections in the United States today: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/basics/ataglance.html What an un-PC virus. Doesn't it know we're living in 2013? I'm told reality is supposed to have a liberal bias now.

First, women are just 20% of all AIDS victims. Mind not blown, Mr. Un-PC Dude.

Second, that shows a fair degree of missing the point of fiction. Sure, in real life, where everything happens according to cold statistics, promiscuous women will tend to get more AIDS than non-promiscuous women and non-promiscuous heterosexual men. Granted.

But this is fiction, a work of art which has an audience and a message, where everything happens because the author wants to. Even if you don't want to, even if you're scared shitless of communicating a Message, you are in fact, as an author, putting a point across. It might not be a message that you as an author subscribe to, but the work is there, and the point is made; and you're just a bad author. And people are naturally adept at finding the core message of works of fiction; we as a species seem to like narrative a lot.

We look at those Nazis melting at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie, and we instinctively get it: they were punished because of their arrogance and evilness (in this case Naziness). Even one Nazi got stigmata, as a symbolical punishment and marker of his inherent badness, that is, Naziness. It's all narrative, and a message gets made, namely that being Nazi is kind of a bad deal. Take Elon Musk, he's the hero in a narrative that pits the Startupy Original Innovators (good) against Sclerotic Big Corporations like Boeing (bad); and it's hinted that badness will be punished at the end and good will prevail, as it is defined in the (narrow, a bit unfair) context of that narrative. A very common and crude narrative structure; and very powerful, by the way.

So, this guy watches Forrest Gump in a culture that tends to shame women that have casual sex, and sees that it just so happens a woman that has casual sex then has (is punished with, the mind readily answers, since it's just too much of a coincidence...) AIDS, because this author just decided for it to happen. And this guy then infers the writer has made a moralizing tale where sluts get AIDS. Now, maybe this author was just clueless and didn't think through the implications of his, or her, decisions; but I wouldn't blame the GP for looking at Forrest Gump that way.

Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)

#108

Post by mhurron »

andrewcooke wrote: post #101
mhurron wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying anti-war protesters can't be women beaters? That liberated women can't get AIDS? That in the late 70's prostitutes were guaranteed ways of getting this disease that wasn't widespread yet? Forrest Gump had very real characters. Jenny had a shitty life, which continued to be shitty by her choices. This really happens to people from shitty backgrounds because they don't recognize shitty situations as shit…

"Are you saying anti-war protesters can't be women beaters?" can you really not see the argument being made? the original post was not saying no women got aids, or that no anti-war protesters are wife-beaters. it was arguing that there is a systematic bias. i don't know if that's true or not, but wilfully misunderstanding or misrepresenting the argument doesn't help anyone.

It's a non sequitur. It does not follow that because the anti-war protester that Jenny hooks up with beats her that the movie is trying to portray anti-war protesters as woman beaters. It can only be a shocking bias if it's so shocking for it to occur.

It also doesn't fit the actual movie. The movie has Jenny making the same poor decisions over and over because that's what her background leads her to. Her personality leads her to protest the injustice of Vietnam, her view of normal gravitates her to the worst of the other protesters. Her personality leads her to being a liberated woman of the 70's, while at the same time drawing her into the culture of abuse and self-abuse that put her in the position to be one of the early contractors of HIV.

There is no bias, this really happens. Jenny was a complex character that was controlled by her demons.

The major characters of Forrest Gump are really portrayed quite realistically.

Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)

#109

Post by theorique »

timr wrote: post #85
tptacek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that AIDS wasn't a high priority for Reagan, but from my vantage point it looks like HIV is an instance of an enormously complicated biological challenge being addressed with extraordinary effectiveness and rapidity by the medical establishment. I take your point (and the sibling commenter's point) about the epidemiologic response to AIDS; I may be over-fixated on the research and development side of the is…

It's important to remember that AZT (the first effective anti-retroviral treatment for HIV) was invented in the 60s as part of cancer research. It wasn't until the mid-80s that HIV researchers started testing it. In other words, it's not as if the drug was invented in response to the AIDS crisis. Once the NIH/NCI made AIDS research a priority, it was a rather straightforward matter to start testing known anti-retrovi…

Was HIV even identified in the late 1970s and early 80s though? I thought it was identified as a consequence of looking at the causes of the AIDS epidemic.

Re: Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)

#110

Post by matt-attack »

run4yourlives wrote: post #7

An article like this makes you wonder how many different diseases (answer - over 200) get lumped together under the large "cancer" umbrella. One wonders if we are doing ourselves a disservice maintaining a term more inline with shared symptoms instead of separating the diseases into shared causes. At any rate I'm digressing, but cancer is a fascinating (while horrible) concept that exists in our reality. When you thi…

> The fact that it was a "gay disease" hampered everything about our response to it.

Why "gay disease" in quotes? Was it not a disease with origins exclusively in gays?

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