Byzantine, I think you missed the point. Universal homosexuality is obviously not a good survival trait when survival relies on heterosexual reproduction. Yet, homosexuality occurring partially in populations that multiply quickly can be a good survival trait when it prevents populations from growing fast enough to deplete their resources they require to survive. I’m not sure how well that argument can be applied to our modern society, but genetic evolution has little to do with our current society.
Again, since it’s engaged in by so very few, it never occurs on such a scale. You will not find a single such instance in human history.
Really? So modern man has effectively ordered genetic forces to hit the “off” switch? Remarkable.
Actually, sooner or later, man will be able to ‘re-design’ himself and so conservative ‘philosophy’ will finally be proved to be total nonsense.
I’m not following your reasoning. Are you talking about genetic design? If so, then it sounds like in the nature-nurture debate you’ve come full circle to nature.
I believe that’s a false dichotomy. I neither encourage or discourage homosexual activity or prostitution. If they hit on me or if I personally knew someone who was a prostitute, then I’d have a problem with it, but otherwise I’m essentially indifferent to it.
To me, the real question to ask is: why do you care about what other people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms? They can be into dominatrix stuff for all I care. That’s their buisiness, not mine.
I don’t, but that is not where the advocates of sexual license intend to leave matters.
Golly, folks, it sure does seem like a lot of y’all (especially you, Brainy) think that racism can only be harmful to an individual. That really depends on circumstance, doesn’t it? While philosophically, I fully agree that in interpersonal relations you should judge people individually, when you do something like own a store, you don’t have that luxury. Now, if you find that blacks who visit your store steal twice as often and buy half as much (not an unrealistic figure, at least in today’s environment), it may well be to your profit to ban blacks from your store. You will miss out on some legitimate business and some lovely people, no doubt, but you know statistically you will avoid more thieves. Or, you might just exclude those who wear oversized clothes and such (which some “progressives” would view as bigotry, too).
White people moved out of inner cities when blacks moved in, because blacks, statistically, have a far higher rate of violent crime. It’s not like Jews or Japanese regularly hang out in Harlem either. Now, we don’t know, yet, whether or not there are inherent, genetic differences in ability and character (again, statistically speaking only) between races, but we can’t rule it out, and we should not have equality as a goal unless it can possibly be brought about without some form of enforcement. I don’t have to tell anyone here, I hope, that forced equality brings everyone down to the lowest common denominator.
Well as far as so-called “public property” is concerned, I side with Walter Block in saying that it’s free reign because there is no current just owner. Hence, graffiti on public property, nudity on public property, etc., gets a green light in my book. Beyond that, I’m not aware of any movement pushing for the notion that you should be required to allow nudity or graffiti on/in your own home or on your own land.
Correlation /= causation. And I’m not talking about or advocating “forced equality”.
Meh, genes are very selfish in this sense. Being a homosexual may be better for the “population”, but it’s crap for your particular genetic code. There is no planning to this sort of thing, y’know.
Look, hormones aren’t very specific. Men want to stick it in a hole, preferably one which is warm and wet. Instinctively, we seek feminine forms and beauty, but that’s really easy to overcome, actually. Humans can learn to lust after children and animals, or toys, or whatever. All that’s really required to get you off is stimulation, and it doesn’t matter where it’s from. It’s pleasurable, and you will seek out what you associate with pleasure, whether or not it’s really biologically designed to pleasure you. Plus, we’re complex emotional beings and in case you haven’t noticed, the ways we can get screwed up are legion. Homosexuality is a psychological phenomenon.
I don’t get your point.
My point is that racialists and apologists for them have a tendency to engage in the error of conflating correlation with causation. They will point to statistical data and then infer from it that race is the primary or only causal determinant. But this isolates one factor from the rest, places too much trust in statistics and draws a sweeping conclusion, a broad generalization, from a limited statistic based on presuppositions in its design. It seems more like a bastardization of science for the purposes of confirmation bias than sound science to me. Even if the statistics are at least fairly accurate, they have no application whatsoever to the individual and they do not inherently lead to a conclusion in favor of racialism.
While I understand the desire to categorically separate white supremacy from “race realism”, “race realism” is often just a mask for a vulgar kind of biological determinism used (or misused) in the attempt to justify all existing inequalities. The problem is that all existing inequalities are not entirely predetermined by nature in a purely meritocratic sense. While nature may certainly have a meritocratic element to it, it is also has an element of uncertainty and dynamism. Another problem is that this overemphasis on biology and geography is at the expense of important situational factors, such as the effects of institutions. A true “race realism” would have to incorporate some kind of institutional analysis.
I suppose there’s a certain sense in which I’m a “race irrealist” in that from a strictly methodological individualist and materialist perspective “race” is no less of a collective abstraction than “society” or “humanity” or “nation”. They are convenient terms to use for general communication, but one should be skeptical towards the prospect of taking them too literally or using them in an anthropromorphic or transcendental way. A race is not a concious and willing actor in and of itself, nor is it anything more than the sum of its parts. At best, it is a term used to describe the sum total effect of the individual components that make it up, and even the process of trying to judge that is not easy and cannot necessarily be used to accurately describe the individual components themselves.
Yes, genetic design, genetic engineering, or whatever name it has. Conservative philosophy, that is, traditionalism and opposition to change says that A, B, C, are natural things to do because of god, the state, the family, etc. In your case, you claim that certain activities are not ‘natural’ or are contrary to biology. But thanks to technology, facts that used to be regarded as inescapable can actually be worked around, biology included.
Genes aren’t selfish at all. A lot of social feelings like empathy, generosity, etc are of genetic origin. Females bodies tend to regulate their cycles when they live together, so they have babies at the same time, etc. A lot of our traits come from living in tribes, where everybody is blood-related in some way – there are studies that check if you are evolutionary better, in average, if the cousin makes 4 babies or you only make 1 baby. If it’s the brother, then your own baby might even have more differences to you than his. Genes adapt to these, and we see that in all animals. Humans aren’t, for instance, unique in adopting babies of others. Relatively to homossexuality, there are some that claim that menopause and some rate of infertility even in young life are evolutionary adventageous because it’s important for a family to not have babies all around and keep some members around. (of course, nowadays, offspring mortality is virtually nil, so that’s a disadvantage.) Homossexuality between females is very important in particular because of the rotativity on breast feeding – female homossexuality behavior is actually normal behavior in a few other apes.
I’m not saying its fair and I never said it was surely genetic. But that has nothing to do with whether or not excluding a race from your store will, in a particular setting, result in an economic advantage. It is not the store owner’s job to correct the injustices of the world. You aren’t denying a correlation between race and crime, are you? Practically speaking, for the store owner, it doesn’t matter what the ultimate cause is.
Hmph. Not a devotee of Dawkins, eh? That’s one point for you, anyway.
You don’t really know that empathy, generosity, and etc. are of genetic origin. That hasn’t been remotely proven.
Empathy, generosity, etc., if they have come about by mutation and natural selection, must not be individual disadvantages. In other words, they must increase the chances of successful breeding for the individual that possesses them. If they are a disadvantage for that individual, than less generous and empathic people would breed more, and pass on those traits, crowding out the traits of generosity and empathy.
Humans aren’t unique in adopting babies, but neither are we unique in their abandonment. Humans are not just genetic machines (if we are, we might as well not talk about it). Desiring only infertile children is also a non-breeding preference, as is beastiality. Is this genetic?
In what sense?
-Jon
In the sense that it is not genetic or otherwise biologically inherent. Humans are homosexual primarily because of mental factors. Emotional/confidence/intimidation issues, habit, daddy issues, what have you.
Hmm, do you have anything to corroborate that?
-Jon
Occam’s razor. You either have to come up with some convoluted reasoning as to how homosexuality is passed down through the generations, or realize that people have been into far weirder stuff, truly, unbreakably devoted to it, without a soul saying it’s because somehow they have a gene that says so. No one has ever actually found a “gay gene” and I really doubt they will. There is no reason to think there is one, except silly anecdotes where people “Always knew they were different”. Group identification and stuff. Does anyone deny that human psychology is complex enough to accommodate such a distortion?
Christianity, in framing it as a sin, has made it seem like a choice, which is far too simplistic an analysis. Anorexia and the like are not choices in the sense that choosing between fries or onion rings is a choice. They are mental patterns which are extremely difficult to overcome. Mental patterns have been shown to literally shape the brains of those who hold them, making reform a difficult and long process as these conformations must be reversed.