For example, where exactly is this liberal sacredness around sexual autonomy?
Providing that which was specifically requested, concrete examples of liberals sacrificing human lives to sacredness in the particular matter of sexuality, will of course result in this post being marked down, and were I to point to examples of the more obvious and extreme examples of sacrificing lives for sacredness, such as the environment, it would be marked down even more.
But here goes:
Let us suppose a capitalist was doing something that frequently caused harm to others and himself, for example operating a car battery recycling center where he dumped acid containing lead sulphates in on the ground, in drains, in a nearby stream, etc. Then he would be strongly regulated and supervised.
But female sexuality frequently results in harm to their children, their husbands, and themselves, and it is pretty much unthinkable to restrict it, even in the case of a married woman with children. Similarly, the response to the AIDs epidemic was to invent an imaginary heterosexual aids epidemic, rather than shut down the bathhouses. I am pretty sure that if Chuck E Cheese’s cheese was killing vast numbers of people due the frequent presence of dangerous molds in the cheese, it would be shut down very rapidly without anyone worrying about restricting the liberty of cheese eaters to eat as much cheese as they liked, in any form they liked, any place they liked.
Similarly, vaccination against certain sexually transmitted diseases. They want to vaccinate vast numbers of people that are unlikely to need it at considerable expense, and possible risk of harm, in order that those that do need don’t suffer possible stigma by having to request it. If you actually wanted to provide herd immunity, you would vaccinate the main disease reservoir, which is adult male homosexuals, not schoolgirls. If this was, say, an expensive rabies vaccine, people would get it on the basis of potential exposure, and animals would get it on the basis of being a potential disease reservoir. Instead it is being targeted at those least likely to benefit, and least likely to cause risk for others, because targeting it where it might actually be most useful might stigmatize the recipients. No one seems to worry that Chuck E Cheese might be stigmatized by visits from the health inspector, and they would worry even less if some customers were dying because their cheeses had the wrong molds growing in them. On the contrary, they would think it a damned good thing if they got stigmatized for harms that they indirectly or carelessly caused.
We face a vast pile of very restrictive regulation to prevent harm to that which liberals consider sacred, on the basis of vague, small, questionable, and nebulous externalities, yet if women fail to express their sexuality in what used to be the approved channels, or express their sexuality in what used to be unapproved channels, this is apt to cause massive externalities, particularly to children. And if female sexual autonomy is sacred, unlike Chuck E Cheese’s cheese, male homosexual autonomy is ten times as sacred, as we saw in the AIDS epidemic.
Cheese gets aggressively regulated for a vague, slight, and quite possibly nonexistent risk of harm. Sexual misconduct does not, despite major and alarming harm, and not only is it not regulated, but aggressively protected from social disapproval.
If someone wants to sell homemade sauerkraut at a farmer’s market, they need to first hire a team of lawyers and consultants to shepherd them through the bureaucracy, lest they somehow cause inadvertent harm to their customers, but if a woman feels that sex with her husband is insufficiently fulfilling and starts banging a pimp from time to time, because the pimp is so much edgier and cooler than her husband, the entire apparatus of state is not only not going to do anything to restrain her, it is going to use violence against her husband and children to prevent them from reacting negatively to this development.
Similarly, vaccination against certain sexually transmitted diseases. They want to vaccinate vast numbers of people that are unlikely to need it at considerable expense, and possible risk of harm, in order that those that do need don’t suffer possible stigma by having to request it. If you actually wanted to provide herd immunity, you would vaccinate the main disease reservoir, which is adult male homosexuals, not schoolgirls.
The controversy over vaccination of young women for “certain sexually transmitted diseases” was over HPV, which is the predominant cause of cervical cancer in the U.S. and does not have any particular connection with “adult male homosexuals” any more than with other groups. HPV does cause other cancers (anal, penile, oral, etc.) but these are much more rare than HPV-caused cervical cancer.
According to the CDC, every year in the U.S. there are 16700 new cases of HPV-related genital or anal cancers in women, predominantly cervical cancer; while there are only 1900 new cases of HPV-related genital or anal cancers in men — including both gay and straight men.
In other words, vaccinating young women for HPV can be expected to directly and selectively help those young women — the specific young women who receive the vaccination, via individual rather than herd immunity. It secondarily helps their (male and female) sexual partners, although HPV-caused penile cancer is much rarer than HPV-caused cervical cancer. It does not appreciably help male homosexuals — who are, after all, a population not noted for having sexual contact with young women.
The controversy over vaccination of young women for “certain sexually transmitted diseases” was over HPV, which is the predominant cause of cervical cancer in the U.S. and does not have any particular connection with “adult male homosexuals”
Where do women catch it from?
They catch it, of course, from males. And males, mostly, catch it from males.
HPV causes the most deaths among heterosexual women, but is most common among males who engage in sex with males. Among women, it is a heterosexual disease. Among men, where it is considerably less deadly, it is primarily a homosexual disease. Homosexuals are the primary reservoir for HPV, just as bats and foxes are the primary reservoir for rabies.
The reason for free or compulsory vaccination is herd immunity, the externality of preventing people from harming others. If you are worried about unvaccinated people harming others, you should be targeting male homosexuals for free HPV vaccination. But that of course would stigmatize them.
If you are worried about unvaccinated people harming others, you should be targeting male homosexuals for free HPV vaccination. But that of course would stigmatize them.
Actually, it’s more that the current vaccine doesn’t work as well for adults—at least according to the CDC, but who knows, maybe they’re in on it:
CDC recommends the HPV vaccine for all boys ages 11 or 12, and for males through age 21, who have not already received all three doses. The vaccine is also recommended for gay and bisexual men (or any man who has sex with men), and men with compromised immune systems (including HIV) through age 26, if they did not get fully vaccinated when they were younger. The vaccine is safe for all men through age 26, but it is most effective when given at younger ages.
Oh, so they are targeting male homosexuals. So much for that conspiracy theory.
Hmm … it seems to me that if I wanted to invent a homophobic conspiracy theory to explain the HPV vaccination strategy, it would be like this:
“The vaccinators clearly do not want to make gay men healthier, because if they did, they’d promote the vaccine heavily for boys. As every good homophobe knows, gay men ‘convert’ little boys, who then grow up to be gay men. Instead, the vaccinators promote it for girls. This means they only want to help women, both lesbian and heterosexual women. Therefore, they are anti-male radical feminists.”
This explains the facts at least as well as your conspiracy theory, and possibly better.
Of course, what would explain the facts even better is that medical ethics generally entail recommending a slightly-risky treatment most heavily for those who can suffer the worst from the disease; in this case, women.
Stigmatization is a concern with social norms about male homosexuality because gay men have, in fact, been heavily shunned/persecuted/stigmatized based on their sexuality. This has had large negative consequences in the lives of gay men, both for men who have faced stigma/shunning and for men who were prevented from having fulfilling romantic lives. There is no parallel concern with pizza parlors.
Antagonistic sexual politics also make it harder to promote public health. It is generally extremely difficult to enforce restrictions against sexual activities, so it helps a lot to have buy-in from the affected community. That is unlikely to happen if “public health” efforts are seen as coming from the persecutors, which makes it important for public health officials to disassociate themselves from the generalized disapproval of men who have sex with men.
But public health-motivated regulation of sexual activities does happen. After the AIDS epidemic hit the US in the early 1980s, many bathhouses were, in fact, shut down or heavily regulated. In San Francisco, for example:
In 1984, however, fear of AIDS caused the San Francisco Health Department, with the support of some gay activists, and against the opposition of other gay activists, to ask the courts to close gay bathhouses in the city. The court, under Judge Roy Wonder, instead issued a court order that limited sexual practices and disallowed renting of private rooms in bathhouses, so that sexual activity could be monitored, as a public health measure. Some of the bathhouses tried to live within the strict rules of this court order, but many of them felt they could not easily do business under the new rules and closed. Eventually, the few remaining actual bathhouses succumbed to either economic pressures or the continuing legal pressures of the city and finally closed. Several sex clubs, which were not officially bathhouses, continued to operate indefinitely and operate to this day, though following strict rules under the court order and city regulations.
Stigmatization is a concern with social norms about male homosexuality because gay men have, in fact, been heavily shunned/persecuted/stigmatized based on their sexuality.
Husbands, fathers, and capitalists, are either demonized or ridiculed on every television show. This is clearly having undesirable effects—less capital formation, less family formation, and less enterprise formation. Why is some people’s stigmatization horrid, shocking, and in fact sacrilegious, while other people’s stigmatization is no problem at all?
Imagine a public health campaign that told us that certain sexual behaviors were literally dirty, in that one was apt to catch a wide variety of diseases, and that people who engaged in these practices were apt to spread disease even to people who do not engage in them, so that people who engaged in these practices tended to be literally dirty..
Sacrilege
Now substitute “production” for “sex”, and perhaps “pollution” for “disease”. Absolutely no problem at all. In fact such a campaign would be pious, even if those condemned were plausibly innocent. Even if the campaign was totally untrue, it would be deemed truthy.
OK, let’s put the Rawlsian veil of ignorance down. So I don’t know who I’m going to be. I’d still prefer a few parts-per-thousand probability of getting AIDS than a 10% probability of having a sexual orientation for a gender with whom I’m forbidden from having sex with.
(OTOH, a monogamous relationship, incl. marriage, is more-or-less-implicitly a contract where you agree—among other things—not to have sex with anyone else, so I do agree that the behaviour of “the entire apparatus of state” you describe in the second part of the last paragraph is wrong.)
a 10% probability of having a sexual orientation for a gender with whom I’m forbidden from having sex with.
Wikipedia indicates that this number is substantially too high. Random representative samples seem to give results of a few percent or less, with higher figures coming from non-representative samples such as prisons, urban areas which concentrate the gay population from surrounding regions, and unscientific polls by condom manufacturers.
I had also underestimated the probability of fatal STDs by an order of magnitude: AIDS alone caused 4.87% of all deaths in 2002. (OTOH, the fact that there are quite a few countries with a two-digit prevalence of HIV makes me seriously doubt sam0345′s claim that “the main disease reservoir” “is adult male homosexuals”. There’s no way gay men comprise a major part of 26% of Swaziland’s population.)
quite a few countries with a two-digit prevalence of HIV makes me seriously doubt sam0345′s claim that “the main disease reservoir” “is adult male homosexuals”. There’s no way gay men comprise a major part of 26% of Swaziland’s population.)
AIDS in Africa is not spread by homosexuals, but by foreign aid: More precisely, by needle reuse in health facilities supported by foreign aid.
In the west, AIDS is, in its pattern of affliction and causation, wrath of God disease. In Africa, AIDS is, in its pattern of affliction and causation, wrath of progressivism disease.
The more AIDS patients you have, the more money you get, so no incentive to sterilize needles. And everyone feels a pleasant glow of progressive holiness and piety at the sight of non homosexuals and non drug users getting AIDS, so no one really wants to halt this display of holiness and sacredness.
The typical African AIDS victim is the faithful wife of a faithful husband who catches the disease because she attends a foreign aid funded clinic while pregnant. That will teach them to be married and faithful.
An article in New Scientist from a decade ago talking about a “controversial new analysis,” without any follow-up in subsequent years is a pretty weak source. Here is Robin Hanson’s post, arguing for the same claim with more recent and better sources, although still unconvincing.
They want to vaccinate vast numbers of people that are unlikely to need it at considerable expense
How much?
Last I heard, $400 for a course, $100 for a dose. If this did not involve sex, such a vaccine would be targeted at at risk populations.
A ten pack of combined tetanus and diptheria vaccine costs $20 and everyone is at roughly comparable risk, so it is reasonable to give the tet/dipth vaccine out like lollipops or McDonald’s toys. Maybe the HPV vaccination should be handed out free at the sex clinic, but it seems to me that the reason that they want to give it to schoolgirls is because they donot want to give it out free at the sex clinic.
The mistakes you’re posting have already been corrected by myself and paper-machine over in this branch of the thread. You are entitled to your own opinions (values), but you are not entitled to your own facts. Please do some research on the subject from medical sources; and do bear in mind that mainstream scientific sources bear a much higher probability of being right (and not merely a much higher status) than fringe or speculative sources. If we lived in a world where fringe political columnists were an accurate source for medical facts and doctors were not, then we would all go to John Derbyshire to treat our diseases. We don’t. Why not?
The mistakes you’re posting have already been corrected by myself and paper-machine over in this branch of the thread.
Your “correction” is that the purpose of the vaccination is not herd immunity, but individual and personal benefit—but the claim justifying compulsory and/or free vaccination is always herd immunity. If no substantial externality, no justification for compulsion and/or subsidy.
In fact, of course, the reason for compulsory HPV vaccination is to avoid stigmatization. If girls get to individually choose whether they want a vaccination against a sexually transmitted disease, those who so choose might be stigmatized.
OTOH, a monogamous relationship, incl. marriage, is more-or-less-implicitly a contract where you agree—among other things—not to have sex with anyone else
Cheating is quite common; about 20% of married people have affairs and the rate is higher in putatively-monogamous unmarried partnerships. Around 3% of children are the result of affairs.
I’m not sure what other sorts of “contracts” have a 20% chance of default. I don’t think banks would offer you a loan if they thought there was a 20% chance you wouldn’t pay up. Even Florida’s foreclosure rate isn’t that bad!
Providing that which was specifically requested, concrete examples of liberals sacrificing human lives to sacredness in the particular matter of sexuality, will of course result in this post being marked down, and were I to point to examples of the more obvious and extreme examples of sacrificing lives for sacredness, such as the environment, it would be marked down even more.
But here goes:
Let us suppose a capitalist was doing something that frequently caused harm to others and himself, for example operating a car battery recycling center where he dumped acid containing lead sulphates in on the ground, in drains, in a nearby stream, etc. Then he would be strongly regulated and supervised.
But female sexuality frequently results in harm to their children, their husbands, and themselves, and it is pretty much unthinkable to restrict it, even in the case of a married woman with children. Similarly, the response to the AIDs epidemic was to invent an imaginary heterosexual aids epidemic, rather than shut down the bathhouses. I am pretty sure that if Chuck E Cheese’s cheese was killing vast numbers of people due the frequent presence of dangerous molds in the cheese, it would be shut down very rapidly without anyone worrying about restricting the liberty of cheese eaters to eat as much cheese as they liked, in any form they liked, any place they liked.
Similarly, vaccination against certain sexually transmitted diseases. They want to vaccinate vast numbers of people that are unlikely to need it at considerable expense, and possible risk of harm, in order that those that do need don’t suffer possible stigma by having to request it. If you actually wanted to provide herd immunity, you would vaccinate the main disease reservoir, which is adult male homosexuals, not schoolgirls. If this was, say, an expensive rabies vaccine, people would get it on the basis of potential exposure, and animals would get it on the basis of being a potential disease reservoir. Instead it is being targeted at those least likely to benefit, and least likely to cause risk for others, because targeting it where it might actually be most useful might stigmatize the recipients. No one seems to worry that Chuck E Cheese might be stigmatized by visits from the health inspector, and they would worry even less if some customers were dying because their cheeses had the wrong molds growing in them. On the contrary, they would think it a damned good thing if they got stigmatized for harms that they indirectly or carelessly caused.
We face a vast pile of very restrictive regulation to prevent harm to that which liberals consider sacred, on the basis of vague, small, questionable, and nebulous externalities, yet if women fail to express their sexuality in what used to be the approved channels, or express their sexuality in what used to be unapproved channels, this is apt to cause massive externalities, particularly to children. And if female sexual autonomy is sacred, unlike Chuck E Cheese’s cheese, male homosexual autonomy is ten times as sacred, as we saw in the AIDS epidemic.
Cheese gets aggressively regulated for a vague, slight, and quite possibly nonexistent risk of harm. Sexual misconduct does not, despite major and alarming harm, and not only is it not regulated, but aggressively protected from social disapproval.
If someone wants to sell homemade sauerkraut at a farmer’s market, they need to first hire a team of lawyers and consultants to shepherd them through the bureaucracy, lest they somehow cause inadvertent harm to their customers, but if a woman feels that sex with her husband is insufficiently fulfilling and starts banging a pimp from time to time, because the pimp is so much edgier and cooler than her husband, the entire apparatus of state is not only not going to do anything to restrain her, it is going to use violence against her husband and children to prevent them from reacting negatively to this development.
The controversy over vaccination of young women for “certain sexually transmitted diseases” was over HPV, which is the predominant cause of cervical cancer in the U.S. and does not have any particular connection with “adult male homosexuals” any more than with other groups. HPV does cause other cancers (anal, penile, oral, etc.) but these are much more rare than HPV-caused cervical cancer.
According to the CDC, every year in the U.S. there are 16700 new cases of HPV-related genital or anal cancers in women, predominantly cervical cancer; while there are only 1900 new cases of HPV-related genital or anal cancers in men — including both gay and straight men.
In other words, vaccinating young women for HPV can be expected to directly and selectively help those young women — the specific young women who receive the vaccination, via individual rather than herd immunity. It secondarily helps their (male and female) sexual partners, although HPV-caused penile cancer is much rarer than HPV-caused cervical cancer. It does not appreciably help male homosexuals — who are, after all, a population not noted for having sexual contact with young women.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV
http://www.cdc.gov/std/HPV/STDFact-HPV.htm
Where do women catch it from?
They catch it, of course, from males. And males, mostly, catch it from males.
HPV causes the most deaths among heterosexual women, but is most common among males who engage in sex with males. Among women, it is a heterosexual disease. Among men, where it is considerably less deadly, it is primarily a homosexual disease. Homosexuals are the primary reservoir for HPV, just as bats and foxes are the primary reservoir for rabies.
The reason for free or compulsory vaccination is herd immunity, the externality of preventing people from harming others. If you are worried about unvaccinated people harming others, you should be targeting male homosexuals for free HPV vaccination. But that of course would stigmatize them.
Actually, it’s more that the current vaccine doesn’t work as well for adults—at least according to the CDC, but who knows, maybe they’re in on it:
Oh, so they are targeting male homosexuals. So much for that conspiracy theory.
Citation, please.
Hmm … it seems to me that if I wanted to invent a homophobic conspiracy theory to explain the HPV vaccination strategy, it would be like this:
“The vaccinators clearly do not want to make gay men healthier, because if they did, they’d promote the vaccine heavily for boys. As every good homophobe knows, gay men ‘convert’ little boys, who then grow up to be gay men. Instead, the vaccinators promote it for girls. This means they only want to help women, both lesbian and heterosexual women. Therefore, they are anti-male radical feminists.”
This explains the facts at least as well as your conspiracy theory, and possibly better.
Of course, what would explain the facts even better is that medical ethics generally entail recommending a slightly-risky treatment most heavily for those who can suffer the worst from the disease; in this case, women.
Stigmatization is a concern with social norms about male homosexuality because gay men have, in fact, been heavily shunned/persecuted/stigmatized based on their sexuality. This has had large negative consequences in the lives of gay men, both for men who have faced stigma/shunning and for men who were prevented from having fulfilling romantic lives. There is no parallel concern with pizza parlors.
Antagonistic sexual politics also make it harder to promote public health. It is generally extremely difficult to enforce restrictions against sexual activities, so it helps a lot to have buy-in from the affected community. That is unlikely to happen if “public health” efforts are seen as coming from the persecutors, which makes it important for public health officials to disassociate themselves from the generalized disapproval of men who have sex with men.
But public health-motivated regulation of sexual activities does happen. After the AIDS epidemic hit the US in the early 1980s, many bathhouses were, in fact, shut down or heavily regulated. In San Francisco, for example:
Husbands, fathers, and capitalists, are either demonized or ridiculed on every television show. This is clearly having undesirable effects—less capital formation, less family formation, and less enterprise formation. Why is some people’s stigmatization horrid, shocking, and in fact sacrilegious, while other people’s stigmatization is no problem at all?
Imagine a public health campaign that told us that certain sexual behaviors were literally dirty, in that one was apt to catch a wide variety of diseases, and that people who engaged in these practices were apt to spread disease even to people who do not engage in them, so that people who engaged in these practices tended to be literally dirty..
Sacrilege
Now substitute “production” for “sex”, and perhaps “pollution” for “disease”. Absolutely no problem at all. In fact such a campaign would be pious, even if those condemned were plausibly innocent. Even if the campaign was totally untrue, it would be deemed truthy.
OK, let’s put the Rawlsian veil of ignorance down. So I don’t know who I’m going to be. I’d still prefer a few parts-per-thousand probability of getting AIDS than a 10% probability of having a sexual orientation for a gender with whom I’m forbidden from having sex with.
(OTOH, a monogamous relationship, incl. marriage, is more-or-less-implicitly a contract where you agree—among other things—not to have sex with anyone else, so I do agree that the behaviour of “the entire apparatus of state” you describe in the second part of the last paragraph is wrong.)
EDIT: Retracted—numbers are way off (see below).
How much?
Wikipedia indicates that this number is substantially too high. Random representative samples seem to give results of a few percent or less, with higher figures coming from non-representative samples such as prisons, urban areas which concentrate the gay population from surrounding regions, and unscientific polls by condom manufacturers.
I had also underestimated the probability of fatal STDs by an order of magnitude: AIDS alone caused 4.87% of all deaths in 2002. (OTOH, the fact that there are quite a few countries with a two-digit prevalence of HIV makes me seriously doubt sam0345′s claim that “the main disease reservoir” “is adult male homosexuals”. There’s no way gay men comprise a major part of 26% of Swaziland’s population.)
AIDS in Africa is not spread by homosexuals, but by foreign aid: More precisely, by needle reuse in health facilities supported by foreign aid.
In the west, AIDS is, in its pattern of affliction and causation, wrath of God disease. In Africa, AIDS is, in its pattern of affliction and causation, wrath of progressivism disease.
The more AIDS patients you have, the more money you get, so no incentive to sterilize needles. And everyone feels a pleasant glow of progressive holiness and piety at the sight of non homosexuals and non drug users getting AIDS, so no one really wants to halt this display of holiness and sacredness.
The typical African AIDS victim is the faithful wife of a faithful husband who catches the disease because she attends a foreign aid funded clinic while pregnant. That will teach them to be married and faithful.
An article in New Scientist from a decade ago talking about a “controversial new analysis,” without any follow-up in subsequent years is a pretty weak source. Here is Robin Hanson’s post, arguing for the same claim with more recent and better sources, although still unconvincing.
Last I heard, $400 for a course, $100 for a dose. If this did not involve sex, such a vaccine would be targeted at at risk populations.
A ten pack of combined tetanus and diptheria vaccine costs $20 and everyone is at roughly comparable risk, so it is reasonable to give the tet/dipth vaccine out like lollipops or McDonald’s toys. Maybe the HPV vaccination should be handed out free at the sex clinic, but it seems to me that the reason that they want to give it to schoolgirls is because they do not want to give it out free at the sex clinic.
The mistakes you’re posting have already been corrected by myself and paper-machine over in this branch of the thread. You are entitled to your own opinions (values), but you are not entitled to your own facts. Please do some research on the subject from medical sources; and do bear in mind that mainstream scientific sources bear a much higher probability of being right (and not merely a much higher status) than fringe or speculative sources. If we lived in a world where fringe political columnists were an accurate source for medical facts and doctors were not, then we would all go to John Derbyshire to treat our diseases. We don’t. Why not?
Your “correction” is that the purpose of the vaccination is not herd immunity, but individual and personal benefit—but the claim justifying compulsory and/or free vaccination is always herd immunity. If no substantial externality, no justification for compulsion and/or subsidy.
In fact, of course, the reason for compulsory HPV vaccination is to avoid stigmatization. If girls get to individually choose whether they want a vaccination against a sexually transmitted disease, those who so choose might be stigmatized.
Cheating is quite common; about 20% of married people have affairs and the rate is higher in putatively-monogamous unmarried partnerships. Around 3% of children are the result of affairs.
I’m not sure what other sorts of “contracts” have a 20% chance of default. I don’t think banks would offer you a loan if they thought there was a 20% chance you wouldn’t pay up. Even Florida’s foreclosure rate isn’t that bad!
End-user licence agreements of commercial software?