Hi. Gay dude here. Please don't silence the voices calling my community out for bad behavior.
There is a reason to have empathy for those who struggle with promiscuity and substance abuse. How long can you be told that your sex life belongs in the gutter and you don't deserve love, after all, before you begin to believe it yourself?
But there isn't a reason to ignore those problems. They lead to social isolation and death for countless of us. We need the social structures, social support, and social expectations of stability and sobriety. The lack of these things leaves a trail of STIs, T overdoses, and abject loneliness in its wake.
There's a way to call it out, and it's with substantive comments like yours talking about the problem.
On HN at least it's not with a one liner that stereotypes a whole group of people with drug use and irresponsible behaviour like the now-dead comment did.
I for one flagged that comment not because it called out the problem, but for how it did it without contributing anything useful.
> Please don't silence the voices calling my community out for bad behavior.
Bad behavior should of course be called out, but there's no need to reference harmful stereotypes such as a supposed "gay (or 'homosexual') community". Many people with a same-sex orientation do not engage in problematic behavior of any sort.
Not sure if you're replying to me or the flagged comment, but I have no issues with anyone's sexual identity or choices. I downvoted the flagged comment because judging from the tone, that commenter DID have a problem with it.
Some opinions here feel dead wrong to me. Moralism included. However I did not downvote a single post on HN as I am a firm believer that this up/downvote culture leads to people adjusting their behavior to suit the average / PC and also leads to "mob lynching". It stands complete opposite to free speech in my opinion.
I interpreted that differently: no moralism but harsh objectivity.
Granted, it's not the most empathetic response, but the gay scene has some very unhealthy subcultures. Drug-fueled disinhibition isn't healthy, and this syphilis outbreak goes to show it.
Diagnosis of syphilis is pretty straightforward, given a reasonable-sized blood sample - there are several simple tests (which tend to have quite high false-positive rates, which is good for a screening test) and then you can do something more complex and specific like imuno-fluorescence.
Maybe this will change post-Covid? In my city (not-US) you can order an STD test kit online, provide a small blood sample (pin prick and then fill small tube from finger) + urine sample, post it back (free), and get the results texted back to you (or on your online account) in a few days. It's 100% free. Maybe governments will see more value in catching these things and stopping them before they spread further.
In my country sending biohazard materials through the post is illegal. You need specially-licensed couriers to transport it. This is in fact a reasonable restriction. The same restriction that applies to explosives or nuclear materials.
There's also the very real problem of personal data security here, at many levels.
This sounds like a poorly conceived services ripe for exploitation.
Could you explain some of the risks you see? The service is run by the NHS (national health service) and materials are posted back in sealed containers + fixed in a box. The chance of the materials coming into contact with a postman are minuscule. He could jump on the package and it would likely stay in tact.
Agreed. Last time I went for an annual physical I decided to get some blood work done, including some STD tests. With insurance I had to pay close to $200.
We really shoot ourselves in the foot in the US by (among other things) not having easier access to testing of all sorts.
Didn’t we shoot ourselves in the foot by choosing to have unprotected sex because basically if feels better and that’s what people care about more right now? We’re talking about preventable diseases here.
As always, when someone presents a solution with "just," it's hastily-conceived and leaves out a lot.
You have only two STDs in your list. Many more exist. You've got your herpes, your clap, multiple strains of HPV. Then you've got nasty old Hep C lurking around, making A and B look like chumps. There's oodles of them and treatment isn't just a wave of the script pad for some.
I remember getting flagged on HN and banned on reddit for pointing out that an overreaction toward Coronavirus is going to cause our resources to be misused to "save" a rounding error of people at best.
Here is one of those examples.
Not to mention I imagine most drug research went on halt for a year in an effort to find a vaccine for Corona.
What percentage of people are going to die because our politicians and influential scientists couldn't do high school level statistics?
In order to save more money on airline reservations you can take a look at the United Airlines Cheap Flight Reservations. With the offers and cheap flight booking discount airfare, you can avail of the best price air tickets on united airlines reservation. For more information regarding the latest flight coupon code or promo code, you can also visit the United Airlines Phone Number.
https://www.flightinfodesk.com/flights/United-Airlines.aspx
I think if you’re taking highly addictive stimulants and doing things you later acknowledge as unsafe like unprotected sex I would speculate something is going wrong in your life that’s compelling you to participate in self destructive activities and that you should get help for the root causes of it.
I disagree. Google "meth and sex", and pretty much everything you read will say that meth will make sex feel absolutely amazing. So it could be the case that, especially when people are young, they know the dangers but think "hey, I know myself, I can do it once or twice without getting addicted"
The problem with meth is that it's so very addictive that you don't necessarily need to be in a pit of despair to get hooked.
Right, but my question then becomes why are young 20 somethings being exposed to meth without the support necessary to avoid taking it or not needing it in their lives? I was young, 20 something too, with access to meth— but I had more in my life than drugs, and I didn’t need it to party or have a good time, and I had mentors I could talk to about it.
Is something going wrong where there are deeper problems here that the article isn’t addressing, is my question, because it’s not like drastic increases in meth-related diseases spontaneously appear in 20 year olds.
I really think a lot of young people going for a hedonistic sex and drugs lifestyle are simply being drawn for a very different reason than people in depressed Rust Belt towns.
I mean, it's been well studied that there is a surge in risk taking behaviors among late teen/early 20-something men across literally all human societies, which is why you see a spike in accidental death for this group.
The problem is for most types of risk taking, if you survive it, you make it to be a late 20-something man and move on. With meth (and other drugs), it keeps you addicted.
Could there maybe be another explanation, such as that drugs and sex are incredibly, ridiculously and uniquely fun human experiences? That's my wild speculation.
meth seems to be the catalyst for the bad behavior done either recreationally (orgies) or while in bad situations arising from a cluster of root causes. I'm only going to address the latter:
the article mentions homeless women who trade sex for shelter. My sister is literally trying to be homeless right now. She has serious mental issues and can't live with anyone for long before she ruins their life and gets kicked out. this is a 20-year-long pattern. She even has access to therapy and shelter, but doesn't accept it. she has adhd and is probably somewhat spectral. she has a very narrow idea of how she wants to live her life: get an easy part-time job, live alone, and pay low rent. But this is not easy when she also freaks out on people, accusing them of abuse, physically assaulting them, etc. So she sometimes starts relationships with people to get access to shelter for short periods. Who knows what she's compromising on behind those closed doors. Could be unprotected sex and offers of drugs. I know for sure pot, alcohol, and cigarettes, but how much farther does it go? I know she's experiment with cocaine and psychedelics. Our family is devastated by all of this, has no idea what to do next, having taking advice from many caring friends, health professionals, etc.
So it's not just one root cause, there are numerous issues of economics, shelter, mental illness, biology, personal responsibility, modernity, inequality, alcoholic parents, realistic expectations and so on that all build on each other creating a "strange attractor," or quite a simply, a "drain."
When our species/culture was all outdoors anyway, I think crazy people like her used to fit in on the fringes. Raising a child had lots of beneficial influence from different types of people instead of just one alcoholic parent like in our case, or lots of phony impressions from self-filtered social media and brain-wave-engineered advertisements. Inequality in native tribes wasn't as extreme and we didn't have "rich kids" in class to compare ourselves to. Once daily living required keeping track of lots of things, like money, and sustaining professional relationships, the fringes of living got narrow and harsh. Then, when having an acceptable online life got added: passwords, service payments, visible resume, working phone, with charge locations, even more people fell through the cracks. They're the ones you seen in tents, in the woods, on the streets. And there is no easy solution... Fix half of the factors I listed above and the rest of the pattern will persist. This doesn't even address how many of these people end up in jail. If there's anything we can do, it's to find small ways to make "traditional life" a little easier for people who can't handle all of this.
It’s worth noting that the article describes how syphilis is common in high risk groups engaging in high risk activities in a high risk part of the country, rather than the general population at large. However it seems inevitable that it will spill out into the wider population too.
It can only spill if it’s not already present. Since it’s already present, the STD will have a larger “concentration gradient” to “flow” faster.
But, really, the STD rates will always be lower among the boring “square” population than the adventurous, promiscuous, one.
I’m sure this will be about as popular a soiled diaper here, but “promiscuity” and “adventurous” sex is mathematically welded with risk. Monogamy, and vanilla sex are essentially risk free (barring a botched blood transfusion or something along those lines)
The trouble is that most people are somewhere between one partner for life and regular participation in sex with strangers and that gap is enough for plenty of relatively square people to end up affected.
Monogamy can also be considered a source of risk depending on circumstances.
People who want to have lots of sex, will still feel those desires in a monogamous relationship. Monogamy might make them less likely to act on those feelings, but it will make them less likely to test regularly, and stop them from being open with their partners about risks, and prevents clear communication about establishing safe sex practices.
If my partner has sex with someone else, I want them to feel safe enough to tell me. That way I can make decisions such as using protection with them that I might not otherwise, or getting tested myself, which I would not be able to otherwise.
> Monogamy, and vanilla sex are essentially risk free
Except you cannot guarantee the other person will actually be monogamous. We saw this with the initial AIDS epidemic in the '80s/'90s, when uber-square supposedly-monogamous (and supposedly heterosexual) individuals turned out to be anything but - to the shock of their official partner.
Well, the silver lining, I guess, is that this appears to be the result of basically getting a handle on the AIDS situation to the point where it wasn’t a threat.
Absent serious consequences (pregnancy, HIV) why would you regularly use condoms? The article covers what I consider to be the critical point. If you don't care about getting Syphillis enough to change your behavior then why should we care enough about it to spend public funds trying to eradicate it?
It is very unlikely to have negative consequences, and while they can be severe with things like blindness, so can downhill skiing and we don't spend public funds to remove the danger of downhill skiing. Hell we often spend public funds building skate parks which come with their own small risk of serious debilitating injury and we do it because the people who engage in that behavior are aware of the danger and don't consider it serious enough to abstain from the pleasure. And most critically those of us who want to avoid the danger can quite easily do so, as with Syhpillis.
I don't see a problem worthy of the publics attention here let alone the publics funds.
It looks that at least one aspect could have a technical solution. I'm talking about this part: ""And if the sex didn't go well, then sometimes they will block the person from their app and they don't even know how to reach that person again."
It looks like the apps could have an emergency notification mechanism to help with that. Phone companies must implement 911, hookup companies should be required to implement an infection notification mechanism.
That could be great, because it could also enable "someone you've been with reported sick, get tested" which would remove a lot of awkward interactions / barriers for reporting. Then again... do we really want dating apps with more or less full network and history of STIs of its users?
That would have nothing to do with HIPAA. HIPAA generally only covers patient information held by health providers, payers, etc. It only applies to "covered entities", which is a specific set of entities. It's a myth that HIPAA applies to health information generally. There's even dispute about whether or not HIPAA applies to doctors and medical services who don't accept insurance ( https://www.lebauerconsulting.com/hipaa-is-my-cash-practice-... )
(although some states have more strict health privacy laws)
Well, it's self-disclosure, and it could be implemented in such a way that your health information isn't really shared with anyone. A message like "One of your recent matches reported a concern about an STD. It might be a good idea to get tested." doesn't necessarily reveal much personal information.
A possibly good idea, but needs protections against false alarms (such as somebody pranking anonymously all their previous contacts), or people will start to abuse it and later other people will start ignoring the alarms.
I am not sure how to solve this. Perhaps a certified doctor could trigger that alarm and nobody else.
How about having a doctor and clinic be in the loop in order for someone to actually be notified?
What we really need is a standard for signed certificates (verified claims) from labs, showing that you tested for X recently and the result. People will start asking for these before sex.
We have concert passes in our Apple Wallet but not these?
You can ask for such a a thing now but most people do not. I think especially if you’re pursuing the kind of extreme level of sex described in this piece it’s not likely
If the tests refered to earlier tests they would form a Merkle tree, not a blockchain. A Merkle tree is not a bad idea, because it is privacy preserving whereas a blockchain isn't.
Why would you use a blockchain? Google “verifiable claims”.
I am talking about a completely private and voluntary MECHANISM to have a way to PROVE that you went to a clinic for X and got result Y. What cultural and subcultural norms arise from that is anyone’s guess but why not have that OPTION available? Right now every clinic has its own incompatible way to prove to yourself — and no one else — the results of a test you took a lot effort to get.
I think this is a great idea, making it much easier to do semi-anonymous STD notification. Sadly, after googling "grindr std notification" I found a bunch of articles around mid-2018 about Grindr "investigating" such a feature, but it certainly never implemented it, and no other info on it in the past 3 years.
Not sure how this would actually work. You usually have hundreds of matches and few substantial conversations per every sexual encounter. I feel like the signal to noise ratio would make it impractical to get tested every time anyone I ever matched with reported an STI. Would you need to report having had sexual contact with someone to improve accuracy? I know I wouldn’t be providing that data to Tinder.
You probably already are, via location tracking. Two matches’ phones reading the same wifi access point all night suggests an extremely limited set of implications.
This is far from a workable solution. Syphilis and Chlamydia are showing early signs of antibiotic resistance.
Really, one has to wonder if an ultra liberal attitude towards sex (enabled by ever declining social mores and various "apps") combined with drugs like PrEP being handed out like candy to promiscuous individuals are not making the situation worse rather than better.
In earlier societies, these folks who repeatedly made bad choices would be outcasts and shunned. Today, not only do we enable their idiotic behavior but allow it to propagate and threaten the rest of society.
The biblical passages about Sodom and Gomorrah come to mind.
That may be the case, but unless someone clearly marks it as such or are ridiculously hyperbolic I assume they are serious. I don't know how else to function on the internet.
Edit: Internet was too broad. Hacker News I mean specifically.
Sorry, that was too broad - on the internet in general I assume that everyone is not being serious and don't engage. I assume that on Hacker News, unless blatantly obvious as a joke, that people are trying to present a real point and add to the discussion.
If a group of consenting adults does something risky that gives them an STD, I don't have to worry that they will give me that STD unless I also consent to do those things.
If a group of consenting adults does something risky that gives them COVID, they can give me COVID by just being in the same room as me for a while.
Hence, the second group is more scold-worthy than the first.
It's the same reason we ban smoking in many indoor public places but allow people to eat a triple cheeseburger with large fries and a large shake in those places. If I smoke next to you you get secondhand smoke. If I pig out on a 3000 calorie lunch next to you you don't get secondhand fat.
I know what you’re saying but an adult can consent to smoke cigarettes and that’s idiotic behavior. An adult can consent to eating fast food every day and that’s idiotic behavior.
So maybe consenting adults having unprotected promiscuous relationships with numerous people they don’t really know within a community that “shares” is idiotic behavior too.
Your assignment of blame is equivalent to "those that live in sin die in sin" which I consider to be one of the most evil ideas any human could possibly have.
I’d recommend “And The Band Played On” for a thoughtful and well-researched narrative of the early AIDS crisis. There was plenty of blame to go around, including for the CDC and the gay communities.
I think that's a really tendentious reading of Shilts' work. The CDC, yes, but it's asking far too much of gay communities, whose relationship with law enforcement and public health authorities, which at that time had been and still was nothing but oppressive, to then immediately heed those authorities' demands to stop participating in what was then a very fundamental aspect of gay culture - and, too, the single aspect of it most distasteful to outsiders.
You can argue that that culture was very vulnerable to a disease like AIDS, and that's fair. You can argue that, had that culture changed faster and more comprehensively, it may have mitigated the crisis somewhat, and that's fair too - although I'd argue the effect would likely not have been very significant.
But to cast blame on the same communities which were repeatedly decimated in large part as a result of those authorities' lack of concern over whether they so much as lived or died - a lack of concern which, as Shilts' own work which you cite makes clear, was so persistent and profound as not to be shifted until gay people themselves fought their way into positions of sufficient power as to have meaningful impact on policy, and not until one of Ronald Reagan's personal friends died of the disease and thus forced him finally to recognize the essential humanity of others likewise afflicted? The kindest thing I can find to call such a position is insultingly absurd.
You must have read a different book than I did, then. Because the book you read seems to completely ignore the battles Cleve Jones and others fought within the gay community. Keep in mind, the very title of the book was meant to apply to everyone involved in this crisis. Everyone. To miss that point is, frankly, dangerous.
It's presentist to overlook the debate between liberation and assimilation as focuses for the movement, which these days is largely settled but in those was very much an active issue, and the effect it had on the way these events played out.
Liberationism and bathhouse culture were closely intertwined, and bathhouse culture had been a bête noire of the assimilationist faction for some time before AIDS showed up. Demands to "stop having sex", or at least to stop having sex in this particular style, were a longstanding feature of that internal conflict, and it wasn't unreasonable early on for folks on the liberationist side to regard this newest call as essentially just more of the same. As the scope and gravity of the problem became obvious, people did gradually change their behavior, but the relatively long asymptomatic period and relatively high transmissibility of the virus meant that, by the time that happened, it was too late to do all that much good.
Sure, an early and assertive response within the community might have had a real effect on the outcome. But this is well within the territory of expecting people to act on the basis of perfect information which, at the time for action, neither they nor anyone else actually had - or, put more succinctly, of presentism in the historiographical sense. I don't blame Shilts for that; he wrote in 1987, when the crisis was still in a very real sense ongoing. We, by contrast, have the benefit of a quarter century's distance and study from which to look back on those days now. We can do better, and should.
Perhaps I am misreading this but the premise is that it’s unfair to ask a marginalized community to comply with public health ordinances so that community has no responsibility for the spread of a disease?
But the community effected by a disease is also the most able to carry out interventions so this is almost to throw our hands up and accept an epidemic.
Yes the gay community was marginalized and oppressed by civil society at many levels. But hosting massive contagion events during an epidemic is highly unethical. If Diane Feinstein had not closed the bathhouses the disease would have continued to multiply and even then people resisted any interventions. The current culture wars around masks emerged around condoms. To simply exculpate a community because they had been treated badly ignores the many choices people made at a personal level to spread a lethal disease, and makes it near impossible to stop such a disease.
The premise is that it's not reasonable to expect a community maltreated by public health and law enforcement for decades to instantaneously reverse themselves and comply with those authorities' dictates when, at long last, those dictates are finally motivated by something other than abusive and too often outright lethal prejudice. As I noted in a response to your sibling comment, this implicitly expects people to act on the basis of knowledge which, at the time they have to choose their actions, does not yet even exist. It's an easy mistake for an armchair historiographer to make, but that it's easy constitutes no excuse.
I'm not even going to address the suggestion that gay bathhouse culture in the 1980s is somehow to blame for COVID anti-maskers in the 2020s.
It is society's fault that it created an environment of distrust in public health among a marginalized group. (It is not society's fault if there is distrust among a dominant group, such as with COVID vaccines and white Republicans.)
Power differences are the single most important fact of society, and too many people assume symmetries exist in situations that are actually asymmetric.
You should watch the documentary Gay Sex in the 70s. Really watch it. One of the conclusions I came away with was that some kind of extremely troublesome STD was going to emerge from that particular situation. It happened to be HIV but it could have been something else entirely.
Anything where you have big globs of people exchanging bodily fluids over and over again is going to encourage the development of something infectious. It's the same reason that preschool tends to be a germ pit. If someone invented a sport called, I don't know, "Loogie Frisbee," where people stood around and took turns spitting into each other's mouths, I would expect some kind of oral infection to take off as the sport went pro.
Quantity has a quality all its own, and so it is here. It's having lots of sex with lots of other consenting adults, whom you do not know particularly well, unsafely, etc., that pushes it into "idiotic behavior."
You should add to that the hypersexualization of commercial culture, and in fact the commercialization of sex itself by apps like Tinder and Grind.
Though, it’s perhaps a bit unfair to call the behavior idiotic - I do think people who engage in self-destructive promiscuity do so out of pain, or due to commercial manipulation that they aren’t savvy enough to resist.
I think it’s fair to call it idiotic. It doesn’t mean the people doing it are idiots. Just that what they’re doing, regardless of reason, is in fact idiotic.
“ [...]idiotic - I do think people who engage in self-destructive promiscuity do so out of pain, or due to commercial manipulation that they aren’t savvy enough to resist.“
Agreed. This is a fundamental result of the spiritual death of Westerners driven by materialism.
However, in the end, the individual makes the discussion. No matter how unfortunate, we’ve all heard whispers of The Truth, The Way [1], but rejected it.
[1] take this to be whatever philosophical/religious ideology you prefer; be it stoicism, Christianity, Buddha, whatever
I’d like to challenge the notion that people willingly engage in risky behavior in spite of being exposed to a perfectly fine and better alternatives. Most specifically, many religions have had fraught relationships with gay people, in fact many current dominant religions do. So a gay person may be completely justified in declining to participate in the spirituality/philosophy way of living if their previous exposures to that were abuse.
Also, I would like to challenge the idea that living a non-drug life is attributable to some philosophical or religious ideology. I follow no philosophical or religious ideology enough to describe myself as a follower of any sort of way and I’m not pursuing a risky lifestyle.
But there's a ton of social mores that aren't required anymore - for instance, pork or shellfish is perfectly safe to consume when appropriately prepared. And I'd love to see if you had any evidence at all that the reason for Ramadan (or a similar fasting ceremony) is actually meant to sneak in healthy life habits - seems coincidental to me.
This whole problem can be solved by a change in attitude and wearing condoms.
Yeah, but when looking back at ancients civilizations with taboos around promiscuous sex it was making the act off limits rather than sensible health education.
> The act of fasting, i.e. calorie restrictions, is good for you. It confers actual health benefits.
I'm not going to argue that (though I do question the overall efficacy of fasting aside from caloric restriction, but regardless, that's beside the point), but I am arguing that not what the intent was originally for - it's a side effect that can help, but wasn't considered.
> To a degree yes. Until the virus evolves to just break down parts of plastic. Given enough time virus will do whatever it needs to survive.
Sure, but until that time condoms work just fine. I feel like that's a huge leap for what an STI can do. Otherwise we also have to worry it could go airborne and spread without doing anything given that bacteria (which is what Syphilis is) can do that as well but that seems equally unlikely. In fact it has had a reason to develop airborne transmission capabilities for millennia longer than it has had reason to fight latex.
> I am arguing that not what the intent was originally for - it's a side effect that can help, but wasn't considered.
And I'm saying the intent doesn't matter, the side effect does. Let's say one group A say eating brain of fallen foes is good, gives strength, group B say, don't eat humans - that angers gods.
Group A eats some fallen foes, and by chance contracts prion disease and dies out.
Group B isn't going to think yeah, this was caused by microscopic particles. They are going to think - See. I was right. Gods are angry at you. Then they will persist to replicate the behavior for centuries after it could make any impact.
> I feel like that's a huge leap for what an STI can do.
It was an example. Since it already affects the brain, it could just evolve to make you more likely to engage in risky behavior and not use condom (like giving you an allergic reaction when using latex). Right now, it doesn't have this ability. But can we be certain it won't acquire it in future? We know at least one pathogen that can alter behavior in mammals (Toxoplasmosis).
It's better ofc, to eradicate it now and not worry about it, but the thing is, promiscuous behavior will always be a breeding lab for these kind of pathogens. Even if none exist, some might evolve into it. If there is a niche to be exploited, some pathogen will evolve to exploit it.
Yes, some items are directly good advice for the time and ours. Not all will - like my pork and shellfish example. Those are fine now - same with being more promiscuous if you leverage the technology of the time. Doesn't matter what god thinks.
And regarding adaptation you're playing a game of "what if" that's not terribly helpful, like my example of it going airborne. Then it doesn't matter what happens. Yeast could mutate and literally turn us into brain munching zombies, but I don't know why that matters.
> Not all will - like my pork and shellfish example.
Depends on context. If for example eating shellfish/pork caused harm once or twice, people could extrapolate it's evil or something. People are good at finding pattern where none exist.
> Yeast could mutate and literally turn us into brain munching zombies
Riiight. But if it did, it would wipe itself out too fast. Like we already have Zombie like disease. It's called rabies.
> And regarding adaptation you're playing a game of "what if"
It's less of what if, and more of a game, let's make our next STD <insert measure> resistant.
Whether it's antibiotics or viral or admittedly far fetched example of latex evasion. As long as there is fertile soil for STD there will be STDs.
not sure about your comparsion; another interesting detail is that some fourty years ago we got the aids epidemic, and that one caused a swing towards conservative values; interesting if this one will have a similar effect.
> The biblical passages about Sodom and Gomorrah come to mind.
Really hoping you'll unpack this more as that story ends with their violent destruction at the hands of God, and I'm wondering if that's what you're advocating for here.
There’s a lot to unpack in the story - some of the ‘god smites ‘em’ passages can be read as a warning that bad things will happen only because the behavior contains the seeds of it’s own destruction - or punishment if you will.
For example - The passage about “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.” sounds absolutely like God is a rotten SOB.
But if you ever see the pain that flows though generations because one father abused his children, you can see that it more of a warning - do something horrible and not only will you suffer, but you’ll cause generations to suffer. So don’t do that.
But in that case this seems like a poor metaphor - congenital syphilis was brought up and is horrible, but we're not talking generation after generation here. In that case anthropogenic climate change seems to fit the bill more than syphilis does.
“They” were ruthless rapists who ordered Lot to hand over his guests so that they could “know” them.
Notice how the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah are never spelled out in detail. We assume, based on our religious tradition, that the sin was gay sex and forget all the other sins that are alluded to. In our modern viewpoint, the story is about two happy gay communities that the evil God of Abraham destroys.
However, the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah were, at the very least, gang rapists. Furthermore they committed the greatest sin imaginable for a tribal society: they disrespected a guest. Note how Lot, rather than have his guests raped, offers his own daughters.
All this under the threat of violence against Lot.
If testing is frequent and widespread enough, eradication or near-eradication will result.
PrEP is a good thing because people who are on PrEP can be required to test frequently as a condition to obtain new medication (not sure if that happens in the US, but it does elsewhere).
It might, although current PrEP can cause kidney damage so it's a good idea to monitor for that, which means you need to draw blood anyay and so doing STD tests as well doesn't result in any additional inconvenience.
> Syphilis and Chlamydia are showing early signs of antibiotic resistance.
Gonorrhea unfortunately even shows advanced signs of antibiotic resistance. There is already "super-gonorrhea" which has resistance to our last line of defense, ceftriaxone.
Way to judge; good thing the Bible is bad fiction and you’re kind of a shit person. I’d rather shun people like you who spread this idiotic drivel instead.
Posting like this will get you banned on HN also, regardless of how bad the comment you're responding to is, or how bad a person you feel someone else is. The reason should be obvious: breaking the site guidelines in your own right and taking the thread further into hell (religious hell, god help us) only causes more damage to the commons.
Would you please read and follow the site guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They include this for tried-and-true reasons: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." In case it's not obvious, that's code for "please don't feed the trolls".
Even so, posting like the GP will get you banned. Obviously, "the Bible is bad fiction", "you're kind of a shit person", and "idiotic drivel" are way, way beyond the pale. The pale is depicted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please don't ever post like that to HN again so we don't have to ban you.
Edit: that includes not calling names like "drivel" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26819803) in general. You can make your substantive points without that, and if you read the guidelines you'll see that they explicitly ask you to.
My eyes have rolled so far back in my head I can see my brain.
I always love the irony that there is a huge amount of overlap in the Venn diagram of people who love to mention Sodom and Gomorrah when it comes to STDs (as opposed to just discussing the real risks in context), and also decry that being compelled to wear a mask during a global pandemic is the work of Satan.
This is a perfect reminder that the same people who cry persecution will, without hesitance persecute you and your freedoms as soon as the tables are turned. It will be mildly comical when some of the "libertarians" courting these sort of people at the moment find themselves as the next enemy.
Society made the choice that stupidity should not come with a death penalty if we can prevent it. We will send several extremely highly trained people in a rescue helicopter to save a pedophile alcoholic in a car crash on that principle.
This may lead to more people doing very dangerous things, but this is a choice society has made, and frankly I think most of us have done things at one point or another we got away with only because we were lucky.
Some people take risks driving too fast, some people take risks having sex with more people. Why should we help the first group but not the last?
> one has to wonder if an ultra liberal attitude towards sex
I've moved from an area with a liberal attitude towards sex, to an area with a more Christian attitude towards sex, which extends to political decision-making around sexual health.
The main difference for me is... it is now extremely difficult to access appropriate testing for STDs, it is more difficult to access appropriate treatment in a timely or private manner, and it is more difficult to access preventative measures (this extends also to condoms).
Flamewar comments will get you banned here. The idea of HN is curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest. Do you think that a religious ideological sex war falls in that scope? It does not. No more of this, please—and see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810504 also.
I'm very curious about the impact of PrEP. On one hand, condomless sex has absolutely exploded in the gay community since PrEP, and honestly, why not? As the saying goes, "Who wants to chew gum with the wrapper on?" But PrEP also requires frequent and regular STD testing, so these cases of syphilis should be caught and treated early before they have much of a chance to spread.
Are people getting PrEP illegally? I would think that would be ridiculously expensive in the US as most states or insurance companies have some sort of plan to cover it (if not the coupon program from the manufacturer, Gilead. In New York State it's essentially free.
It would also be dangerous to be taking PrEP and not getting the required kidney function tests with it ever 90 days (the older version of PrEP can be hard on some people's kidneys).
I do see advertisements for legitimate mail-order services where you do consult with a doctor, and perform the tests at home.
Looking at one site, if you have no coverage, it's $164 for kidney and STI testing, $94 for just the required kidney tests. So some may just opt out to save money. But again, I would be surprised if there's many people paying out of pocket for the whole treatment.
What, why would someone order it from "illegal" sites online when there are plenty of good, reputable legal sites online that allow you to do all the testing at home?
Depends on the country. Here in the UK it's not offered by the NHS at all unless you're on one of their trials, so you have to buy it outright. Some organisations will offer it as long as you go get tested regularly, but you can order it online just as easily.
I order my PrEP online and do all my STD testing at home, since I hate having to reveal my sexual history to strangers constantly.
Unfortunately on https://www.iwantprepnow.co.uk/prep-on-the-nhs/ it looks like it's still via closed trials, unless you're in Scotland or Wales. I'm not holding out much hope for it being generally available any time soon, based on how they've acted so far.
Just want to add this here in case anybody's unfamiliar: PrEP can also be taken on an event-driven schedule, rather than the daily dose most people are familiar with. Under this regime, you take two doses two hours before sexual activity (or upto 24 hours earlier), followed by a single dose 24 hours after the first 2 pills, and a final dose 24 hours after that. If sexual activity can be planned or is infrequent, this 2+1+1 regime might be preferred.
It's not medical advice nor did I invent it - it's just one of the regimes for PrEP recommended by the WHO. I know people on PrEP who were unaware of this regime, since the default consideration is the daily dose. Like all things, it's something to discuss with your physician.
As the WHO notes, the event-driven regime isn't generally recommended for adolescents who might have issues with compliance, or cis & trans women.
And also to measure the other potential long term effects on liver, kidney. I'm not sure if i've been tested for 'bones' not sure how to do that. My doc says it's important to monitor.
Are they testing for all STDs or only for HIV? Also, the person taking PrEP is (potentially) only half of the equation. How often do people who test positive inform their recent partners?
The normal procedure here in Seattle anyway is to get a blood panel, rapid HIV test, mouth-, and anal-swab every three months as a requirement for being prescribed PReP. They check for syphilis, gonhorrea, HIV, chlamydia, and other blood-related issues That could be caused by the drug itself.
Most people I know engaging in especially frequent encounters get tested monthly. There are multiple free health clinics in the city so it isn’t just a game for the rich either.
That seems like a crazy amount of effort just to have sex with strangers a little safer. I wonder if it backfires and people skip it and just take the risk.
So long as the supply chains keep running, insurance keeps paying for the drugs (which can cost thousands of USD per month over the course of a patient's entire life), the drugs reach the patient, and the patient takes all their drugs on schedule.
If at all possible, I'd rather avoid a life-or-death dependence on global supply chains, pharmaceutical factories, and insurance agents most of all. People die every year for lack of insulin, and that drug is much cheaper, more well-understood biologically, and more widely available than HIV medications.
Which isn't linked from the full version. All they present you with is an illegal cookie banner. With a link to "Choices" which doesn't actually have any choices. Come on NPR, you can do better.
> Experts point to the advent of dating apps, less condom use and an increase in meth.
This comes with the explosion of casual sex in recent times. Also STI throat cancers are on the rise from the explosion of oral sex. [1] maybe due to the novel widespread availability of internet video pornography and increased normalization in media relative to past decades.
That’s interesting. It may be the case that sexual activity is decreasing per capita but unprotected casual sex with distant strangers is increasing as a percentage of all sexual activity.
I'm quite sure the normalisation of analingus, and general anal play, in the media will also see a corresponding rise in intestinal parasites in years to come!
A rise in intestinal parasites might also help bring regulate autoimmune disorders & inflammatory conditions. C diff troubles? Analingus - just what the doctor ordered.
FTR that article is from 2009, which is only three years after the arrival of the first HPV vaccine (2006). I'm not sure when broad vaccinations have started, seems around that time. For boys/men they started even later. Furthermore, these cancers often have incubation times of years to decades, so we still don't see the full effect of the vaccination campaign. A newer source would certainly be helpful.
> During 2007–2016, the incidence of cancers of the oral cavity and pharynx combined increased, despite decreases in several anatomic sites, including the nasopharynx, hypopharynx, lip, and floor of mouth. The overall increase appears to be driven by increases in cancers of the tonsil, base of tongue, oropharynx, and other cancers of the oral cavity and pharynx, which are HPV-associated, as well as by those of gum and anterior tongue.
Thanks for linking this study. It seems at first that it proves your point, but note that not everyone is vaccinated against HPV. Older people in fact aren't. If you look at table 2, you'll see that cancer rates have gone up for the general population, but in the group aged 20-39, the rates have gone down for many cancers. I put this onto the high vaccination rates in that population. The data is only from 2016, and in the 2013-2018 period there has been a big jump in vaccination rates in the 18-26 population, so I expect this decline to continue.
> It seems at first that it proves your point, but note that not everyone is vaccinated against HPV
The efficacy of the HPV vaccine in preventing throat cancer doesn’t refute the observation that practicing oral sex increases one’s likelihood of contracting throat cancer.
> I put this onto the high vaccination rates in that population.
I don’t think you can draw that conclusion from this data.
> The data is only from 2016, and in the 2013-2018 period there has been a big jump in vaccination rates in the 18-26 population
>With the risk of contracting a deadly disease falling to almost zero, condoms fell even more out of favor than they already were, says Park.
>"If one man is taking PrEP and the other one is virally suppressed, there's no HIV risk at all," she says. "So why use condoms if you don't mind having a touch of syphilis?"
Humans really do take for granted the efficacy of antibacterials and antibiotics across the board.
These sort of harmful bacteria are completely and safely treatable now in most people, but the real potential threat is breeding drug resistant strains of bacteria, microorganisms and viruses. We shouldn't treat these fantastic tools like a pass to do whatever, we should instead use them sparingly and curb behavior. There are plenty of simple preventative practices than can reduce ever needing such treatments while mostly being able to continue doing what you'd like. A huge amount of these infections could be reduced drastically just by using a condom.
Rely on those prevention approaches first and drugs/treatment second to reduce the risk of creating situations where treatments don't exist. This can be said about a huge swath of preventable disease in the US. A bit of diet, exercise, and an once of prevention is worth its weight in gold.
And one other thing: Cheap, anonymous tests for everyone. It should be the norm that when you hook up with a new person / one night stand that you show them your recent negative test result. At least where I live (Germany) you can already get them sent to your home for 50€ (https://samhealth.de/) and you can get free tests at your local health office (Gesundheitsamt) if you are not too shy to argue a bit. AFAICT it should be a net positive for society to completely subsidize home tests for everyone, but that is probably an uphill battle against conservative prejudices even in Germany.
> A bit of diet, exercise, and an once of prevention is worth its weight in gold.
All those cases of just eating less sugar / exercising more / sitting less are unfortunately really hard for most individuals. We really should strive to create environments where doing the good thing is as easy as possible. Like offering free daily work breaks for sport or having healthy lunch meals for children in school.
> AFAICT it should be a net positive for society to completely subsidize home tests for everyone, but that is probably an uphill battle against conservative prejudices even in Germany.
Great, now we’re “prejudiced” for not wanting to subsidize other people’s risky sexual behavior.
Did it ever occur to you that if there is, as you suggest, a large health burden associated with casual sex culture (and, according to the article, drug use culture), that maybe the “conservatives” are correct to be “prejudiced” against it?
A prejudice is just a pre-conceived notion about something. So yes, if you have decided that casual sex is bad, you are prejudiced against it. Don't be so upset, it's not a problem.
Moral argument: functioning society's don't expect their member to act perfectly and always make the right choices. Would you expect a hospital not to treat you because you got injured while committing risky behavior (e.g. extreme sports, trying strange foods, or arguably driving a car)? Treatments like this support "repeat offenders" and the poor bastards who make a wrong choice once alike.
Pragmatic argument: It's better economically and for productivity for people to not have HIV, Syphilis, etc. It's far easier to provide treatment and testing then to tell people to stop having sex.
I think it's actually fine to charge higher premiums to people who take significantly greater risks than the average person. we already do this with car insurance for people who drive certain models, have been in at-fault collisions, have traffic infractions on record, etc. no one "needs" to go skiing or drive a fast car, but a.) we should let them and b.) they ought to pay a bit more into the pool.
I can see the argument for that, however from my reading OP was arguing that people who take greater risks shouldn't get treatment at all or be "subsidized" by people who don't. You seem to be arguing (and correct me if I'm wrong) that people making riskier choices pay more for themselves to make up for that.
yes, that is exactly what I'm arguing. if everyone pays into a pool without any risk adjustment, that is effectively a subsidy to the risk-takers. I think that is a more fair way to understand rayiner's objection to "subsidies". I don't think he is seriously arguing that risk-takers should be denied care/testing/whatever altogether.
of course this is all hypothetical with the current state of US healthcare. step one has to be a reasonable cost baseline for people who don't elect a bunch of extra risk.
How is this different from healthcare as it is set out now or in the past? (Pre existing condition? Too bad. Too expensive to keep you around. Pay out of pocket.)
Hypothetically, you don’t need healthcare if you live/lived a near fundamentally perfect lifestyle. Accidents happen but then maybe don’t use knives or ever leave your home too.
I'm not talking about preexisting conditions. I'm talking about conscious choices people make that increase their risk level. I'm not telling you how to live your life, but if our care is funded from the same pool and you live a riskier life by choice, I don't think it's unfair for me to ask that you pay proportionally more.
> I'm not telling you how to live your life, but if our care is funded from the same pool and you live a riskier life by choice, I don't think it's unfair for me to ask that you pay proportionally more.
Charging people more for coverage is telling them how to live their life. And where is the line drawn? "Oh, you like to go 10mph over the limit? Higher medical coverage fees, sir. You're likely to get hurt. Oh, sir, you live in a rough neighborhood? Very likely to get shot sir, you should definitely have higher premiums, yes."
You may as well ask people to not have health insurance and just pay out of pocket for everything.
Btw - do you really think if you do this that costs will go down for you in this hypothetical system? They won't. Premiums will go up for everyone and the people who will profit are executive leadership.
I don't really understand the distinction you're trying to draw between "make those who choose to live risky lives pay more" vs. "people who take risks shouldn't be subsidized by people who don't".
If we're just handing out everything for free then I'd argue it's also better economically for people (and particularly kids) to have free eye care, free dental care, and a million other things I'd rather see subsidized over free Syphilis tests.
Economically, I absolutely agree and fortunately we have the power to do both. Plus Syphilis testing is very cheap, relative to most testing (about $20-$50 for early infections) and testing costs are only going down. Rapid testing is even cheaper, down to something like $5 per test.
I 100% agree with you and I'm sorry this is not the case in the country you live in. I keep forgetting how bad the health care system is in some parts of the rich and developed world. I agree with my sibling comments that fortunately you can have all of those for free, for affordable prices for society, if the right policies are implemented.
Moral argument: functioning societies don't move the burden of the consequences of known risky behavior from those doing such behavior to those who are not. In fact, that's a recepie for a civilizational death spiral.
I think I'd need to see a better argument that we're moving the burden of consequences. Riding a bike with no helmet is known risky behavior; if they get hit by a car or fall or their bike and have to go to the hospital, would you say that's shifting the burden of consequence? People with Syphilis who get tested and help for it still pay their taxes, which helped fund their treatment. They still have consequences such as having to see a doctor, take medicine which may be unpleasant (ever have GI side-effects from an anti-biotic?), and of course they experience the side-effects of, you know, having Syphilis. The government isn't taking $20 out of your wallet to bribe the bacteria to not infect someone.
strange: drunk driving continues to cause grave personal, public health and economic harm to non-participants and has for, what, well over 50 years? yet the US seems to be largely "functioning".
By this standard we’re arguably at greater risk of civilizational death spiral, e.g., helping homeowners to rebuild in natural disaster-prone areas than trying to treat venereal disease.
It's better economically and for productivity for people to not have HIV, Syphilis, etc.
Stop this. It isn't an economics issue. This is a moral issue. Your tract of reasoning is precisely why the world is growing so untenable for the human element. There needn't exist laws or programs or any other edifice by which regulation is effected. People need to be made to realize that they're being wholly indiscretionate and their disposition to do so comes at a cost, and it should be personal to make the point manifest.
With all due respect, the first half of comment is literally prefaced with "the moral argument". Personally I believe that argument should be enough, but you gotta play to the audience.
You yourself are making the distinction between the casual sex culture and STD testing. Diseases have a way of spreading and not testing for STD is a piss-poor way to change hookup culture for the better.
You can yell about it, concoct vindictive policies to punish people whose behavior you don't like, dress up these policies by describing them in purportedly scientific economic terms like "subsidizing," "externality," "free rider," etc., but ultimately, this is a futile position to take. People are going to do what they want.
If the effect of peoples' real aggregate behavior creates a negative effect that you might suffer from in the future, e.g. breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria, then the more effective position is to STFU with all of the moralizing and support policies that actually work, even if you have to pony up a bit to pay for them. It's cheaper for you in the long run -- you're not just paying to support risky behavior, you're paying so that behavior that is going to happen anyway doesn't put you at risk in the future.
Your options are to be angry today and sick or dead tomorrow, or to let it go, support effective policies today, and get a better shot at a successful tomorrow. Yelling at people doesn't work.
>STFU with all of the moralizing and support policies that actually work, even if you have to pony up a bit to pay for them. It's cheaper for you in the long run
>Your options are to be angry today and sick or dead tomorrow, or to let it go, support effective policies today,
You're asking for one portion of the populous to take on the burden cause by lack of restraint by another. There is legitimate reason for "moralizing" here. This is the point where what "two people do in the privacy of their bedroom" spills over into affecting everyone else.
It's ironic that "yelling at people doesn't work" yet we see just as much yelling and moralizing by the people who want the freedom to do whatever they want even when their actions DO negatively affect others.
This is always the hard part with public health policy, you can barely make any demands before people say screw this and ignore you, as we've learned from asking people to wear masks :/
Parent is responding to accusations of "conservative prejudice." That is its own moralizing.
You can make the pragmatic argument that it's pointless to try to control the risky behaviors of others, or to expect the people engaged in those risky behaviors to bear the cost of them. But it's pretty insulting to then disparage others as "prejudiced" for not liking this deal, while having no criticism of the behavior itself. "People are going to do what they want" -- well maybe some people want to be upset about subsidizing behavior they don't approve of.
I agree with you that people have the right to be upset, to moralize, etc. My insinuation was that it isn't effective as public policy, which is the extra step that moralizing conservatives seem eager to take.
I'm fine if they want to sit in the corner and whine, but if they're going to use this whining to enact policies that don't work, and that haven't worked despite decades of trying, then I'm going to push back, and yes, I'm going to be a little insulting, especially seeing as they have no problem berating the people that they don't approve of.
People who insist on maintaining a delusion despite evidence that it doesn't work, and despite examples of other policies in other places that produce better results annoy me. Why should I have to pay for the externalities of their stupid opinions when I'm not the one the one having them? (See, it sounds just as ridiculous from the other side)
How much evidence is there that insulting others is an effective way to get them to change their opinions and support the policies you favor? If the basis of your annoyance is ineffectiveness, then I would expect you to feel a lot of annoyance at people who insult others and call them stupid as a strategy for changing their behavior.
Turning that question around: do you have any evidence that it's not effective? Do you have evidence of another argumentation style that's more effective?
I'm hard pressed to design a good, reproducible experiment on the question one way or the other.
> The field situation consisted of a park-bench discussion of a topical social issue, arranged by a public-opinion interviewer. Prepared experimental variations were introduced by one of the discussion partners, a confederate of the interviewer. In the critical variation, the confederate insulted the subject during discussion. In other variations, he tried to persuade but did not insult, or else simply gave certain arguments without intent to persuade. Attitude-change results supported the hypothesis of negative change in the insult condition.
Eleanor Gordon-Smith spent two years interviewing people who changed their minds, and suggests this:
> The strategy is this: Ask where people’s beliefs come from as well as what they actually believe.
Uncivil remarks uniquely diminished the speaker’s reputation, and had little impact on the reputation of the targets of the attack, the perceived winner of the verbal exchange, the reputation of the speaker’s party, or the sense that the country is moving in the right direction. Incivility made the speaker seem less warm and did less to affect perceptions of dominance or honesty. This warmth deficit explained the reputational costs of incivility.
That's from 2018 and specifically takes recent American politics into account.
I'm skeptical of the study for a variety of reasons, mostly coming down to the issue of what people tell researchers vs what they actually do. But it's good to know that somebody is at least trying.
You raise a good point... essentially the same point I made earlier -- insulting people is as bad a strategy for changing behavior as yelling at them.
If I were trying to get moralizing conservatives to agree with me, then not insulting them would indeed be the first part of an effective strategy. However, I'm not trying to change minds, because that is also fruitless.
For the same reason that trying to convince ordinary people that their promiscuous lifestyles are bad won't actually change their behavior, trying to convince moralizing conservatives that their entire worldview is wrong isn't going to change their perspective.
This kind of person is not trying to achieve an effective outcome through policy, they're trying to use policy as a weapon against people they don't like. Debating the effectiveness of various policy options won't move that particular needle, so why bother?
> I'm fine if they want to sit in the corner and whine, but if they're going to use this whining to enact policies that don't work despite decades of trying, then I'm going to push back, and yes, I'm going to be a little insulting
This is a little problematic for me. You are basically saying people have a right to whine, but not a right to try to remedy the situation causing their whining.
Say you live in a fictional country X. Country X has a problem called "Raw Water Fever" where people get these massive chronic migraines because they take untreated stream water and squirt it up their butts with a baster (this is called "basting" - and gives a nice euphoric effect due to some yet-undetermined combination of native bacteria in the water reacting with gut bacteria). Previous efforts to get people in country X to use treated water fail because they complain the treated water doesn't produce any euphoria. The country also tried outright banning basting, and that was also ineffective.
So, the government decides that the right solution to this problem is to reach into your wallet to subsidize free per-use testing kits for the whole country. These testing kits would be able to tell you whether the water you are about to squirt up your butt has the Raw Water Fever bacteria present.
If you protest, the government says that while are allowed to whine about them reaching into your wallet, that's about all you are allowed to do because they already attempted previously to ban basting and it was ineffective.
Are you cool with this, or would it leave a bad taste in your mouth? Now, say that basting is not country X's only source of problems, it has lots of other problems stemming from behaviors you don't partake in. The government wants to reach into your wallet for each of those problems too. How are you feeling at this point? Are you glad to give up your hard earned money to help citizens of country X continue their favorite behaviors safely? Or does it leave a bad taste in your mouth and make you want to move to a different country where the citizens' behaviors align more with your own?
Sex is something hardwired into people. Basting in this example? Not so much.
Like just replace the word basting with the word sex in your example.
"The government tried outright banning sex"--sounds pretty ludicrous! Has any government even tried such a thing in all of history?
Personally, I welcome the prospect of my tax dollars being used to help people rather than kill and maim them. The amount each individual has to contribute for such a thing is likely incredibly low as well.
Well, I was sort of thinking of drugs when I made the analogy, but the government policy response is similar (i.e. the government wants to reach into my wallet to subsidize free syringes, drug purity tests, etc.)
> Sex is something hardwired into people
This is an appeal to nature. We naturally want to do it, therefore we shouldn't try to resist it? There are many counter examples: violence, incest, tribalism, and other undesirable evolutionary behaviors are hardwired into people (and animals) too, yet our efforts to reduce/temper their influence and emergence can be quite effective (though not 100% effective). Why is sex any different? I think we could temper sexual activity with the right messaging (and more importantly, leading by example) to youth.
Something like "sex is something that should be reserved for a committed relationship, not a recreational activity you should do casually - the latter leads to a lot of problems in society. Nevertheless, the choice is up to you and here are the risks and things you need to know either way..." Obviously "accidents" would still happen, but the idea would be to address the root cause of sex-related issues in society instead of throwing your hands into the air and deciding to just treat the symptoms.
Do you think I’m wrong to say that sex education courses, regardless of whether they’re abstinence-only or more modern, typically already include admonitions against promiscuous sex?
No, you are not wrong to say that... but that’s not what your parent comment was saying. Your comment was saying that messaging did not have much influence on your behavior later in life. I’m saying that just because it didn’t have much influence on your behavior does not mean it hasn’t had much influence on the behavior of others
School has limited influence on kids when compared to parents. If your parents don't see casual sex as a big deal, neither will you. If your mom got pregnant at 14, well, I guess it's not a big deal if you get pregnant at 14 either.
I grew up in a fairly wealthy little town where pretty much nobody was the child of a teen parent. It’s awfully facile, and to my own experience, to pretend the children of such parents are the only people having sex in high school.
I live in a part of Maryland with high teen pregnancy rates. Unsurprisingly, the pregnant teens are often the children of single moms who were also pregnant teens. Is this a coincidence? Even ignoring truancy problem, somehow I don't believe sending all these kids to wealthy gold-plated schools to get a "proper" sexual health education will fix the issue because my argument is that the messaging they receive at home through their parent(s) is 10x stronger and more influential than the school's messaging.
I would guess failure to use effective birth control methods could be correlated pretty well with income but I’d be pretty surprised to see any evidence that sexual activity was much lower in the tony towns. I’m also going to refer back to my memories of being a teenager to say that I often didn’t really put much stock in my parents’ values or wisdom, and hardly think I was alone in this.
You could say it's special pleading on my part, but for the continuation of homo sapiens, sex is required (at least for now).
> violence, incest, tribalism, and other undesirable evolutionary behaviors
None of the explicitly mentioned things in this list are similarly essential to the continuation of humans and human civilization. Like violence may in reality be unavoidable, but that doesn't mean it's strictly necessary.
But I do agree that appeal to nature alone isn't very strong. Like to me, I guess it's moreso what seems like extreme impracticality in trying to control people's sexuality to a finer degree than is already in place.
> I guess it's moreso what seems like extreme impracticality in trying to control people's sexuality to a finer degree than is already in place.
I agree trying to "control" people's sexuality is extremely impractical. That's why I think it needs to be more a cultural value that we collectively decide is worth teaching to kids (and leading by example), not something the government forces on us. I think that would work because it worked for me and my extended family as far as I can tell (with a few exceptions).
I don't want to impose the value on people that don't share it with me. I want to convince people to share the value with me first and rely on network effects to convince others to share the value until those that don't share it are in a minority.
The people specifically in the story? Probably not. Americans in general over a period of time? Maybe. I could see a "religious renaissance" happening at some point where religion goes on the rise again if/when people become disillusioned with secularism/nihilism/etc, a side effect of which would be people being "talked into monogamy"
Isn't this still a form of control? Like the idea here is to psychologically manipulate people to have different values? What happens when some people don't respond to this proposed conditioning?
I would like to believe I have somewhat of a unique perspective on this. I was raised with the exact cultural values you talk about, and I ultimately chose to reject them (at least partially).
However, I do want to acknowledge what seems like a destabilizing, negative effect "hookup culture" or the like has had on society. Dating apps are part of this whole issue as well.
My own position is that I want to be in a committed relationship but never married. So I guess you could peg me as a serial monogamist.
Certainly some governments have attempted to criminalize extramarital sex. However 1) limited efficacy 2) creates an extremely regressive society I think few Americans would welcome
Seems pretty obvious to me that conservatives would be as susceptible to prejudices as the rest of humanity. Stating that common prejudices amongst those who identify as conservative might negatively affect specific policies is not itself moralizing.
People are going to disparage people who have casual sex and not want to subsidize their expensive health insurance as a result of their desires also. Why don't they STFU about that also?
Why should we have to change and pay up? Why shouldn't they have to change and rein in their hedonism?
The person I was replying to implied that if we don't do things the way he thinks it should be done, we might end sick or dead. And to say STFU and except my wisdom as pure gold is also ill mannered and unkind.
Lots of things are ill mannered or unkind yet have little in common with a protection racket. His point is that people are going to engage in risky behavior regardless and we have the choice to attempt to mitigate the consequences or just stick our hands in the sand.
That is a false choice. Prevention is better than cure. Supporting safe sex or sex in steady relationships seems to work much better so far than his ideas that nothing can be done we should all just chip in.
I reject the thinking that "people are going to do what they want" and we are helpless to influence their behavior so we should just accept whatever they are doing no questions asked and work around it with public policy if it causes a problem. The reason I reject it is because I would argue "what people want to do" does not spontaneously arise in their minds, but rather is influenced by popular culture, marketing, and more.
Take alcohol for example. You might say "you can't prevent people from drinking, look at Prohibition, it was a complete failure, don't even try", and in a certain sense you are right. You can't prevent all people from drinking.
However, you can prevent many people from drinking (or at least, reduce the total amount of drinking to more moderate levels) by:
- Not glorifying alcohol via pop culture and movies (especially American binge drinking at age 21)
- Restrict/regulate alcohol advertisements and marketing to reduce the influence of "drinking = happiness" messaging
- etc.
Or, stated in other terms, you can exacerbate your country's alcohol-related issues by glorifying alcohol and enshrining it in popular culture.
In the same vein, maybe we wouldn't have as big of a problem if we didn't glorify casual sex encounters so much in our media. If popular media/culture instead glorified things like self-restraint, commitment, etc, I'm sure some % of people would be influenced.
> I reject the thinking that "people are going to do what they want" and we are helpless to influence their behavior so we should just accept whatever they are doing no questions asked and work around it with public policy if it causes a problem. The reason I reject it is because I would argue what people want to do does not spontaneously arise in their minds, but rather is influenced by popular culture, marketing, and more.
Hmm, let's see how well that worked with sexually active teenagers in the bible belt, shall we?
Excellent point! Seems like some are more interested in pushing their own beliefs and morality on others rather than examining the evidence of what makes effective (or ineffective) public policy.
That just proves that Sunday school can’t do much in the face of a culture that overwhelmingly normalizes casual sex in TV, movies, music, etc. That doesn’t mean that societies committed to the opposite don’t exist. And many do—such as much of Asia. We can argue about the merits of say Bangladeshi society (where I’m from) but we have almost completely escaped the global AIDs epidemic.
Gay man here, on prep in a long term open relationship.
To date I have yet to come across anything in mainstream media that comes close to 'glorifying' the type of relationship I have with my partner, or non-monogamy in general. Can you give any examples of this?
I'd also argue I'm in a committed relationship, but I'm not going argue semantics.
Yeah, I would argue "long term relationship" is a sign of commitment.
I'm more talking about shows and movies that make it seem like non-committal hookups and switching sexual partners rapidly for any reason is cool and totally normal:
- How I Met Your Mother (Barney)
- The Office (everyone has slept with everyone by the end)
- Game of Thrones
You could argue the "good" characters like Tyrion typically showed more commitment in their sexual activities than "bad" characters like Theon who just knocked up random women for fun. But even then you have instances where the "heroes" like Arya have one night stands with no consequences (because HBO wanted to be edgy).
Have you considered the possibility that this might have more to do with the fact that serial monogamy is already widespread (and has been since before it was commonly depicted on television) and the shows have a relatively limited cast of characters?
Even if not, are we asking the government to step in and ban Friends? Because if not, I don’t see how this observation gives us anything approaching a solution.
> Even if not, are we asking the government to step in and ban Friends? Because if not, I don’t see how this observation gives us anything approaching a solution.
Absolutely not. Government should not have to solve every problem in society. The solution is for us (consumers) to not watch shows that promote values we don't agree with. And if you do agree with them... you reap what you sow.
Continuing to raise awareness of the consequences of assuming risky behavior is a reasonable action that could be taken. With widespread messaging, the burdens of the consequences of risky behavior greater fall solely onto those who engage in the behavior, rather than being distributed evenly across society
Of course it is useful - if you don’t know of a thing, you don’t know the consequences of engaging in that thing. It’s as axiomatic as the trite and age old saying “knowledge is power”. Your comment is completely disingenuous.
I don’t think the problem here is people aren’t aware that venereal disease is a possible result of unprotected sex. You have provided just as little evidence for your assertion to the contrary.
My hunch is that people are probably generally unaware of the recent rise in syphilis cases, would do well to be more informed, and with proliferation of the message some general adjustment of behavior in society is to be expected
I'll be honest I've not seen the first two series so I'll avoid speculating. I'm sure you are absolutely right.
In the case of Game of Thrones, a lot of the more 'liberal' sexual encounters were really put in for shock value or an excuse for nudity, for example Oberyn's orgy scenes. I never really got the feeling it was trying to normalise these things, but that was just my interpretation.
Similarly for Friends my interpretation was characters like Joey were to be the punchline of a joke, not to say his behaviour was normal. It felt more to laugh AT him, not to normalise it.
My experiences of mainstream media seems to largely focus on the young bachelor(ette) who has casual sex as a 'phase', or the monogamous faithful couple who've grown up and matured. Despite this narrative, I really don't believe monogamy works for a fair percentage of the population. This leads to either two states:-
1. They never form close romantic relationships, leading to more casual sex and probably larger risk of spreading STDs.
2. They do engage in a monogamous relationship, only for it to turn sour because of the tensions it causes. In some cases this leads to a party cheating on the other. These people almost never go to STI clinics to get tested for fear it will ruin their relationships.
How about instead the mainstream media embraced the idea of wanting to have multiple sexual partners is fine regardless of your stage of your life or your relationship status? That way, we can have make sure that everyone is informed of the risks and getting the medical treatment they need to keep themselves and others safe (particularly regular testing). As soon as you start demonising it and saying you shouldn't feel that way, people will do it anyway and just hide it instead.
Btw. I have a friend who likes fast reckless driving. Now we could yell about it or just except that some people like to drive with no regards to theirs and others safety and not punish them for it and maybe even pay fines for them?
Why subsidize an activity that puts health at risk? Sure, people will do what they want, but this just incentivizes people to put themselves at risk and makes everyone else pay for it.
Sure, but that doesn’t stop us from trying to influence people in other areas, so why should it stop us here. By this argument we should abolish all laws because what’s the point of telling someone “don’t murder” when “people are going to do what they want”?
Your post makes it sound like you are also against taxing cigarettes or taxing cars with big engines or banning guns since we should not (or it would be pointless) to influence behavior in such ways.
That’s obviously not true. Asian countries for example have far lower rates of drug use, sex outside of marriage, etc. than western countries. For example Bangladesh, the country where I’m from, has virtually no prevalence of HIV. (And it actually has quite a good system of health reporting so it’s not just failure to collect data.) Societies can in fact shame and coerce people into avoiding harmful behaviors.
Bangladesh, which you've used as an example of good conservative marriage values, forces most young girls into marriage and has some of the highest rates of domestic violence in the world. Excellent example!
The "conservatives" seem to be prejudiced against casual sex behaviors for the wrong reasons: religious dogma, moral panic, personal bias etc...
The dollar cost of casual sex culture is not a reason I have heard cited as an argument against casual sex in pop conservatism. If you want to get into what costs society a greater amount, gay men getting syphilis is going to be way farther down the list than people having large numbers of children. We heavily subsidize that form of sexual activity.
Society is terrible at this, though. Issues like this tend to become proxy wars for other things.
I mean, look how mask wearing has become moralized. It should never have become a silly political fight, it should've been people helping people get masks and avoid disease. Instead, we have all sorts of nonsense like idiots burning masks or arresting someone alone on a deserted beach for not having a mask.
You're advocating taking money from those who don't participate in these health-risking activities to subsidize those who do, and you're chastising the parent post for moralizing? How absurd.
The people disproportionately getting STDs have short time horizons. Regardless of the incentives in place, they're going to be having risky sex. It's less costly for society to pay for widespread testing and the occasional treatment than it is to pay for widespread treatment and no testing.
You know, it's interesting that we highlight the health burden of other activities like smoking and some governments want to go as far as banning salt and sugary soda for the same reasons.
But on this one topic we treat people like they're monsters for suggesting we should be choosier about our sexual encounters. Not just that sexual freedom is prioritized in our society, but _exercising_ that freedom is treated like a virtue. Despite all of the obvious costs and despite the fact that most people end up being less active than we'd expect and on the other side of that spectrum a lot of people come to regret their choices.
There's a huge cost associated with child-rearing as well but that's just part of human civilization, as is lots of sex and, while we're at it, drug use.
There are many countries where sex outside of marriage and drug use occur at very low rates. As a result they have escaped the attendant social problems, such as single parent households, the AIDS epidemic, etc.
Uhhh you the same guy in your post history defending Bangladeshi marriage culture, which is based on forced child marriage? Big oof to have any moralizing from "conservatives" like you.
"prejudices" was a bad wording. I'm sorry to have ignited that much emotional heat which deters from good discussion culture. My usage of "prejudice" was the best kind of correct: technically correct. I was thinking about how nearly everyone that I had a personal discussion with lost their view point about how subsidizing STI tests was a bad idea after I told them about personal experiences of some acquaintances of mine. So those people were (technically) prejudiced, as a close inspection of such cases changed their judgement.
Nonetheless, the word itself has strong connotations and it's mostly neither nice nor effective to tell someone to their face that they are prejudiced. And I can't assume it to be the case about a potential reader of my post.
Regarding whether it is good policy, even with a conservative value system, my sibling comments have already presented most of the points I would make.
>> that maybe the “conservatives” are correct to be “prejudiced” against it?
Because the most vocal "conservatives" are often the ones that, in private, are the most casual about sex. Not a day goes by without a news story about a conservative politician caught in some sexual scandal/coverup/fiasco. It is to the point that if I see any powerful man advocating abstinence I just assume he has a couple girlfriends stashed somewhere. Thou doth protest too much.
Do you drive a car? Do you eat red meat? Do you burn fossil fuels or rely on any kind of electricity? Well done. We are all subsidizing your risky lifestyle.
When you are willing to retire to a plot of land and live entirely upon it, including starving each winter, then you may throw stones at "subsidizing" other people's risky behavior. Until then, you don't get to pick and choose which behavior we subsidize and which we do not.
Alternatively, we can pass a law that says citizens can choose which kinds of risky behavior they are willing so subsidize with their taxes.
Other people's risky sexual behaviour can harm you even if you (normally) don't engage in it yourself; it's not like skiing where people can break only their own necks. You can do two things to minimize the harm:
(a) try to reduce the number of people who engage in risky sex—through changing people's views, different upbringing and whatnot;
(b) try to mitigate the consequences of their behaviour—by subsidizing testing for infections and treatment.
Note that there's no dichotomy here.
I don't know if there's a good, reliable way to do (a); also, some people can be against it for ideological reasons. But (b) in the meantime is straightforward to implement and is known to be efficient. Why not implement (b) and make it work it while we are arguing about (a)?
> maybe the “conservatives” are correct to be “prejudiced” against it?
Conservatives should not be stigmatized for supporting (a), this is not prejudice, they can have the view they have on sex. But I don't see a single reason, except prejudice, that can make you go against (b), which is simply practical.
But at the rate some people have casual sex they would not be able to get tested before each sexual encounter. The cost is also high and it's not clear that society should subsidize the outliers who have tons of sexual partners when the average person has 3-4 partners in their lifetime.
I don't think it's prejudiced to notice that casual sex is a risky behavior that harms one's community. We all agree wearing masks is not about your comfort level but it's about keeping society safe. Why is casual sex not seen the same way?
In the US we are deterred from getting STD testing because the cost will be variable and sometimes very high, depending on what insurance you happen to have (or not) at the time.
I suppose we've had the trifecta of bad HN comments: diet and exercise as a magic ward against all sickness, victim-blaming the AIDS crisis, and suggestions of recording everyone's sexual activity on the blockchain. I've flagged the story for this.
No, clearly not against syphilis, against a variety of other preventable diseases (read the sentence before the excerpt). I'm generalizing that we jump to treatment over prevention in health. In the specific case of syphilis, a condom is a great start.
In retrospect, it could generalize even further than health because humans tend to follow "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." We cling to fixing things we break vs exercising even a bit of caution to reduce the chances of breaking things as a strategy, even when prevention is sometimes trivial or were talking about our own health.
If you're talking about Syphilis diet and exercise could make the problem worse. Your opportunities for random hookups are more frequent when you are fit.
To make this explicit: HN users shouldn't be downvoting due to disagreement or personal feelings of embarrassment. If the comment is too short and doesn't contribute towards a deeper conversation, that could be why it gets downvoted. For instance, though I agree meat eaters may not like the above, it's also possible others simply feel the comments are low effort compared to other comments.
> HN users shouldn't be downvoting due to disagreement or personal feelings of embarrassment
FWIW, this has been debated several times recently, and generally some one ends up quoting some PG comment about how downvoting as disagreements is fine.
Well, if PG says it, we'd better all do it. Now if you downvote me due to disagreeing, you're disagreeing with the notion that you're employing. Mwahahaha. Recursive gotcha.
the flagged comment said something along the lines of "because meat eaters don't want to feel guilty," which seems like a reasonable take to me. it's at least part of the answer.
Interesting idea, never considered that angle. Perhaps I should clarify that like my goo to obey commands written in ACGT, and not some future kind using C
Not sure why the downvotes, this is a known fact. Cows are meant to eat grass for instance but because we feed them corn and soy instead (slightly cheaper), they get diseases they otherwise wouldn’t get. So their foodstuff is also laced with antibiotics, which people eating the meat and milk in turn absorb.
Even if you feed livestock a totally optimal diet (e.g. grass for cows) they'll convert it more efficiently (read: they'll grow bigger from the same amount of feed) if you supplement it with low dose antibiotics.
I thought the main issue was that antibiotics make the livestock put on weight faster, and the dose to do that isn’t quite enough to kill of the bacteria? So the bacteria get a chance to evolve immunity?
Interesting that this has been downvoted. Isnt antibiotics abuse as livestock fattening helper absolutely breeding resistance and there's also a concept of horizontal gene transfer between germs after they have been passed to farm workers
I didn't downvote it, but your comment was pretty useless as far as knowledge building goes. You merely made a claim about something that's controversial, non-obvious to most of the population and has more nuance than you let on.
In this case, explicitly mentioning the antibiotics abuse and how that leads to resistance would've made a big difference in quality. Going further and explaining feasible ways about how to deal with it and how to manage the economical and lifestyle impact of possible solutions in a feasible manner would've been even better.
It isn't really the burden of the statement maker to enunciate his arguments to the nth degree lest suffer the pangs of mob downvotes. At least it shouldn't be, on a decent realm of discourse. If anything, the downvotes just show a low level of informedness of the average HN user.
Exactly. The word “superbugs” implies antibiotic resistance, and anyone who is skeptical or curious about the connection between factory farms and antibiotic resistance due to HUMAN activity can look it up.
I could go to the nth degree and speak about how capitalism creates a lot of negative externalities, including factory farming, pollution, depression and the current state of the news. In fact take the latter — here is a website for what the problem is, what the solutions are, and how to fix it... as well as an hour long interview that goes into all the details:
I often go into amazing detail and write blog posts about each topic... but if I link to them on HN, I would usually get accused of throwing out “20 claims at once” and “shilling my blog” and my videos and solutions (that I give away for free). You just can’t win with some people...
Throwing links as an answer (instead of using them as an addendum or because it's a valid source) is considered bad practice in discussion since usually they're not a direct rebuttal to specific points made.
If you were making a detailed argument about the issues with unregulated capitalism, and I would just respond with "Go read some Mises", it's just a lazy cop-out that doesn't address the problems you're presenting and lowers whatever value the comments may have to a reader, even if I had a point or not.
Yes, it is their burden, specially when you're treating a subject that has a lot of depth.
You cannot form a decent realm of discourse when every comment is low-effort. This is the kind of thing that (for now, and only up to a certain degree) separates Hacker News from things like popular subreddits that only chant trendy opinions or act as venting boxes without much actual factual discussion going on.
FWIW I'm just as guilty as the GP of doing the same at times, and I should be called out for it as well whenever it happens. Sometimes we don't know what we don't know, know too much and take things for granted, or can't tell when our biases are showing. It is up to the community as a whole to keep the standards high.
Tell that to the western pundits who spout off "we must ban foreign wet markets" completely ignoring their own backyard.
Yes, I get the doing both is not mutually exclusive. The point isn't that stopping both wouldn't be great. The point is the way it's presented "look at that backward nation doing things that breed pathogens" without actually even considering their own country is just as guilty. Effectively "we're smart and enlightened, you're backward and ignorant"
> Factory farming is accelerating the rise of superbugs
Downvotes don't change facts. The browbeating over people misusing antibiotics at the individual level is a lot like plastic producers guilting consumers over recycling when the root cause is from industry.
Factory farming uses antibiotics purely for profit, the health of the animals is only an ancillary benefit. Animals fed antibiotics grow larger, driving higher profits. It's a tragedy of the commons situation, since the abuse of antibiotics has major negative externalities for us all, but the profits are reserved for the owners of the factory farms.
I wonder if we can develop vaccination against syphilis.
With all the progress made because of Covid, it might just be possible. Syphilis has been a big vaccination challenge.
Edit: Why I am getting downvoted for this of all things? Do people hate syphilis victims so much? Not everyone who catches syphilis is a raging cheater.
It seems that chemsex goes hand in hand with STDs. Russian AIDS epidemic seems to be connected to mephedrone just like this thing is connected to meth.
Do people seriously believe antibiotics are magic shots that make you whole again? Syphilis is associated with serious sequela, some that only show up years later.
When humans build a great tool to eradicate a disease, people think it's a free pass to do anything. Sometimes I think we deserve whatever pandemic is thrown at us.
I was recently shocked to learn that a large percentage of my friend group sincerely believes we will be the first generation to live forever due to advances in medical science. I think an unbridled optimism in medical technology is part of certain subcultures.
356 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadThere is a reason to have empathy for those who struggle with promiscuity and substance abuse. How long can you be told that your sex life belongs in the gutter and you don't deserve love, after all, before you begin to believe it yourself?
But there isn't a reason to ignore those problems. They lead to social isolation and death for countless of us. We need the social structures, social support, and social expectations of stability and sobriety. The lack of these things leaves a trail of STIs, T overdoses, and abject loneliness in its wake.
On HN at least it's not with a one liner that stereotypes a whole group of people with drug use and irresponsible behaviour like the now-dead comment did.
I for one flagged that comment not because it called out the problem, but for how it did it without contributing anything useful.
Bad behavior should of course be called out, but there's no need to reference harmful stereotypes such as a supposed "gay (or 'homosexual') community". Many people with a same-sex orientation do not engage in problematic behavior of any sort.
Granted, it's not the most empathetic response, but the gay scene has some very unhealthy subcultures. Drug-fueled disinhibition isn't healthy, and this syphilis outbreak goes to show it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26695867
Where it's available, you just do a blood test every 3 months, test for HIV and syphilis and start therapy if positive.
Speaking as an ex microbiologist.
There's also the very real problem of personal data security here, at many levels.
This sounds like a poorly conceived services ripe for exploitation.
We really shoot ourselves in the foot in the US by (among other things) not having easier access to testing of all sorts.
You have only two STDs in your list. Many more exist. You've got your herpes, your clap, multiple strains of HPV. Then you've got nasty old Hep C lurking around, making A and B look like chumps. There's oodles of them and treatment isn't just a wave of the script pad for some.
be best hn
Here is one of those examples.
Not to mention I imagine most drug research went on halt for a year in an effort to find a vaccine for Corona.
What percentage of people are going to die because our politicians and influential scientists couldn't do high school level statistics?
The problem with meth is that it's so very addictive that you don't necessarily need to be in a pit of despair to get hooked.
Is something going wrong where there are deeper problems here that the article isn’t addressing, is my question, because it’s not like drastic increases in meth-related diseases spontaneously appear in 20 year olds.
The problem is for most types of risk taking, if you survive it, you make it to be a late 20-something man and move on. With meth (and other drugs), it keeps you addicted.
meth seems to be the catalyst for the bad behavior done either recreationally (orgies) or while in bad situations arising from a cluster of root causes. I'm only going to address the latter:
the article mentions homeless women who trade sex for shelter. My sister is literally trying to be homeless right now. She has serious mental issues and can't live with anyone for long before she ruins their life and gets kicked out. this is a 20-year-long pattern. She even has access to therapy and shelter, but doesn't accept it. she has adhd and is probably somewhat spectral. she has a very narrow idea of how she wants to live her life: get an easy part-time job, live alone, and pay low rent. But this is not easy when she also freaks out on people, accusing them of abuse, physically assaulting them, etc. So she sometimes starts relationships with people to get access to shelter for short periods. Who knows what she's compromising on behind those closed doors. Could be unprotected sex and offers of drugs. I know for sure pot, alcohol, and cigarettes, but how much farther does it go? I know she's experiment with cocaine and psychedelics. Our family is devastated by all of this, has no idea what to do next, having taking advice from many caring friends, health professionals, etc.
So it's not just one root cause, there are numerous issues of economics, shelter, mental illness, biology, personal responsibility, modernity, inequality, alcoholic parents, realistic expectations and so on that all build on each other creating a "strange attractor," or quite a simply, a "drain."
When our species/culture was all outdoors anyway, I think crazy people like her used to fit in on the fringes. Raising a child had lots of beneficial influence from different types of people instead of just one alcoholic parent like in our case, or lots of phony impressions from self-filtered social media and brain-wave-engineered advertisements. Inequality in native tribes wasn't as extreme and we didn't have "rich kids" in class to compare ourselves to. Once daily living required keeping track of lots of things, like money, and sustaining professional relationships, the fringes of living got narrow and harsh. Then, when having an acceptable online life got added: passwords, service payments, visible resume, working phone, with charge locations, even more people fell through the cracks. They're the ones you seen in tents, in the woods, on the streets. And there is no easy solution... Fix half of the factors I listed above and the rest of the pattern will persist. This doesn't even address how many of these people end up in jail. If there's anything we can do, it's to find small ways to make "traditional life" a little easier for people who can't handle all of this.
But, really, the STD rates will always be lower among the boring “square” population than the adventurous, promiscuous, one.
I’m sure this will be about as popular a soiled diaper here, but “promiscuity” and “adventurous” sex is mathematically welded with risk. Monogamy, and vanilla sex are essentially risk free (barring a botched blood transfusion or something along those lines)
People who want to have lots of sex, will still feel those desires in a monogamous relationship. Monogamy might make them less likely to act on those feelings, but it will make them less likely to test regularly, and stop them from being open with their partners about risks, and prevents clear communication about establishing safe sex practices.
If my partner has sex with someone else, I want them to feel safe enough to tell me. That way I can make decisions such as using protection with them that I might not otherwise, or getting tested myself, which I would not be able to otherwise.
Except you cannot guarantee the other person will actually be monogamous. We saw this with the initial AIDS epidemic in the '80s/'90s, when uber-square supposedly-monogamous (and supposedly heterosexual) individuals turned out to be anything but - to the shock of their official partner.
It is very unlikely to have negative consequences, and while they can be severe with things like blindness, so can downhill skiing and we don't spend public funds to remove the danger of downhill skiing. Hell we often spend public funds building skate parks which come with their own small risk of serious debilitating injury and we do it because the people who engage in that behavior are aware of the danger and don't consider it serious enough to abstain from the pleasure. And most critically those of us who want to avoid the danger can quite easily do so, as with Syhpillis.
I don't see a problem worthy of the publics attention here let alone the publics funds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis#Tertiary
It looks like the apps could have an emergency notification mechanism to help with that. Phone companies must implement 911, hookup companies should be required to implement an infection notification mechanism.
(although some states have more strict health privacy laws)
I am not sure how to solve this. Perhaps a certified doctor could trigger that alarm and nobody else.
What we really need is a standard for signed certificates (verified claims) from labs, showing that you tested for X recently and the result. People will start asking for these before sex.
We have concert passes in our Apple Wallet but not these?
Actually, maybe let’s not do this
I am talking about a completely private and voluntary MECHANISM to have a way to PROVE that you went to a clinic for X and got result Y. What cultural and subcultural norms arise from that is anyone’s guess but why not have that OPTION available? Right now every clinic has its own incompatible way to prove to yourself — and no one else — the results of a test you took a lot effort to get.
I see you are not familiar with most Grindr hookups.
Really, one has to wonder if an ultra liberal attitude towards sex (enabled by ever declining social mores and various "apps") combined with drugs like PrEP being handed out like candy to promiscuous individuals are not making the situation worse rather than better.
In earlier societies, these folks who repeatedly made bad choices would be outcasts and shunned. Today, not only do we enable their idiotic behavior but allow it to propagate and threaten the rest of society.
The biblical passages about Sodom and Gomorrah come to mind.
Edit: Internet was too broad. Hacker News I mean specifically.
On the contrary, I don't see how you do function on the Internet.
If a group of consenting adults does something risky that gives them COVID, they can give me COVID by just being in the same room as me for a while.
Hence, the second group is more scold-worthy than the first.
It's the same reason we ban smoking in many indoor public places but allow people to eat a triple cheeseburger with large fries and a large shake in those places. If I smoke next to you you get secondhand smoke. If I pig out on a 3000 calorie lunch next to you you don't get secondhand fat.
So maybe consenting adults having unprotected promiscuous relationships with numerous people they don’t really know within a community that “shares” is idiotic behavior too.
Don't you dare lay the blame for AIDS at the feet of queer people.
You can argue that that culture was very vulnerable to a disease like AIDS, and that's fair. You can argue that, had that culture changed faster and more comprehensively, it may have mitigated the crisis somewhat, and that's fair too - although I'd argue the effect would likely not have been very significant.
But to cast blame on the same communities which were repeatedly decimated in large part as a result of those authorities' lack of concern over whether they so much as lived or died - a lack of concern which, as Shilts' own work which you cite makes clear, was so persistent and profound as not to be shifted until gay people themselves fought their way into positions of sufficient power as to have meaningful impact on policy, and not until one of Ronald Reagan's personal friends died of the disease and thus forced him finally to recognize the essential humanity of others likewise afflicted? The kindest thing I can find to call such a position is insultingly absurd.
Liberationism and bathhouse culture were closely intertwined, and bathhouse culture had been a bête noire of the assimilationist faction for some time before AIDS showed up. Demands to "stop having sex", or at least to stop having sex in this particular style, were a longstanding feature of that internal conflict, and it wasn't unreasonable early on for folks on the liberationist side to regard this newest call as essentially just more of the same. As the scope and gravity of the problem became obvious, people did gradually change their behavior, but the relatively long asymptomatic period and relatively high transmissibility of the virus meant that, by the time that happened, it was too late to do all that much good.
Sure, an early and assertive response within the community might have had a real effect on the outcome. But this is well within the territory of expecting people to act on the basis of perfect information which, at the time for action, neither they nor anyone else actually had - or, put more succinctly, of presentism in the historiographical sense. I don't blame Shilts for that; he wrote in 1987, when the crisis was still in a very real sense ongoing. We, by contrast, have the benefit of a quarter century's distance and study from which to look back on those days now. We can do better, and should.
I'm not even going to address the suggestion that gay bathhouse culture in the 1980s is somehow to blame for COVID anti-maskers in the 2020s.
Power differences are the single most important fact of society, and too many people assume symmetries exist in situations that are actually asymmetric.
Anything where you have big globs of people exchanging bodily fluids over and over again is going to encourage the development of something infectious. It's the same reason that preschool tends to be a germ pit. If someone invented a sport called, I don't know, "Loogie Frisbee," where people stood around and took turns spitting into each other's mouths, I would expect some kind of oral infection to take off as the sport went pro.
Or how my comment is now on -2 and visible.
This place is very odd sometimes.
Quantity has a quality all its own, and so it is here. It's having lots of sex with lots of other consenting adults, whom you do not know particularly well, unsafely, etc., that pushes it into "idiotic behavior."
Though, it’s perhaps a bit unfair to call the behavior idiotic - I do think people who engage in self-destructive promiscuity do so out of pain, or due to commercial manipulation that they aren’t savvy enough to resist.
Agreed. This is a fundamental result of the spiritual death of Westerners driven by materialism.
However, in the end, the individual makes the discussion. No matter how unfortunate, we’ve all heard whispers of The Truth, The Way [1], but rejected it.
[1] take this to be whatever philosophical/religious ideology you prefer; be it stoicism, Christianity, Buddha, whatever
Also, I would like to challenge the idea that living a non-drug life is attributable to some philosophical or religious ideology. I follow no philosophical or religious ideology enough to describe myself as a follower of any sort of way and I’m not pursuing a risky lifestyle.
For ancient Greek eating human flesh was taboo. That also was a way to prevent prion diseases.
It's possible at some time that behavior gave society a bit of edge, but it then kept passing it over just as a form of tradition.
E.g. fasting is another practice that has hidden health benefits.
This whole problem can be solved by a change in attitude and wearing condoms.
Some still worship some guy that died 2021+ years ago (or so) . We made our calendar around his whole life. With holy days and all.
And another set of humans worship another person that lived around 1500 years ago
To a degree yes. Until the virus evolves to just break down parts of plastic. Given enough time virus will do whatever it needs to survive.There are already microbes that breakdown plastic and virus are adept at horizontal gene transfer (between different species or genus altogether).
I'm not going to argue that (though I do question the overall efficacy of fasting aside from caloric restriction, but regardless, that's beside the point), but I am arguing that not what the intent was originally for - it's a side effect that can help, but wasn't considered.
> To a degree yes. Until the virus evolves to just break down parts of plastic. Given enough time virus will do whatever it needs to survive.
Sure, but until that time condoms work just fine. I feel like that's a huge leap for what an STI can do. Otherwise we also have to worry it could go airborne and spread without doing anything given that bacteria (which is what Syphilis is) can do that as well but that seems equally unlikely. In fact it has had a reason to develop airborne transmission capabilities for millennia longer than it has had reason to fight latex.
Group A eats some fallen foes, and by chance contracts prion disease and dies out.
Group B isn't going to think yeah, this was caused by microscopic particles. They are going to think - See. I was right. Gods are angry at you. Then they will persist to replicate the behavior for centuries after it could make any impact.
It was an example. Since it already affects the brain, it could just evolve to make you more likely to engage in risky behavior and not use condom (like giving you an allergic reaction when using latex). Right now, it doesn't have this ability. But can we be certain it won't acquire it in future? We know at least one pathogen that can alter behavior in mammals (Toxoplasmosis).It's better ofc, to eradicate it now and not worry about it, but the thing is, promiscuous behavior will always be a breeding lab for these kind of pathogens. Even if none exist, some might evolve into it. If there is a niche to be exploited, some pathogen will evolve to exploit it.
And regarding adaptation you're playing a game of "what if" that's not terribly helpful, like my example of it going airborne. Then it doesn't matter what happens. Yeast could mutate and literally turn us into brain munching zombies, but I don't know why that matters.
Depends on context. If for example eating shellfish/pork caused harm once or twice, people could extrapolate it's evil or something. People are good at finding pattern where none exist.
> Yeast could mutate and literally turn us into brain munching zombies
Riiight. But if it did, it would wipe itself out too fast. Like we already have Zombie like disease. It's called rabies.
> And regarding adaptation you're playing a game of "what if"
It's less of what if, and more of a game, let's make our next STD <insert measure> resistant. Whether it's antibiotics or viral or admittedly far fetched example of latex evasion. As long as there is fertile soil for STD there will be STDs.
Or is it that people who make "bad" decisions are an other that need to be eradicated (like S&G)? Please, explain ?
I mean, face coverings might become more popular. They certainly are popular in East Asian countries, and that seems to have helped.
Really hoping you'll unpack this more as that story ends with their violent destruction at the hands of God, and I'm wondering if that's what you're advocating for here.
For example - The passage about “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.” sounds absolutely like God is a rotten SOB.
But if you ever see the pain that flows though generations because one father abused his children, you can see that it more of a warning - do something horrible and not only will you suffer, but you’ll cause generations to suffer. So don’t do that.
Notice how the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah are never spelled out in detail. We assume, based on our religious tradition, that the sin was gay sex and forget all the other sins that are alluded to. In our modern viewpoint, the story is about two happy gay communities that the evil God of Abraham destroys.
However, the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah were, at the very least, gang rapists. Furthermore they committed the greatest sin imaginable for a tribal society: they disrespected a guest. Note how Lot, rather than have his guests raped, offers his own daughters.
All this under the threat of violence against Lot.
PrEP is a good thing because people who are on PrEP can be required to test frequently as a condition to obtain new medication (not sure if that happens in the US, but it does elsewhere).
Gonorrhea unfortunately even shows advanced signs of antibiotic resistance. There is already "super-gonorrhea" which has resistance to our last line of defense, ceftriaxone.
Would you please read and follow the site guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They include this for tried-and-true reasons: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." In case it's not obvious, that's code for "please don't feed the trolls".
Even so, posting like the GP will get you banned. Obviously, "the Bible is bad fiction", "you're kind of a shit person", and "idiotic drivel" are way, way beyond the pale. The pale is depicted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please don't ever post like that to HN again so we don't have to ban you.
Edit: that includes not calling names like "drivel" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26819803) in general. You can make your substantive points without that, and if you read the guidelines you'll see that they explicitly ask you to.
I always love the irony that there is a huge amount of overlap in the Venn diagram of people who love to mention Sodom and Gomorrah when it comes to STDs (as opposed to just discussing the real risks in context), and also decry that being compelled to wear a mask during a global pandemic is the work of Satan.
This may lead to more people doing very dangerous things, but this is a choice society has made, and frankly I think most of us have done things at one point or another we got away with only because we were lucky.
Some people take risks driving too fast, some people take risks having sex with more people. Why should we help the first group but not the last?
I've moved from an area with a liberal attitude towards sex, to an area with a more Christian attitude towards sex, which extends to political decision-making around sexual health.
The main difference for me is... it is now extremely difficult to access appropriate testing for STDs, it is more difficult to access appropriate treatment in a timely or private manner, and it is more difficult to access preventative measures (this extends also to condoms).
None of this is a benefit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It would also be dangerous to be taking PrEP and not getting the required kidney function tests with it ever 90 days (the older version of PrEP can be hard on some people's kidneys).
I do see advertisements for legitimate mail-order services where you do consult with a doctor, and perform the tests at home.
Looking at one site, if you have no coverage, it's $164 for kidney and STI testing, $94 for just the required kidney tests. So some may just opt out to save money. But again, I would be surprised if there's many people paying out of pocket for the whole treatment.
You can get the kidney function tests yourself if you like on demand, as well, privately.
I order my PrEP online and do all my STD testing at home, since I hate having to reveal my sexual history to strangers constantly.
Just want to add this here in case anybody's unfamiliar: PrEP can also be taken on an event-driven schedule, rather than the daily dose most people are familiar with. Under this regime, you take two doses two hours before sexual activity (or upto 24 hours earlier), followed by a single dose 24 hours after the first 2 pills, and a final dose 24 hours after that. If sexual activity can be planned or is infrequent, this 2+1+1 regime might be preferred.
As the WHO notes, the event-driven regime isn't generally recommended for adolescents who might have issues with compliance, or cis & trans women.
https://www.who.int/hiv/pub/prep/211/en/
Most people I know engaging in especially frequent encounters get tested monthly. There are multiple free health clinics in the city so it isn’t just a game for the rich either.
Especially now that HIV isn't a dead sentence.
So long as the supply chains keep running, insurance keeps paying for the drugs (which can cost thousands of USD per month over the course of a patient's entire life), the drugs reach the patient, and the patient takes all their drugs on schedule.
If at all possible, I'd rather avoid a life-or-death dependence on global supply chains, pharmaceutical factories, and insurance agents most of all. People die every year for lack of insulin, and that drug is much cheaper, more well-understood biologically, and more widely available than HIV medications.
I couldn't get past the cookie consent screen. Might require JS. Don't care. Went straight to Archive.is.
Thanks for the link.
This comes with the explosion of casual sex in recent times. Also STI throat cancers are on the rise from the explosion of oral sex. [1] maybe due to the novel widespread availability of internet video pornography and increased normalization in media relative to past decades.
[1] https://www.webmd.com/sexual-conditions/hpv-genital-warts/ne...
I wonder if the decrease in male sexual activity is associated with the observed decrease in male testosterone levels (and sperm counts): https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_59fcc5fbe4b0d467d4c224b3
> During 2007–2016, the incidence of cancers of the oral cavity and pharynx combined increased, despite decreases in several anatomic sites, including the nasopharynx, hypopharynx, lip, and floor of mouth. The overall increase appears to be driven by increases in cancers of the tonsil, base of tongue, oropharynx, and other cancers of the oral cavity and pharynx, which are HPV-associated, as well as by those of gum and anterior tongue.
The efficacy of the HPV vaccine in preventing throat cancer doesn’t refute the observation that practicing oral sex increases one’s likelihood of contracting throat cancer.
> I put this onto the high vaccination rates in that population.
I don’t think you can draw that conclusion from this data.
> The data is only from 2016, and in the 2013-2018 period there has been a big jump in vaccination rates in the 18-26 population
Can you provide a source?
> Can you provide a source?
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db354-h.pdf
>"If one man is taking PrEP and the other one is virally suppressed, there's no HIV risk at all," she says. "So why use condoms if you don't mind having a touch of syphilis?"
Humans really do take for granted the efficacy of antibacterials and antibiotics across the board.
These sort of harmful bacteria are completely and safely treatable now in most people, but the real potential threat is breeding drug resistant strains of bacteria, microorganisms and viruses. We shouldn't treat these fantastic tools like a pass to do whatever, we should instead use them sparingly and curb behavior. There are plenty of simple preventative practices than can reduce ever needing such treatments while mostly being able to continue doing what you'd like. A huge amount of these infections could be reduced drastically just by using a condom.
Rely on those prevention approaches first and drugs/treatment second to reduce the risk of creating situations where treatments don't exist. This can be said about a huge swath of preventable disease in the US. A bit of diet, exercise, and an once of prevention is worth its weight in gold.
> A bit of diet, exercise, and an once of prevention is worth its weight in gold.
All those cases of just eating less sugar / exercising more / sitting less are unfortunately really hard for most individuals. We really should strive to create environments where doing the good thing is as easy as possible. Like offering free daily work breaks for sport or having healthy lunch meals for children in school.
Great, now we’re “prejudiced” for not wanting to subsidize other people’s risky sexual behavior.
Did it ever occur to you that if there is, as you suggest, a large health burden associated with casual sex culture (and, according to the article, drug use culture), that maybe the “conservatives” are correct to be “prejudiced” against it?
Pragmatic argument: It's better economically and for productivity for people to not have HIV, Syphilis, etc. It's far easier to provide treatment and testing then to tell people to stop having sex.
of course this is all hypothetical with the current state of US healthcare. step one has to be a reasonable cost baseline for people who don't elect a bunch of extra risk.
Hypothetically, you don’t need healthcare if you live/lived a near fundamentally perfect lifestyle. Accidents happen but then maybe don’t use knives or ever leave your home too.
Be a bubble boy.
> people who don't elect a bunch of extra risk
I'm not talking about preexisting conditions. I'm talking about conscious choices people make that increase their risk level. I'm not telling you how to live your life, but if our care is funded from the same pool and you live a riskier life by choice, I don't think it's unfair for me to ask that you pay proportionally more.
Charging people more for coverage is telling them how to live their life. And where is the line drawn? "Oh, you like to go 10mph over the limit? Higher medical coverage fees, sir. You're likely to get hurt. Oh, sir, you live in a rough neighborhood? Very likely to get shot sir, you should definitely have higher premiums, yes."
You may as well ask people to not have health insurance and just pay out of pocket for everything.
Btw - do you really think if you do this that costs will go down for you in this hypothetical system? They won't. Premiums will go up for everyone and the people who will profit are executive leadership.
Aren't those the same thing?
Stop this. It isn't an economics issue. This is a moral issue. Your tract of reasoning is precisely why the world is growing so untenable for the human element. There needn't exist laws or programs or any other edifice by which regulation is effected. People need to be made to realize that they're being wholly indiscretionate and their disposition to do so comes at a cost, and it should be personal to make the point manifest.
If the effect of peoples' real aggregate behavior creates a negative effect that you might suffer from in the future, e.g. breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria, then the more effective position is to STFU with all of the moralizing and support policies that actually work, even if you have to pony up a bit to pay for them. It's cheaper for you in the long run -- you're not just paying to support risky behavior, you're paying so that behavior that is going to happen anyway doesn't put you at risk in the future.
Your options are to be angry today and sick or dead tomorrow, or to let it go, support effective policies today, and get a better shot at a successful tomorrow. Yelling at people doesn't work.
>Your options are to be angry today and sick or dead tomorrow, or to let it go, support effective policies today,
You're asking for one portion of the populous to take on the burden cause by lack of restraint by another. There is legitimate reason for "moralizing" here. This is the point where what "two people do in the privacy of their bedroom" spills over into affecting everyone else.
It's ironic that "yelling at people doesn't work" yet we see just as much yelling and moralizing by the people who want the freedom to do whatever they want even when their actions DO negatively affect others.
Parent is responding to accusations of "conservative prejudice." That is its own moralizing.
You can make the pragmatic argument that it's pointless to try to control the risky behaviors of others, or to expect the people engaged in those risky behaviors to bear the cost of them. But it's pretty insulting to then disparage others as "prejudiced" for not liking this deal, while having no criticism of the behavior itself. "People are going to do what they want" -- well maybe some people want to be upset about subsidizing behavior they don't approve of.
> then the more effective position is to
(emphasis added)
I agree with you that people have the right to be upset, to moralize, etc. My insinuation was that it isn't effective as public policy, which is the extra step that moralizing conservatives seem eager to take.
I'm fine if they want to sit in the corner and whine, but if they're going to use this whining to enact policies that don't work, and that haven't worked despite decades of trying, then I'm going to push back, and yes, I'm going to be a little insulting, especially seeing as they have no problem berating the people that they don't approve of.
People who insist on maintaining a delusion despite evidence that it doesn't work, and despite examples of other policies in other places that produce better results annoy me. Why should I have to pay for the externalities of their stupid opinions when I'm not the one the one having them? (See, it sounds just as ridiculous from the other side)
I'm hard pressed to design a good, reproducible experiment on the question one way or the other.
> The field situation consisted of a park-bench discussion of a topical social issue, arranged by a public-opinion interviewer. Prepared experimental variations were introduced by one of the discussion partners, a confederate of the interviewer. In the critical variation, the confederate insulted the subject during discussion. In other variations, he tried to persuade but did not insult, or else simply gave certain arguments without intent to persuade. Attitude-change results supported the hypothesis of negative change in the insult condition.
Eleanor Gordon-Smith spent two years interviewing people who changed their minds, and suggests this:
> The strategy is this: Ask where people’s beliefs come from as well as what they actually believe.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-the-difficult-secr...
The paper has been cited only about 40 times in the half-century since it was written, but I found one recent interesting citation:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327127198_The_Monta...
That's from 2018 and specifically takes recent American politics into account.I'm skeptical of the study for a variety of reasons, mostly coming down to the issue of what people tell researchers vs what they actually do. But it's good to know that somebody is at least trying.
If I were trying to get moralizing conservatives to agree with me, then not insulting them would indeed be the first part of an effective strategy. However, I'm not trying to change minds, because that is also fruitless.
For the same reason that trying to convince ordinary people that their promiscuous lifestyles are bad won't actually change their behavior, trying to convince moralizing conservatives that their entire worldview is wrong isn't going to change their perspective.
This kind of person is not trying to achieve an effective outcome through policy, they're trying to use policy as a weapon against people they don't like. Debating the effectiveness of various policy options won't move that particular needle, so why bother?
This is a little problematic for me. You are basically saying people have a right to whine, but not a right to try to remedy the situation causing their whining.
Say you live in a fictional country X. Country X has a problem called "Raw Water Fever" where people get these massive chronic migraines because they take untreated stream water and squirt it up their butts with a baster (this is called "basting" - and gives a nice euphoric effect due to some yet-undetermined combination of native bacteria in the water reacting with gut bacteria). Previous efforts to get people in country X to use treated water fail because they complain the treated water doesn't produce any euphoria. The country also tried outright banning basting, and that was also ineffective.
So, the government decides that the right solution to this problem is to reach into your wallet to subsidize free per-use testing kits for the whole country. These testing kits would be able to tell you whether the water you are about to squirt up your butt has the Raw Water Fever bacteria present.
If you protest, the government says that while are allowed to whine about them reaching into your wallet, that's about all you are allowed to do because they already attempted previously to ban basting and it was ineffective.
Are you cool with this, or would it leave a bad taste in your mouth? Now, say that basting is not country X's only source of problems, it has lots of other problems stemming from behaviors you don't partake in. The government wants to reach into your wallet for each of those problems too. How are you feeling at this point? Are you glad to give up your hard earned money to help citizens of country X continue their favorite behaviors safely? Or does it leave a bad taste in your mouth and make you want to move to a different country where the citizens' behaviors align more with your own?
Like just replace the word basting with the word sex in your example.
"The government tried outright banning sex"--sounds pretty ludicrous! Has any government even tried such a thing in all of history?
Personally, I welcome the prospect of my tax dollars being used to help people rather than kill and maim them. The amount each individual has to contribute for such a thing is likely incredibly low as well.
> Sex is something hardwired into people
This is an appeal to nature. We naturally want to do it, therefore we shouldn't try to resist it? There are many counter examples: violence, incest, tribalism, and other undesirable evolutionary behaviors are hardwired into people (and animals) too, yet our efforts to reduce/temper their influence and emergence can be quite effective (though not 100% effective). Why is sex any different? I think we could temper sexual activity with the right messaging (and more importantly, leading by example) to youth.
Something like "sex is something that should be reserved for a committed relationship, not a recreational activity you should do casually - the latter leads to a lot of problems in society. Nevertheless, the choice is up to you and here are the risks and things you need to know either way..." Obviously "accidents" would still happen, but the idea would be to address the root cause of sex-related issues in society instead of throwing your hands into the air and deciding to just treat the symptoms.
> violence, incest, tribalism, and other undesirable evolutionary behaviors
None of the explicitly mentioned things in this list are similarly essential to the continuation of humans and human civilization. Like violence may in reality be unavoidable, but that doesn't mean it's strictly necessary.
But I do agree that appeal to nature alone isn't very strong. Like to me, I guess it's moreso what seems like extreme impracticality in trying to control people's sexuality to a finer degree than is already in place.
I agree trying to "control" people's sexuality is extremely impractical. That's why I think it needs to be more a cultural value that we collectively decide is worth teaching to kids (and leading by example), not something the government forces on us. I think that would work because it worked for me and my extended family as far as I can tell (with a few exceptions).
I would like to believe I have somewhat of a unique perspective on this. I was raised with the exact cultural values you talk about, and I ultimately chose to reject them (at least partially).
However, I do want to acknowledge what seems like a destabilizing, negative effect "hookup culture" or the like has had on society. Dating apps are part of this whole issue as well.
My own position is that I want to be in a committed relationship but never married. So I guess you could peg me as a serial monogamist.
Why should we have to change and pay up? Why shouldn't they have to change and rein in their hedonism?
Take alcohol for example. You might say "you can't prevent people from drinking, look at Prohibition, it was a complete failure, don't even try", and in a certain sense you are right. You can't prevent all people from drinking.
However, you can prevent many people from drinking (or at least, reduce the total amount of drinking to more moderate levels) by:
- Not glorifying alcohol via pop culture and movies (especially American binge drinking at age 21)
- Restrict/regulate alcohol advertisements and marketing to reduce the influence of "drinking = happiness" messaging
- etc.
Or, stated in other terms, you can exacerbate your country's alcohol-related issues by glorifying alcohol and enshrining it in popular culture.
In the same vein, maybe we wouldn't have as big of a problem if we didn't glorify casual sex encounters so much in our media. If popular media/culture instead glorified things like self-restraint, commitment, etc, I'm sure some % of people would be influenced.
Hmm, let's see how well that worked with sexually active teenagers in the bible belt, shall we?
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/abstinence-programs-i...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/23/5452891...
https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...
actually doing something effective like taxing the purchase of alcohol to such a level that people don't do as much of it unless they are alcoholics.
So all we have to do is tax when people purchase their genitalia for the weekend.
To date I have yet to come across anything in mainstream media that comes close to 'glorifying' the type of relationship I have with my partner, or non-monogamy in general. Can you give any examples of this?
I'd also argue I'm in a committed relationship, but I'm not going argue semantics.
I'm more talking about shows and movies that make it seem like non-committal hookups and switching sexual partners rapidly for any reason is cool and totally normal:
- How I Met Your Mother (Barney)
- The Office (everyone has slept with everyone by the end)
- Game of Thrones
You could argue the "good" characters like Tyrion typically showed more commitment in their sexual activities than "bad" characters like Theon who just knocked up random women for fun. But even then you have instances where the "heroes" like Arya have one night stands with no consequences (because HBO wanted to be edgy).
- Friends
Even if not, are we asking the government to step in and ban Friends? Because if not, I don’t see how this observation gives us anything approaching a solution.
Absolutely not. Government should not have to solve every problem in society. The solution is for us (consumers) to not watch shows that promote values we don't agree with. And if you do agree with them... you reap what you sow.
Of course it is useful - if you don’t know of a thing, you don’t know the consequences of engaging in that thing. It’s as axiomatic as the trite and age old saying “knowledge is power”. Your comment is completely disingenuous.
In the case of Game of Thrones, a lot of the more 'liberal' sexual encounters were really put in for shock value or an excuse for nudity, for example Oberyn's orgy scenes. I never really got the feeling it was trying to normalise these things, but that was just my interpretation.
Similarly for Friends my interpretation was characters like Joey were to be the punchline of a joke, not to say his behaviour was normal. It felt more to laugh AT him, not to normalise it.
My experiences of mainstream media seems to largely focus on the young bachelor(ette) who has casual sex as a 'phase', or the monogamous faithful couple who've grown up and matured. Despite this narrative, I really don't believe monogamy works for a fair percentage of the population. This leads to either two states:-
1. They never form close romantic relationships, leading to more casual sex and probably larger risk of spreading STDs.
2. They do engage in a monogamous relationship, only for it to turn sour because of the tensions it causes. In some cases this leads to a party cheating on the other. These people almost never go to STI clinics to get tested for fear it will ruin their relationships.
How about instead the mainstream media embraced the idea of wanting to have multiple sexual partners is fine regardless of your stage of your life or your relationship status? That way, we can have make sure that everyone is informed of the risks and getting the medical treatment they need to keep themselves and others safe (particularly regular testing). As soon as you start demonising it and saying you shouldn't feel that way, people will do it anyway and just hide it instead.
Why subsidize an activity that puts health at risk? Sure, people will do what they want, but this just incentivizes people to put themselves at risk and makes everyone else pay for it.
Sure, but that doesn’t stop us from trying to influence people in other areas, so why should it stop us here. By this argument we should abolish all laws because what’s the point of telling someone “don’t murder” when “people are going to do what they want”?
Your post makes it sound like you are also against taxing cigarettes or taxing cars with big engines or banning guns since we should not (or it would be pointless) to influence behavior in such ways.
That’s obviously not true. Asian countries for example have far lower rates of drug use, sex outside of marriage, etc. than western countries. For example Bangladesh, the country where I’m from, has virtually no prevalence of HIV. (And it actually has quite a good system of health reporting so it’s not just failure to collect data.) Societies can in fact shame and coerce people into avoiding harmful behaviors.
The dollar cost of casual sex culture is not a reason I have heard cited as an argument against casual sex in pop conservatism. If you want to get into what costs society a greater amount, gay men getting syphilis is going to be way farther down the list than people having large numbers of children. We heavily subsidize that form of sexual activity.
People are engaged in this behaviour either way, it doesn't require subsidy.
What you do by enabling everyone to self-monitor is solve the collective harm of harmful viruses spreading.
So do you want to preserve your moral sensibility, or do you want to stop the spread of viruses?
I think it is perfectly reasonable to say, of people who choose the former, that they aren't very praiseworthy people.
Society is terrible at this, though. Issues like this tend to become proxy wars for other things.
I mean, look how mask wearing has become moralized. It should never have become a silly political fight, it should've been people helping people get masks and avoid disease. Instead, we have all sorts of nonsense like idiots burning masks or arresting someone alone on a deserted beach for not having a mask.
You know, it's interesting that we highlight the health burden of other activities like smoking and some governments want to go as far as banning salt and sugary soda for the same reasons.
But on this one topic we treat people like they're monsters for suggesting we should be choosier about our sexual encounters. Not just that sexual freedom is prioritized in our society, but _exercising_ that freedom is treated like a virtue. Despite all of the obvious costs and despite the fact that most people end up being less active than we'd expect and on the other side of that spectrum a lot of people come to regret their choices.
Nonetheless, the word itself has strong connotations and it's mostly neither nice nor effective to tell someone to their face that they are prejudiced. And I can't assume it to be the case about a potential reader of my post.
Regarding whether it is good policy, even with a conservative value system, my sibling comments have already presented most of the points I would make.
Because the most vocal "conservatives" are often the ones that, in private, are the most casual about sex. Not a day goes by without a news story about a conservative politician caught in some sexual scandal/coverup/fiasco. It is to the point that if I see any powerful man advocating abstinence I just assume he has a couple girlfriends stashed somewhere. Thou doth protest too much.
When you are willing to retire to a plot of land and live entirely upon it, including starving each winter, then you may throw stones at "subsidizing" other people's risky behavior. Until then, you don't get to pick and choose which behavior we subsidize and which we do not.
Alternatively, we can pass a law that says citizens can choose which kinds of risky behavior they are willing so subsidize with their taxes.
(a) try to reduce the number of people who engage in risky sex—through changing people's views, different upbringing and whatnot;
(b) try to mitigate the consequences of their behaviour—by subsidizing testing for infections and treatment.
Note that there's no dichotomy here.
I don't know if there's a good, reliable way to do (a); also, some people can be against it for ideological reasons. But (b) in the meantime is straightforward to implement and is known to be efficient. Why not implement (b) and make it work it while we are arguing about (a)?
> maybe the “conservatives” are correct to be “prejudiced” against it?
Conservatives should not be stigmatized for supporting (a), this is not prejudice, they can have the view they have on sex. But I don't see a single reason, except prejudice, that can make you go against (b), which is simply practical.
I don't think it's prejudiced to notice that casual sex is a risky behavior that harms one's community. We all agree wearing masks is not about your comfort level but it's about keeping society safe. Why is casual sex not seen the same way?
While I agree, €50 for an ONS is not exactly cheap.
This also helps less developed and rich nations than Germany. A USD 10 comprehensive test for basic STDs would be a huge game changer in Africa.
Against syphillis?
I suppose we've had the trifecta of bad HN comments: diet and exercise as a magic ward against all sickness, victim-blaming the AIDS crisis, and suggestions of recording everyone's sexual activity on the blockchain. I've flagged the story for this.
In retrospect, it could generalize even further than health because humans tend to follow "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." We cling to fixing things we break vs exercising even a bit of caution to reduce the chances of breaking things as a strategy, even when prevention is sometimes trivial or were talking about our own health.
If you're talking about Syphilis diet and exercise could make the problem worse. Your opportunities for random hookups are more frequent when you are fit.
FWIW, this has been debated several times recently, and generally some one ends up quoting some PG comment about how downvoting as disagreements is fine.
But what if the nano-bots get a virus!
You might like bacteriophages — viruses which eat bacteria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage
It's shockingly dangerous and should be illegal.
In this case, explicitly mentioning the antibiotics abuse and how that leads to resistance would've made a big difference in quality. Going further and explaining feasible ways about how to deal with it and how to manage the economical and lifestyle impact of possible solutions in a feasible manner would've been even better.
I could go to the nth degree and speak about how capitalism creates a lot of negative externalities, including factory farming, pollution, depression and the current state of the news. In fact take the latter — here is a website for what the problem is, what the solutions are, and how to fix it... as well as an hour long interview that goes into all the details:
https://rational.app
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M8HbvC6vqIY
I often go into amazing detail and write blog posts about each topic... but if I link to them on HN, I would usually get accused of throwing out “20 claims at once” and “shilling my blog” and my videos and solutions (that I give away for free). You just can’t win with some people...
If you were making a detailed argument about the issues with unregulated capitalism, and I would just respond with "Go read some Mises", it's just a lazy cop-out that doesn't address the problems you're presenting and lowers whatever value the comments may have to a reader, even if I had a point or not.
You cannot form a decent realm of discourse when every comment is low-effort. This is the kind of thing that (for now, and only up to a certain degree) separates Hacker News from things like popular subreddits that only chant trendy opinions or act as venting boxes without much actual factual discussion going on.
FWIW I'm just as guilty as the GP of doing the same at times, and I should be called out for it as well whenever it happens. Sometimes we don't know what we don't know, know too much and take things for granted, or can't tell when our biases are showing. It is up to the community as a whole to keep the standards high.
Yes, I get the doing both is not mutually exclusive. The point isn't that stopping both wouldn't be great. The point is the way it's presented "look at that backward nation doing things that breed pathogens" without actually even considering their own country is just as guilty. Effectively "we're smart and enlightened, you're backward and ignorant"
I am not disagreeing that both practices are bad, but that is just not the point.
Downvotes don't change facts. The browbeating over people misusing antibiotics at the individual level is a lot like plastic producers guilting consumers over recycling when the root cause is from industry.
Factory farming uses antibiotics purely for profit, the health of the animals is only an ancillary benefit. Animals fed antibiotics grow larger, driving higher profits. It's a tragedy of the commons situation, since the abuse of antibiotics has major negative externalities for us all, but the profits are reserved for the owners of the factory farms.
We need a UBI funded by Pigovian taxes on pollution and other negative externalities. It’s the only way I can see ending these situations sustainably!
With all the progress made because of Covid, it might just be possible. Syphilis has been a big vaccination challenge.
Edit: Why I am getting downvoted for this of all things? Do people hate syphilis victims so much? Not everyone who catches syphilis is a raging cheater.
Plague vaccine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_vaccine
Diphtheria vaccine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphtheria_vaccine
BCG vaccine against tuberculosis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCG_vaccine
Typhoid vaccine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoid_vaccine
Cholera vaccine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera_vaccine
When humans build a great tool to eradicate a disease, people think it's a free pass to do anything. Sometimes I think we deserve whatever pandemic is thrown at us.