"Bodily passion was not just a part of Bentham's life: it was fundamental to his thought... Of all enjoyments, Bentham reasoned, sex was the most universal, the most easily accessible, the most intense, and the most copious – nothing was more conducive to happiness."
Yep, this is someone who tech nerds can honestly relate with. Easily accessible. Uh huh.
"The biggest thing, the thing that bothered me the most is I felt like my intelligence was greatly devalued,” she wrote. ”I am a smart woman. I have a master’s from Berkeley in philosophy. My brain is very abstract, though, the exact opposite of so many men in tech who have very concrete/literal brains."
Sounds like a sexist generalism to me. Maybe she should meet more of us. And while we're flirting with anecdote, perhaps I can take samples from within the population of my little town out in the sticks and demonstrate the same lack of abstract thinking in the women here.
I was more struck by the idea that high paid software engineers have the opposite of 'abstract' thinking. I mean programming is all about abstraction piled upon abstraction. Maybe they really they meant something else like 'tolerance for ambiguity.'
I'd go so far as to allow the quoted to be referring more generally to tech workers in general, including many that do not function in the abstract.
With regard to "tolerance for ambiguity," perhaps there's a point to be made. I know I have a low tolerance for ambiguity, but I work with male co-workers (cough sales weasels cough) that are just as ambiguous about things as anyone else could ever be.
However, I think you've illuminated a point that I hadn't considered: that the speaker meant something other than what was said; that this self-described intelligent individual may have not been clear; or didn't understand how their words would be misinterpreted; or is oblivious to their own misuse of language. And this is usually the cause for so much animosity and/or ambivalence: that the speaker/writer can't be bothered to clarify their intent; that they throw up their hands and declare "you wouldn't understand!" rather than explain themselves; and further that their audience is all-to-eager to castigate them for being stubborn, abusive, obtuse, etc.
I've been having trouble expressing the seemingly paradoxical nature of many people in my (our?) field being both 'abstract' but also extremely 'concrete/literal' in their behavior (especially socially).
It seems that many people I meet with occupations that involve a lot of abstraction (like programming) also have a tendency to try and abstract things that they perhaps should not. Conversation, discussion, etiquette, and so on, tend to suffer when too much generalization (or 'control) is applied to them in an effort to abstract them.
That still doesn't really explain this phenomenon though. One could argue that it's quite possible to 'abstract' the social world: "being correct is often not the point of an interaction", "listening is valuable in itself, even if the subject matter is not always fascinating", and "imagine yourself in the position of the person you're talking to" are all simple rules that I see many people break.
Perhaps it's to do with the context where such an abstraction is applied. Especially in the IT world we spend a lot of time being able to think about abstractions, whereas in a social setting we might have to internalize these abstractions more.
I would say the current state of the tech world is antithetical to Bentham's views in just about every sense. We, as a group, are massively sex-negative.
Is that why this article is on the top, or because it was submitted by an admin?
By "sex-negative," do you mean "negative about gender" or "negative about sexuality" or even "negative about the act of intercourse?"
I can't begin to generalize about my technology peers because they are such a diverse group and because intercourse, sexuality and gender don't affect our professional interactions. From my perspective, it's just that these things are not relevant to the part of our lives that intersect, not that we're negative about them.
> By "sex-negative," do you mean "negative about gender" or "negative about sexuality" or even "negative about the act of intercourse?"
The latter two.
> "..intercourse, sexuality and gender don't affect our professional interactions...these things are not relevant to the part of our lives that intersect, not that we're negative about them."
You seem to be of the opinion that it is completely possible to separate the personal from the professional. Yet a lot of us absorbed in the tech/startup world spend the larger part of our awake time (~10 hours or more) interacting with people at work. In such an environment, I don't think it is realistic to totally separate the professional from the personal. Otherwise, you turn the meaning of "personal" on its head for the majority of your working week, if you have to behave "non-personally" for > 60% of the time.'
And actually I think this is part of what I mean to say. The attitude of, "Sex is not relevant in the workplace. Let's be professional about this." Why not, exactly? Why are professionalism and sexuality mutually exclusive? Maybe if we at least explore the possible reasons why people's sexual motivations may cause them to interact in specific ways at work, we can make progress towards making those interactions somewhat positive and frictionless.
I'm of the opinion that most people don't need to discuss things irrelevant to the task at hand. I deal with personal life throughout the day - I IM my wife and children for various reasons. I have co-worker friends that I lunch with and with whom I do discuss personal matters sometimes. I do not need to discuss personal matters, let alone sexual (for all interpretations) matters, with my manager, with the other team members, with various other male and female co-workers. It's not relevant to the reason I'm at the office. Ever.
Your things are very specific to your situation, yet you yourself easily generalize them to "most people". What about people who don't have wives or children? What if their social circles are mostly concentrated at the office (as often happens with young people in startups)? What if they have a crush on their manager, or their attractive co-worker?
These are real things that happen, and just forbidding them from ever being spoken of is not a very good strategy in my opinion. And I think Bentham's thoughts are very applicable in this regard.
Who said anything about forbidding these topics? I simply express a lack of understanding about why such things would be relevant to a place that has nothing to do with such topics. People want to talk about this stuff at work? Fine let's talk. But at some point, we need to get our jobs done. If sex and gender are an obstacle to getting work done (you know, the actual reason we're even getting paid to be in this office), then sex and gender discussions are a priority.
As it stands, they're not critical to doing my job. If you're standing around the water cooler for hours a day discussing football, cinema, the symphony, and/or sex, you're not getting your job done unless you work for a company whose business revolves around these things. Are these things taboo at the office? Certainly not. Are they relevant to the jobs of most people in the US? I doubt it, but certainly I could be swayed by actual data on the subject.
> "People want to talk about this stuff at work?......water cooler for hours a day discussing football, cinema, the symphony, and/or sex..."
Either you misunderstand my point, or you're making a straw man argument. I was talking about discussion on here (HN), not sitting around water coolers in the office for several hours. See how my previous comment has been downvoted without explanation? I'm talking about that sort of thing, reflexive "Ewww, he said sex!" behaviour.
> "If sex and gender are an obstacle to getting work done (you know, the actual reason we're even getting paid to be in this office...."
Well, it isn't an obstacle to work every day, but it can be. You might have heard of the github incident recently, or if you haven't, you might want to read the details.
>Is that why this article is on the top, or because it was submitted by an admin?
Speaking purely for myself I've previously read up on the history of philosophy and was a fan of Bentham. It was interesting to find this new side to him which is not in the usual text books.
Men and women are sexual beings, no doubt; and sex can be about but pleasure, but also so much more.
Readers here may be interested in studying a somewhat different take on human sexuality, John Paul II's Theology of the Body[1], which "presents an interpretation of the fundamental significance of the body, and in particular of sexual differentiation and complementarity, one which aims to challenge common contemporary philosophical views."[2]
They were from the leader of one of the largest religions of the world–which still represents roughly 17% of the world population. I'd say they are still relevant and part of what Numberwang refers to as a "modern view of the world".
BTW, I'm not saying I agree with the content of those lectures. Only that dismissing them because you think the modern world doesn't hold those views is silly. And, yes, I'm aware that more recent pontiffs have expressed different views.
You seem to be confusing "relevant" with "correct".
The teachings are most definitely relevant, if for no other reason than that perhaps a billion people worldwide consider the teacher to be directly important to them.
> The ability of the human body to express truth through the sexual union of married couples is acclaimed. The moral wrongness of using artificial means to manipulate such a significant aspect of the created body is explained.
Please take a moment to reflect how much damage this type of thinking has done in the world.
This book isn't just useless and misguided, it's positively evil.
Without having read the book or arguing for one side or the other, I have to point out that you aren't attempting to meet with the argument or even attack the premises. Instead, you're looking at the conclusion and declaring that, in effect, it is immoral to even argue for that position. This is dogmatism; this is wrong; this is antithetical to sound and rational behavior (to be clear, "this" is your argument, not his!). In short, you /might/ even say that what you've just done is... evil.
> It follows that many of those who died from AIDS would still be alive today had the Catholic Church abandoned its condom ban in the 1980s, as it became clear that condoms were (and still are) the most effective practical measure to prevent the spread of the disease.
Also forbidding sane family planning and the prevention of unwanted offspring, where lack of necessary resources causes even more disease and more death.
People undeterred by the catholic church's prohibition on sex outside marriage are unlikely to be reluctant to wear condoms because of doctrinal concerns, I'd have thought.
Theoretically, yes, but sadly the reality isn't quite like that. Passion/desire often trumps doctrine, and doing something that one thinks one shouldn't do can have all sorts of nasty consequences, ranging from teen pregnancy to untreated STD's.
Having been an Evangelical Christian and 'assistant teen pastor' in a previous life, I've seen this in action in many different areas of life. People constantly did things they believed were wrong, and the combination of not being prepared or informed about those things and feeling ashamed about it afterwards led to a lot of suffering.
believe it or not but you do not to have direct experience to be able to produce judgment. In fact researcher should have distance from the subject he/she is investigating.
Sodomy, he argued, was not just harmless but evidently pleasurable to its participants. The mere fact that the custom was abhorrent to the majority of the community no more justified the persecution of sodomites than it did the killing of Jews, heretics, smokers, or people who ate oysters – "to destroy a man there should certainly be some better reason than mere dislike to his Taste, let that dislike be ever so strong".
It's a shame that Jeremy Bentham's name is nowadays more associated with Lost than the utilitarianism he pioneered. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation is a good intro to his general line of thinking: http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/278
Yes. It's a conventional view now, but Bentham was so far ahead of his time on this that it makes him seem more interesting. That's what's significant about this article. It's remarkable in intellectual history for views so contrarian (and prescient) to be discovered in a major thinker 200 years later.
Unfortunately, the thread quickly went hopelessly off kilter. It's being heavily flagged and we're certainly not going to override that.
It's a conventional view now, but Bentham was so far ahead of his time
Bentham was "ahead of his time" only because his intellectual descendants triumphed. If, e.g., the Nazis had won WWII, 19th-century anti-Semites would have appeared "ahead of their time". In other words, it's wrong to equate "being ahead of your time" with "being righteous".
Bentham was also wrong about sodomy being harmless, at least regarding anal sex. Among other things, anal intercourse causes loose sphincters in its recipients and is far more effective at spreading sexually transmitted diseases than vaginal intercourse. (This is a Humean is, though—a matter of fact. It doesn't necessarily justify banning the practice. That's a Humean ought—a matter of opinion.)
Nah. I tried incognito and the results were the same. Still I'm in the UK. I'm guessing you are in the US? Maybe Google thinks brits are interested in philosophy and the yanks are interested in Lost? -
Update: I tried incognito and a US proxy and the highest Lost entry moved from no 13 to no 7, though utilitarianism was still in the lead
> In one surviving letter to a friend, he joked that his rereading of the Bible had finally revealed that the sin for which God had punished the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah was not in fact buggery, but the taking of snuff. He and his secretary had consequently taken a solemn oath to hide their snuff-pouches and nevermore to indulge "that anti-Christian and really unnatural practice" in front of one another. Meanwhile, they were now both happily free to enjoy "the liberty of taking in the churchyard or in the market place, or in any more or less public or retired spot with Man, Woman or Beast, the amusement till now supposed to be so unrighteous, but now discovered to be a matter of indifference".
This got a snicker from me. I guess sex jokes really do never get old.
"Sodom's real crime was _____" is considerably less funny when you realize a rape gang surrounded Lot's house in the Biblical story. That's not the sort of thing I'm inclined to brush off with a joke.
The original article seemed to me to be destined to provoke a religious (or possibly political) flamewar. That's probably why it's been flagged way down to the second page. I was honestly surprised that you were the one who posted it; I'd have thought you'd have foreseen it being problematic.
I did my best to keep this comment targeted at the "rape isn't funny" angle rather than the "here's how I do or don't agree with the Bible" angle -- that is, directed at the offensive concept rather than the religious source. If you have a suggestion as to how I could have better stated it, please let me know.
> The original article seemed to me to be destined to provoke a religious flamewar.
This strikes me as utterly odd. The article is about a major new finding in intellectual history. If Bentham used Biblical language, it is only because everyone did.
That said, your theory of the article fits the data of the thread better than mine does.
That in turn said, a "rape isn't funny" flamewar is every bit as off-topic if not more so.
I'll try to respond to the points you've made here and upthread.
I posted the article because it surprised me. Also, of all the classic components of HN, history is by far the least represented. HN needs more high-quality historical articles.
Is this article high-quality? I take it you don't think so, but it seems to me as good a bit of intellectual history as we can hope for from major media these days. It manages to be serious, not overly tendentious, and packed full of information. To pick just one example, the fact that Bentham's writings on sex were kept out of Bentham scholarship as late as the 1960s is remarkable. So I'd say the article easily clears the bar for a good HN post. It's also news, of a sort—a pretty dramatic revelation about a major thinker.
The thread went bonkers, but we should hesitate to overinterpret that. There's a lot of randomness, and the threads are sensitive to initial conditions. It's not hard to imagine a sensible discussion of this article on HN, though the dice came up snake eyes this time.
As for off-topicness, sorry to put this glibly, but yes: responding to something off-topic with something even more off-topic is certainly off-topic. Triply so when it's a fast track to a flamewar.
An on-topic discussion is typically about the specific content of the article—the things that make it stand out from other stories. Going on a tangent is fine if it's something surprising, i.e. if the tangent adds information, like this one did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077. But when a thread breaks away from the specific content of a story and makes a beeline for some generality, no information is added. The worst kind of beeline is the predictable ideological tangent. That's not only off-topic, but likely to fuel an agitated argument, and those are the lowest-quality discussions on HN.
So the rule of thumb for on-topicness on HN is something like this: story specifics good, predictable ideological tangents bad.
> "It manages to be serious, not overly tendentious, and packed full of information."
Odd. I found it to be lacking in valuable information. There was no indication as to whether there had been any new manuscript discoveries (though the sidebar indicates the writings are being newly published). There was no indication as to anything particularly surprising about his views other than the era in which they occurred. "There was a guy a few centuries back who agreed with modern sexual mores, and it wasn't published because society wasn't open to it a few centuries back" doesn't strike me as a particularly valuable contribution. Obviously some people saw it as such or it wouldn't have gotten so many upvotes -- but obviously others saw it as not belonging.
> "responding to something off-topic"
It was a direct quote from the article. In fact, it was the quote from the article that I thought pushed it over the line into flagging territory.
Even so, I'm not sure why you think my response was a fast track to a flamewar. I think my response was measured and calm, clearly explaining why the comment in the original post was problematic, and furthermore adding information people might not be aware of (that Sodom wasn't following modern "not your business what consenting adults do" practice; "rape culture" was alive and well there.) I would expect people reading such a comment to come away with better understanding, and perhaps not be so quick to treat Sodom as modern/enlightened.
It's possible that your instinctive sense of horror is exactly Bentham's point and the joke: something is not only bad because it's what the Bible says is bad. If we discover that we had all missread that part of the Bible, would forcible sodomy be OK now? It's absurd!
Bentham was the first major English philosopher of sexual liberty, and it's about time we celebrated that. "If there be one idea more ridiculous than another," he once wrote about the sexual prohibitions of his day, it was that "of a legislator who, when a man and a woman are agreed about a business of this sort, thrusts himself in between them, examining situations, regulating times, and prescribing modes and postures". Today we are all the heirs of this once revolutionary way of thinking.
53 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadYep, this is someone who tech nerds can honestly relate with. Easily accessible. Uh huh.
http://www.damemagazine.com/2014/05/23/amazon-killing-my-sex...
Hmmm...
Sounds like a sexist generalism to me. Maybe she should meet more of us. And while we're flirting with anecdote, perhaps I can take samples from within the population of my little town out in the sticks and demonstrate the same lack of abstract thinking in the women here.
With regard to "tolerance for ambiguity," perhaps there's a point to be made. I know I have a low tolerance for ambiguity, but I work with male co-workers (cough sales weasels cough) that are just as ambiguous about things as anyone else could ever be.
However, I think you've illuminated a point that I hadn't considered: that the speaker meant something other than what was said; that this self-described intelligent individual may have not been clear; or didn't understand how their words would be misinterpreted; or is oblivious to their own misuse of language. And this is usually the cause for so much animosity and/or ambivalence: that the speaker/writer can't be bothered to clarify their intent; that they throw up their hands and declare "you wouldn't understand!" rather than explain themselves; and further that their audience is all-to-eager to castigate them for being stubborn, abusive, obtuse, etc.
It seems that many people I meet with occupations that involve a lot of abstraction (like programming) also have a tendency to try and abstract things that they perhaps should not. Conversation, discussion, etiquette, and so on, tend to suffer when too much generalization (or 'control) is applied to them in an effort to abstract them.
That still doesn't really explain this phenomenon though. One could argue that it's quite possible to 'abstract' the social world: "being correct is often not the point of an interaction", "listening is valuable in itself, even if the subject matter is not always fascinating", and "imagine yourself in the position of the person you're talking to" are all simple rules that I see many people break.
Perhaps it's to do with the context where such an abstraction is applied. Especially in the IT world we spend a lot of time being able to think about abstractions, whereas in a social setting we might have to internalize these abstractions more.
Is that why this article is on the top, or because it was submitted by an admin?
I can't begin to generalize about my technology peers because they are such a diverse group and because intercourse, sexuality and gender don't affect our professional interactions. From my perspective, it's just that these things are not relevant to the part of our lives that intersect, not that we're negative about them.
The latter two.
> "..intercourse, sexuality and gender don't affect our professional interactions...these things are not relevant to the part of our lives that intersect, not that we're negative about them."
You seem to be of the opinion that it is completely possible to separate the personal from the professional. Yet a lot of us absorbed in the tech/startup world spend the larger part of our awake time (~10 hours or more) interacting with people at work. In such an environment, I don't think it is realistic to totally separate the professional from the personal. Otherwise, you turn the meaning of "personal" on its head for the majority of your working week, if you have to behave "non-personally" for > 60% of the time.'
And actually I think this is part of what I mean to say. The attitude of, "Sex is not relevant in the workplace. Let's be professional about this." Why not, exactly? Why are professionalism and sexuality mutually exclusive? Maybe if we at least explore the possible reasons why people's sexual motivations may cause them to interact in specific ways at work, we can make progress towards making those interactions somewhat positive and frictionless.
These are real things that happen, and just forbidding them from ever being spoken of is not a very good strategy in my opinion. And I think Bentham's thoughts are very applicable in this regard.
As it stands, they're not critical to doing my job. If you're standing around the water cooler for hours a day discussing football, cinema, the symphony, and/or sex, you're not getting your job done unless you work for a company whose business revolves around these things. Are these things taboo at the office? Certainly not. Are they relevant to the jobs of most people in the US? I doubt it, but certainly I could be swayed by actual data on the subject.
Either you misunderstand my point, or you're making a straw man argument. I was talking about discussion on here (HN), not sitting around water coolers in the office for several hours. See how my previous comment has been downvoted without explanation? I'm talking about that sort of thing, reflexive "Ewww, he said sex!" behaviour.
> "If sex and gender are an obstacle to getting work done (you know, the actual reason we're even getting paid to be in this office...."
Well, it isn't an obstacle to work every day, but it can be. You might have heard of the github incident recently, or if you haven't, you might want to read the details.
Speaking purely for myself I've previously read up on the history of philosophy and was a fan of Bentham. It was interesting to find this new side to him which is not in the usual text books.
Readers here may be interested in studying a somewhat different take on human sexuality, John Paul II's Theology of the Body[1], which "presents an interpretation of the fundamental significance of the body, and in particular of sexual differentiation and complementarity, one which aims to challenge common contemporary philosophical views."[2]
[1] http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP2TBIND.HTM
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology_of_the_Body
BTW, I'm not saying I agree with the content of those lectures. Only that dismissing them because you think the modern world doesn't hold those views is silly. And, yes, I'm aware that more recent pontiffs have expressed different views.
The teachings are most definitely relevant, if for no other reason than that perhaps a billion people worldwide consider the teacher to be directly important to them.
Please take a moment to reflect how much damage this type of thinking has done in the world.
This book isn't just useless and misguided, it's positively evil.
> It follows that many of those who died from AIDS would still be alive today had the Catholic Church abandoned its condom ban in the 1980s, as it became clear that condoms were (and still are) the most effective practical measure to prevent the spread of the disease.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_HIV/AIDS
Also forbidding sane family planning and the prevention of unwanted offspring, where lack of necessary resources causes even more disease and more death.
Having been an Evangelical Christian and 'assistant teen pastor' in a previous life, I've seen this in action in many different areas of life. People constantly did things they believed were wrong, and the combination of not being prepared or informed about those things and feeling ashamed about it afterwards led to a lot of suffering.
Sodomy, he argued, was not just harmless but evidently pleasurable to its participants. The mere fact that the custom was abhorrent to the majority of the community no more justified the persecution of sodomites than it did the killing of Jews, heretics, smokers, or people who ate oysters – "to destroy a man there should certainly be some better reason than mere dislike to his Taste, let that dislike be ever so strong".
It's a shame that Jeremy Bentham's name is nowadays more associated with Lost than the utilitarianism he pioneered. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation is a good intro to his general line of thinking: http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/278
Unfortunately, the thread quickly went hopelessly off kilter. It's being heavily flagged and we're certainly not going to override that.
Bentham was "ahead of his time" only because his intellectual descendants triumphed. If, e.g., the Nazis had won WWII, 19th-century anti-Semites would have appeared "ahead of their time". In other words, it's wrong to equate "being ahead of your time" with "being righteous".
Bentham was also wrong about sodomy being harmless, at least regarding anal sex. Among other things, anal intercourse causes loose sphincters in its recipients and is far more effective at spreading sexually transmitted diseases than vaginal intercourse. (This is a Humean is, though—a matter of fact. It doesn't necessarily justify banning the practice. That's a Humean ought—a matter of opinion.)
I'm relieved to see if I google Jeremy Bentham the first twelve links are about utilitarianism with Lost not coming till no. 13.
That's only because Google knows you read this article.
Search in a private/incognito window incognito window and all the results are about Lost.
Update: I tried incognito and a US proxy and the highest Lost entry moved from no 13 to no 7, though utilitarianism was still in the lead
1: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
This got a snicker from me. I guess sex jokes really do never get old.
I did my best to keep this comment targeted at the "rape isn't funny" angle rather than the "here's how I do or don't agree with the Bible" angle -- that is, directed at the offensive concept rather than the religious source. If you have a suggestion as to how I could have better stated it, please let me know.
This strikes me as utterly odd. The article is about a major new finding in intellectual history. If Bentham used Biblical language, it is only because everyone did.
That said, your theory of the article fits the data of the thread better than mine does.
That in turn said, a "rape isn't funny" flamewar is every bit as off-topic if not more so.
... in response to a joke about Sodom and Gomorrah?
Perhaps that's not the topic you originally intended, but as the comments show, the article left the door wide open for it.
> "The article is about a major new finding in intellectual history"
It presents that finding in a very poor way.
I posted the article because it surprised me. Also, of all the classic components of HN, history is by far the least represented. HN needs more high-quality historical articles.
Is this article high-quality? I take it you don't think so, but it seems to me as good a bit of intellectual history as we can hope for from major media these days. It manages to be serious, not overly tendentious, and packed full of information. To pick just one example, the fact that Bentham's writings on sex were kept out of Bentham scholarship as late as the 1960s is remarkable. So I'd say the article easily clears the bar for a good HN post. It's also news, of a sort—a pretty dramatic revelation about a major thinker.
The thread went bonkers, but we should hesitate to overinterpret that. There's a lot of randomness, and the threads are sensitive to initial conditions. It's not hard to imagine a sensible discussion of this article on HN, though the dice came up snake eyes this time.
As for off-topicness, sorry to put this glibly, but yes: responding to something off-topic with something even more off-topic is certainly off-topic. Triply so when it's a fast track to a flamewar.
An on-topic discussion is typically about the specific content of the article—the things that make it stand out from other stories. Going on a tangent is fine if it's something surprising, i.e. if the tangent adds information, like this one did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077. But when a thread breaks away from the specific content of a story and makes a beeline for some generality, no information is added. The worst kind of beeline is the predictable ideological tangent. That's not only off-topic, but likely to fuel an agitated argument, and those are the lowest-quality discussions on HN.
So the rule of thumb for on-topicness on HN is something like this: story specifics good, predictable ideological tangents bad.
Odd. I found it to be lacking in valuable information. There was no indication as to whether there had been any new manuscript discoveries (though the sidebar indicates the writings are being newly published). There was no indication as to anything particularly surprising about his views other than the era in which they occurred. "There was a guy a few centuries back who agreed with modern sexual mores, and it wasn't published because society wasn't open to it a few centuries back" doesn't strike me as a particularly valuable contribution. Obviously some people saw it as such or it wouldn't have gotten so many upvotes -- but obviously others saw it as not belonging.
> "responding to something off-topic"
It was a direct quote from the article. In fact, it was the quote from the article that I thought pushed it over the line into flagging territory.
Even so, I'm not sure why you think my response was a fast track to a flamewar. I think my response was measured and calm, clearly explaining why the comment in the original post was problematic, and furthermore adding information people might not be aware of (that Sodom wasn't following modern "not your business what consenting adults do" practice; "rape culture" was alive and well there.) I would expect people reading such a comment to come away with better understanding, and perhaps not be so quick to treat Sodom as modern/enlightened.
Bentham was the first major English philosopher of sexual liberty, and it's about time we celebrated that. "If there be one idea more ridiculous than another," he once wrote about the sexual prohibitions of his day, it was that "of a legislator who, when a man and a woman are agreed about a business of this sort, thrusts himself in between them, examining situations, regulating times, and prescribing modes and postures". Today we are all the heirs of this once revolutionary way of thinking.