I’m not taking it personally. Go back and re-read Excalibre’s posts. The point is that there is no other way to define orientation except through personal reports, because behavior doesn’t make an orientation.
I knew you weren’t saying I was lying. I was trying to point out the logical problem in you insisting that the possibility I was lying was relevent to this discussion.
The same margin of error exists that you might be wrong that you are now gay. If you’re going to insist that I have to account for it, you have to do the same thing.
‘Ah,’ you say, ‘but I have studies to back me up, and you don’t’. Right. Because they don’t exist, not definitively. So again, I want to know if you would still be sure you’re gay if there were no studies to show you you probably won’t change your mind. It seems like you’re saying you’re not sure you won’t change your mind. That’s fine, but you must know it’s not representative of the opinion of most gay folks.
Yes, but personal reports aren’t reliable, is the point you’re not grasping. Not taken one-by-one. There are millions of gay people who insist they were born that way and can’t possibly change. The odds are pretty sharply against all of them having exactly the same delusion, or making exactly the same lie. Now, some of these guys insist that they have changed, and are no longer homosexual. But if you come back to that same group a year later, a whole lot of them are gay again. And a year later, it’s even more. I think after five years, it’s about a 95% recidivism rate. At that point, it becomes entirely legitimate to think, “Maybe those 5% remaining are fooling themselves when they say they aren’t gay yet.” Of course, in public, it would be rude to treat them differently, but if you’re trying to make some sort of objective determination about the nature of sexual orientation, you have to allow the possibility that those guy’s reports are simply not reliable.
So, in this case, we have a claim: that some poly people are innately poly. As evidence, we (originally) had one claim that said it was so. Well, one claim isn’t reliable. Your opinion might be the opinion of the vast majority of polys. Or you may be the only person on Earth who feels like that. If it’s the latter, you might be like one of those 5%, who for whatever reason is not reporting accurately. The thing is, we don’t know. We don’t know you. You don’t know us. We have no way to guage how accuratly you’re reading your own emotional states. If you’re giving us this information in a social situation, the polite thing is to do is accept it at face value, but if you’re offering it as evidence of a proposition, it’s open to questioning like any other piece of evidence offered in a debate.
I’ve not insisted that you account for anything. I’m telling you what I take into account. As far as I’m concerned, my sexuality isn’t in doubt. How much trust you put into that statement is up to you.
Studies for what? That prove I’m gay? I’m afraid that I don’t. There’s no such thing as a cite that proves that I, you, or Quentin Crisp is gay. I can provide you with a cite that proves I claim to be gay. And I can show you another cite that proves lots of other people claim they’re gay, from which one can deduce that there is a thing called “gay” and that people are it. But I can’t provide any sort of “proof” that I’m gay.
Which tells us that there’s no evidence to make a conclusion in either direction: one hypothesis is as good as the other.
Considering that I’m bi, there’s a good chance I will “change my mind.” Which is why it would be a mistake to make any conclusions about the nature of homosexuality based on my statesment on the subject alone.
And how do we know this? Because we have other opinions to compare mine against. There are enough other opinions like mine to make it exceedingly unlikely (absent other factors) that I’m lying about my internal state. We don’t have enough evidence, yet, to make a dispassionate judgement about your internal state, so your evidence, on its own, isn’t enough to prove the argument one way or another. Hence (finally getting back around to the main point) the request for a cite in the first place, to provide context for your singular anecdote.
Gracious. Speaking here as a person who is orientationally poly, who knows not only other orientationally poly people and a number of people who have no monogamy/polyamory preference but also a number of orientationally monogamous people (both male and female), who is intermittently active in questions of how to deal with multiple legally recognised partnerships (but frankly, my first target would be the law in Michigan that makes “teaching polygamy as a correct form of family life” a felony), who is neither an atheist nor opposed to same-sex marriage rights (if anything, I’m more of an activist for same-sex marriage rights than I am for multiple marriage rights), and all that jazz …
… wow, this has been one hell of a hijack to read through.
I guess I know how this thread managed to get so long now, huh? Curiosity satisfied.
So you’ve made an assertion, and your argument is “prove me wrong”?
Remember when you said I was acting like a “noob”? I wouldn’t really consider your conduct here acceptable from someone new to the SDMB either.
So you didn’t claim that polyamorists could be perfectly happy in a monogamous relationship. You claimed that they could live in a monogamous relationship.
So either you’re splitting very fine hairs in order to avoid being held responsible for what you said, or else you’re arguing that it doesn’t matter that polyamorists might not be happy in monogamous relationships - it still doesn’t qualify as being different from anyone else. Again, this exact argument would make exactly as much sense applied to gay people. I could marry a woman and live with her. I could even have sex with her. I wouldn’t be happy - but that doesn’t make any difference?
Except that the very concept of “sexual orientation” depends on its not being changeable. Again, you haven’t found any evidence - and I’m still waiting. You’ll have to prove that literature existed demonstrating exclusive same-sex attraction that was stable over time - after all, that’s what you and Miller have been arguing.
(To head off you, again, claiming you didn’t say something that you did, you said this: “I do think the fact that sexual orientation is so fixed and immutable add to the cruelty of anti-SSM laws, though.”)
So were there gay people forty years ago, or not?
So you don’t think anything is worth scientific investigation until there are already scientific studies that indicate it exists?
Do you see the logical flaw here?
It’s already been explicitly explained; polyamorous people claim they are not happy in monogamous relationships. It’s not something I understand at all - but again, I can find no logical argument to contradict them, and clearly neither can you. Ensign Edison has already linked to evidence that many people besides him feel that way.
Ultimately, your demand for “clinical evidence” - when substantial evidence of a different sort has been provided - boils down to an argument from authority. You will accept it, but only if it’s in a peer-reviewed journal. While obviously scientific research is an invaluable tool, Ensign Edison has provided evidence that you have tried and failed to rationally refute. Now you change the rules of the argument, and you’re insisting that you’ve been “asking for evidence” when you have not. Indeed, this entire argument began with your making an assertion that you cannot support.
So how is it valid? According to anthropologists who have studied the Sambia, young, pre-pubescent boys begin performing fellatio upon older adolescents at around eight years old. After months or years of this, they begin showing sexual responses to performing oral sex on men and eventually become aroused at the thought of it. Eventually, after they are initiated as men, they marry women.
So under your analysis, every boy in this tribe is either bisexual or gay, since they show very clear signs of attraction to older boys. I’m sorry. I’m having a bit of trouble relating this to western ideas of sexuality at all.
The concept of sexual orientation is far more culture-bound than you’re admitting, despite your claims to the contrary. People show a range of sexual behaviors that is vastly different than those practiced here; your obsessive focus on “sexual attraction” - the one thing that can’t be studied or measured - then means what? In all of these cultures, people’s behavior is substantially at odds with their attraction? Or else does it mean that you can rationalize away any sort of behavior by imagining that people are “attracted” to something that matches up with your preconceived notions of sexual orientation?
At any rate, it’s fun to see you try to squirm away from providing evidence for the numerous assertions you’ve made. You haven’t even provided evidence for this “clinical definition” you keep referring to, even though all this time I’ve raised rather substantial questions about its relevance to the discussion. If “sexual attraction” is the only criterion used to establish sexual orientation in research, how do you prove anything at all? No clinical research could possibly be valid since it must therefore rely on self-reports that, as Miller has pointed out, are tremendously unreliable.
[qupte]I haven’t moved any goal posts. You really should just admit when you’re wrong sometimes.
[/QUOTE]
I’m still awaiting evidence from all those plies and piles of clinical research you’re claiming is out there that proves your point.
It will be fun to watch you continue to try and rationalize away the fact that you spent the first half of this discussion making unsupported statement after unsupported statement, and then attempted (tricky, tricky!) to shift the burden of proof onto me, even while knowing that such clinical research is unlikely to exist.
It’s ironic that you call yourself an empiricist, since you’ve been explicitly denying something without evidence, while admitting the simple difficulty of obtaining such evidence. You have a preconceived notion, and you have continuously demanded that everyone else “prove it wrong”, as you acknowledge in the first quote in this post. Such behavior is very far from empiricalism, Diogenes.
Miller. For one, I did provide those cites, as I assume you saw. Lilairen has now backed me up further. I assume you’re now just defending the request for them in the first place. I never meant to imply – wait, first off, believe me, dude, I’m the last person you need to lecture about personal anecdotes not being evidence. Really, truly believe me on this one, please.
Okay, that said: What I objected to was not the very concept that you might need documentation that more than I make this claim. I objected to Dio demanding this after announcing all kinds of things he just knew to be true about polyamory. It’s not like he said “Hmm, I don’t have enough information to evaluate your claim, can you provide more” and I insisted that my one personal story was the final word. What happened was, he started making assertions, and I replied to them, and he then started claiming a lack of information. Well, if he didn’t know, why was he acting like he did? (Yet again, I might add.)
You can’t prove you are bi, and you never ever could. It is a thing which cannot be proven, if personal assertion is not acceptable proof. Likewise, I can’t prove that I’m poly-oriented to you in the way that you and Dio are demanding, because again, it is a thing which cannot be proven in that way.
Shh! Don’t let Diogenes know that you’re assessing people’s sexual orientation through their behavior and not through their self-reports!
You’re making the mistake that Diogenes is (deliberately) using to avoid justifying his claims. If your argument that people’s self-reports have no probative value, than all research in any of these areas is inherently faulty, since (as we’ve been told) only attraction counts, and that can obviously only be assessed through self-reports.
The mind continues to boggle.
At any rate, perhaps you mean to say that a self-report has weak probative value; that’s probably a fair claim. People do lie about such things. If self-reporting is at least partially reliable, than one can rationally study it. Well, Ensign Edison has provided evidence that many other polyamorous people feel as he does; now, unless you’re going to continue with Diogenes’ pretense that data somehow becomes magically valid when published in a journal, you have to admit that, logically, lots of self-reports have some substantial probative value. And you haven’t even provided any evidence to contradict one self-report, let alone many of them.
Then what you’re saying has nothing to do with empiricism (though you, admittedly, have not made the rather unbelievable claim of being an empiricist.) You believe in non-heterosexual orientations only because you have experienced it yourself. That strikes me as a difficult way to rationally understand the world and an inherently unsympathetic one.
By the way, since Diogenes has completely dropped the ball, maybe you could provide that peer-reviewed research backing all you guys’ claims about homosexuality, since, as you said, there is a “wealth of scientific evidence and peer-reviewed papers that have shown, again and again, that sexual orientation is innate and unchangable.” As I’ve described, my limited knowledge of anthropology makes me doubt such ideas are entirely valid, particularly on a cross-cultural basis. I’ve been asking for any actual evidence for this claim that you and Diogenes are resting your arguments on, and I have yet to get it.
So aggregated self-reports do have probative value. But only to prove the existence of homosexuality. Ensign Edison’s citation of very similar evidence in regard to polyamory is false, since different standards of evidence apply!
I’m starting to get the hang of this argument!
Only under the obviously false suggestion that only peer-reviewed journal articles constitute “evidence”. You don’t want to get on board with Diogenes on that one, Miller. I’ve already argued exactly why above, but let me remind you that there is no such rule in any style of debate - nor in any formulation of empiricism - besides the ancient art of “attempting to prove Diogenes the Cynic wrong to his own satisfaction.”
Where’s the clinical data I’ve been waiting on? This matter of a different standard of proof for the two things is becoming frustrating.
Yeah, I should make that clear. I’m not actually interested in the argument about the nature of polyamorousness itself. Like I said on page three: I don’t really care.
Okay. It sounded to me like you were objecting to your personal anecdote being questioned at all, not the tone of the questioning. Normally, such a statement should be taken at face value, of course, but if offered in support of an argument, it should be subject to the same scrutiny as any other cite.
I said exactly this in my last post.
Excalibre, I’m not arguing or defending Diogenes position, although this thread’s become such a mess I can appreciate that its hard to tell precisely where anyone is standing on this argument any more. Or even what the argument is.
I typoed, actually, and meant to say ‘know’ there and ‘assume’ later. I was only commenting that I knew you knew that I knew, you know?
I agree. A neutral observer might ask ‘What is this polyamory you speak of, and how do I know you’re not talking violet armadillo sputum?’ Of course, here in GD (where the rules of civility such as ‘don’t tell people they’re potentially crazy liars’ don’t apply, because we’re not here for a dinner party; that’s why I really wasn’t offended) if I state an unusual position I’m rightfully expected to back it up. I only didn’t because, well, Dio has this habit of asserting things and then demanding the information he would have to already have to make his assertion. Which brings me to…
It almost did. I had a Pit thread open, titled, and half-composed for part of the evening. But Excalibre was chipping away so diligently and rationally, and I knew it would be degraded by a trip to the flamier side of town. (I would make it my business to be a third wheel, Homer says tangentally in my head; when I say it’d be degraded, believe me, I’m not slamming anyone but myself).
Anyway, I’d start a new thread myself here in GD about polyamory orientation, but I’m leaving town until Friday starting in…hey, about eight hours til train time! Time to get offline.
My assertion was correct. There is no such clinically recognized orientation as 'polyamory." It’s fun to make up new definitions and criteria but they don’t count as cites. My assertion that “polyamory is not a sexual orientation” is factually correct as far as it pertains to any relevant clinical recognition.
I said if they lived in monogomous relationships they would be monogamists by definition. I didn’t say anything about “happy.” Please respond to what I’ve actually said and quit making things up.
In point of fact I haven’t expressed any opinions about polyamorously oriented people at all because I have yet to be shown any evidence that such a thing exists.
Once again…I HAVEN’T SAID ANYTHING ABOUT ANYBODY BEING “HAPPY.” I am still waiting for proof that there is any clinical DIFFERENCE between so called polys and monos. I also haven’t said shit about what these alleged polys should or should not do. The fact that some people report that they were unhappy in previous relationships is not exactly rare or earth-shattering, nor is a hypothetical, polyamorous orientation the only possible explanation for that unhappiness.
Once again, the difference sails over your head. You would still be defined by your attractions, not your relationship. Being happy or unhappy in a relationship is no criterion for sexual orientation that I’ve ever seen. Are you in the habit of making up new clinical criteria in other areas of psychology or is that something you confine to human sexuality?
No it doesn’t.
You are mistaken. Immutability is not a necessary criterion for sexual orientation Although it is almost always a characteristic, it is not a definitional criterion.
Yes. Even if you hadn’t gotten your facts wrong about the definitional criteria you still would have no point. A sexual orientation can obviously exist before it’s clinically recognized. That doesn’t help you with your poly claims, though, because a hypothetical future recognition of a polyamorous orientation does compute to a conclusion NOW that it must exist. Theoretically, yes, it could exist, butb there’s no proof yet and no reason for me to make that assumption until I SEE proof.
Well duh. Existence doesn’t have to confirmed by scientific studies (nice strawman there) but you can’t investigate something without some kind of confirmation that it exists in the first place.
No, why don’t you point it out to me, Sherlock. Explain to me how you can go about investigating something if you don’t know it exists.
Saying that “polyamorous people claim…” is putting the cart before the horse. You’re ASSUMING that polyamorous people exist and that they report the same things. Some people report an inability to be happy in monogamous relationships. This much I recognize and accept and have no quarrel with and don’t want to force them to be monogamous or discourage them from persuing paradigms that make them happy. However, this is still not really evidence that polyamory is a sexual orientation and that is not the only possible explanation for why those people would report being unhappy in monogamous relationships.
Also, what about people who are able to be happy either way? I’ve known at least one girl who lived periodically in both kinds of relationships and said she was content either way. Was she poly or mono. If unhappiness in monagmy is a criterion for a polyamorous orientation then does that mean polys who SAY they can be happy with monogamy aren’t really poly?
Well duh.
How did I try to refute it? I said I believed him but his testimony simply soes not constitute useful evidence.
My “analysis” would be that these kids are sexual abuse victims. It’s not unusual for boys to become aroused when they’re being molested by men and it does not define their orientation in the long run.
Yes. Culture can easily override natrual inclinations and attractions. How many American lesbians have spent their lives married to men and having babies, do you think?
I don’t have the patience to go through the rest and you just keep repeating yourself anyway. The bottom line is you can’t prove your assertion that there is such a thing as a polyamorous orientation and so now you’re kicking up a lot of dust and trying to deny that there’s any such thing as sexual orientation at all (at least that’s what I THINK you’re trying to do. You haven’t been all that coherent and you keep making up things I never said).
Go in peace, Excalibre. I’m exhausted with this argument. I don’t know why you care what I think anyway. It’s not like I have any LEGAL disagreement with you. Why are you spending so much energy arguing with someone who is already ON YOUR SIDE (and Ensign’s side for that matter)? It’s not enough for me to agree with you, I have to agree for the exact same REASONS?
I had to make one final comment on this, because you do have a point, and…I’ve used the word ‘gay’ in this thread where I would normally say ‘queer’ as an inclusive term meaning LGBT; I did this because I encountered people here who seemed uncomfortable or unfamiliar with the use of the term in that way, and for the ease of shorthand, that’s all.
That said, I acknowledge your underlying point, Miller, that people’s perception about themselves changes over time, of course. I didn’t mean to deny that, but rather to state that it’s legitimate to claim to be queer (or straight, or monogamous, or polyamorous) even if there’s no statistical evidence that you won’t change your mind. Perhaps my identity in the future will be different, but my identity right now is certain, and that’s what I have available to discuss.
That he does. I think the fundamental difference between me and Diogenes, and the one that makes this argument useless, is that I am by nature an empiricist, and I base my opinions on the preponderance of evidence. It’s not something most people seem to be capable of.
Like I said, I questioned the validity of polyamory as a sexual orientation once upon a time. But then I realized where the evidence lay. Even if we don’t have the billions upon billions of pages of scientific journals that are apparently out there describing homosexuality, we do have a large number of people, including yourself, who are quite fervent in their statement that polyamory is a fundamental part of how they relate to other people and it’s something they can’t change.
Even if the evidence for that is limited to anecdote, we’re talking about thousands of anecdotes - and on the other side, no evidence to contradict them! Disbelieving something in the face of the evidence is a trait of Creationists and the superstitious; it’s obviously also a triat of Diogenes, who has learned the traditional Creationist trick of making a bald, unjustifiable assertion and then demanding that everyone else prove him wrong.
It’s funny how what you said and what you say you said don’t match, even when confronted with quotes of yourself!
Look, Diogenes. You are obviously far too invested in this - for whatever reason - to approach it rationally. I have made a rational argument, one you have not even come close to refuting. You persist, instead, in arguing about the argument, something inherently useless. You are changing the goalposts, you are claiming that you didn’t say things that you said - look, let’s end this. Maybe this isn’t true for every issue, but clearly you can’t argue this issue in a defensible way.
My assertion is true. There is no such recognized sexual orientation as “polyamory.” You’ve been utterly unable to show a cite to the contrary (and this is really your assertion. I don’t have to prove it’s NOT an orientation in any absolute sense. If you can’t prove it is, then it isn’t).
The best you can do is that one poster says he can’t be happy in a monogamous relationship. You mistake this anecdote for irrefutable proof. Whatever. I really don’t care how you want to conceptualize it. I have no emotional investment in the issue at all. I’m completely indifferent to the activities of self-identified polys and have no wish to hamper them legally or deny them any rights. Put legal polygamy on a referendum and I’ll vote for it. I’ll go ahead and wait for the science before I accept it as an “orientation,” though.
Just so you know, it wouldn’t BOTHER me to find out that it was. I have no reason to want it NOT to be which is what you seem to think.
Argument from authority again. (You are aware that’s a logical fallacy, are you not?) And once again, these authorities to which you appeal are imaginary, since you have not found a shred of evidence to back your assertion.
And now you’re simply lying. Ensign Edison has come up with evidence that many more people than him share his experience. And I have quite explicitly not maintained that this is “irrefutable proof” - just that it is evidence that I cannot refute through logical argument - and clearly that you cannot either. And further, I know of no clinical research indicating it isn’t true. Again, clearly, you don’t either.
Thus I’m left with a preponderance of evidence. The evidence isn’t perfect, but then, evidence never is. However, with quite a bit of evidence supporting one viewpoint, and none supporting the other, I’m left with the conclusion that the viewpoint with the evidence on its side is most likely correct.
That’s the sort of thinking that makes up empiricism, Diogenes. It involves collecting evidence and weighing it. It could well be the case that each and every one of these people is delusional; however, I can’t find any evidence that this is the case.
If only your actions matched your words, Diogenes dear.
No, it’s simply an objective observation of fact. There is no such recognized orientation. Calling the lack of of clinical recognition an “appeal to authority” is just whining on your part. I call it a lack of evidence.
[quote]
And now you’re simply lying. Ensign Edison has come up with evidence that many more people than him share his experience. And I have quite explicitly not maintained that this is “irrefutable proof” - just that it is evidence that I cannot refute through logical argument - and clearly that you cannot either. And further, I know of no clinical research indicating it isn’t true. Again, clearly, you don’t either.[/quotw]
It’s not evidence at all. The plural of anecdote is not data. It doesn’t have to be refuted because it doesn’t mean anything. The truthfulnss of the reporters isn’t even relevant because the reports – even if TRUE – can still be explained in other ways other than hypothesizing a new sexual orientation.
I don’t think that word “evidence” means what you think it means. You don’t have evidence for anything until you can eliminate other explanations for people being unhappy in previous monagamous relationships. Can you do that?
You have also claimed that unhappiness with monogamy is a definitional criterion for this alleged poly orientation. If that’s the case then could you answer my question about people who report an ability to be happy either way? Are they still poly if they CAN be happy in a monogamous relationship but happen to be living poly?
Once more, the subjective “truth” of what they report is neither here nor there. Your mistake is that you are assuming only one possible explanation for what they report and you’re also assuming that it’s the same explanation for everyone who reports it. That’s not empiricism.
Dio, we acknowledge that it’s not a clinically-defined orientation. You know that we do. We state that we think it is nevertheless an orientation. So you can stop necking with your own strawman now, please. Banking on the hope that people won’t actually read the thread and discover for themselves how disingenuous you’re being is probably not going to get you far.
As for people who can be happy and be poly or monogamous…well? So? People can be happy and have gay or straight relationships, too, does that mean bisexuality is not an orientation? And furthermore, I have said all along that it is not a choice for some of us, not that it is not a choice for all of us.
If I had said initially that polyamory is “not a clinically-defined orientation,” rather than just saying “it’s not a sexual orientation,” would I have been attacked for it? Is there really a substantive difference there? Why is it disingenuous for me to want to see some clinical recognition before I call it an orientation?
You might be right. I’m not saying you CAN’T be right, but I think it’s premature to act like it’s something that’s been confirmed on the level of gender-based orientations.
It’s not like I’m trying to stand in the way of how you want to live your life or deny you any rights or that I think you need clinical recognition to VALIDATE those rights.
If you guys (you and Excalibre) are this contentious with people who are on your side, what must you be like with the real homophobes and puritans?
Dio, I can barely even follow what you’re talking about anymore, your story has changed so much so many times. We talked about this “clinical” thing already, why are you acting like it’s brand new information suddenly?
And I don’t know what you mean by contentious. We disagree with you. We’re discussing why. Thanks for your support of my rights and all, but it’s not relevant to this discussion, and I’m not obligated to agree with someone just because they have the basic sense and decency to acknowledge what everyone should.
You say “I think it’s premature to act like it’s something that’s been confirmed on the level of gender-based orientations.” I have no idea what this means. “Act like”? In what way? Since you go on to say you know I don’t need clinical recognition, what does this refer to? I never once claimed it was clinically recognized. So what exactly is it that you object to?
Refusal to consider anything besides published, peer-reviewed journal articles - on a subject in which you know such things are unlikely at the present - is assuredly an appeal to authority. It’s not rational to claim something doesn’t exist because you don’t have a journal article in front of you proving its existence.
Not true at all. You’re having trouble with this word, evidence. The evidence provided by scientific research is inherently imperfect; if you have studied basic statistics, you know what words like “p-value”. In any statistical research, there exists the possibility that - by chance alone! - the results could be wrong. And as a general rule, the accepted chance in such circumstances is 5% or less - meaning that there is, in fact, a substantial possibility in most scientific research that mere chance could derail your results.
The idea that no evidence is acceptable until it’s been proven beyond a doubt to be accurate is a nice-sounding idea, but in reality it would paralyze scientific research, and it’s simply not the case under any debate format I’m aware of that the evidence must be absolute and perfectly reliable. Instead, it’s up to you to prove a piece of evidence unreliable if you believe it is - and the only argument I’ve heard against the reliability of this evidence is that, essentially, maybe everyone who claims to be oriented polyamorist is lying or delusional. Those are both fantastically unlikely ideas; you’re clinging to some possibility that the evidence presented to you is wrong even when you can provide no reason of your own to think that.
The invention of arbitrary standards for evidence and the setting of new bars rather reminds me of how creationists argue. An empiricist would weigh the evidence and find that there’s a preponderance of evidence on one side of the discussion - evidence that isn’t perfect but nonetheless has some probative value - and conclude that the assertion you’ve made - one that you can’t back up with any evidence whatsoever - is likely false.
You also have yet to explain away the fantastical idea that somehow, aggregating self-reports and publishing the results in a scientific journal makes them reliable - since any study on either homosexuality or polyamory would have to start with self-reporting of the exact type that Ensign Edison has provided! You have yet to explain away how, given that your own definition requires that homosexuality be proven only through self-report, any research at all could be done on the subject. Your own arguments are contradictory, Diogenes, and I’ve been pointing that out. The fact that you ignore it doesn’t change it.
That’s like questioning the existence of gay people since bisexuals also exist, and they can display heterosexual attraction.
No, Diogenes. The difference is that you’re pretending the probative value of self-reports is zero, even though by your definition it’s the only fact that could serve as the base for research on homosexuality. I’m regarding the evidence rationally - no, self-reports aren’t perfect, but they’re simply the only possible evidence, and any research published in a journal would have to be based upon them anyway. Further, I’m taking the empiricist stance of not dismissing evidence out of hand because I don’t like it, while you’ve attempted to explain it away with imaginary hypotheticals and no evidence of your own.
Again, it’s very much like arguing with a creationist.
Well, your words about the substantial body of scientific literature confirming your precise (and yet everchanging!) definition - and basic cross-cultural existence - of homosexuality have not been matched with evidence to support them.
You’ve spent this whole argument making assertions and saying “prove me wrong”. This doesn’t represent the empirical approach in any way whatsoever. It does demonstrate, though, that you are emotionally invested in the assertions you’ve made to the point that you consider them true without any evidence whatsoever to support them.
If you had said that, we might not be arguing. But you asserted - and I’ve quoted it a couple times - that no such thing exists at all. You have claimed that you’re resting your assertions on evidence, but you have provided none; in fact, you can’t even provide evidence that homosexuality exists at all - much less in your definition. I guess your post is your cite, right?
That’s funny, because earlier you were asserting that it didn’t exist at all, and claiming that polyamorous people simply wanted to “bang” everyone they were attracted to.
I’m contentious with people who make claims that they can’t back. This is not particularly a political argument at all. But, as I’ve said and demonstrated, I place a high value on rational argument and it bothers me to see people making claims they can’t back.
