>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
“Moriah” 
sez
So far, you’re the only one posting knee-jerk rants.
Peace.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
yeah, right, You have the right to label anything I say as a “rant”.
As far as I’m concerned I raised some valid points.
Wendell at least made a reasonable response,unlike you.
I label your post as a prime example of “Trolling”, trying to make waves/dissention without contributing to the discussion.
Nice try though.
Peace to you,too
Claw
Tongue-in-cheek research figures but, anyway you look at it the number of lesbian mothers will go down. >;^)
Actually, that was the point I was making…
For some reason, gay rights advocates tend to get very angry if you involve facts in a discussion about homosexuals. If you question the 10% figure, then somehow you think blacks should be pickin’ cotton on the plantation. It seems to hold for any statistics (or definitions) that gay advocates put forth; if you dare to actually ask ‘how did you get that number’, then you’re some sort of evil bigot. I gave up on that ‘Ask the Gay guy’ thread when, after asking about a bizzare definition, a certain poster started accusing me of finding people being assaulted funny.
As far as I can see, gay rights groups consider facts an direct threat to their cause, thus the hostility to articles like Cecil’s that objectively examine the data behind an assertion.
Kevin Allegood,
“At least one could get something through Trotsky’s skull.”
- Joseph Michael Bay
[[As far as I can see, gay rights groups consider facts an direct threat to their cause, thus the hostility to articles like Cecil’s that objectively examine the data behind an assertion.]]
This is a generalization that is not supported by my experience. Having worked in the HIV/AIDS field for many years, I work closely with gay activists and gay rights groups, most of whom recognize the loss of credibility and sabotage to the cause that comes with perpetuating myths and exaggerating statistics. There are always a few emotional people in any “cause” who feel that it serves them well to make shit up to support what they say. Gays certainly don’t have a monopoly on this tendency.
Nobody really knows what percentage of the population is homosexual. This is complicated by current thinking that suggests that most people fall on a continuum somewhere between strictly homosexual and strictly heterosexual. So how do you categorize all the people who fall somewhere in between, even if they are “mostly” heterosexual or “mostly” homosexual?
Jill
I read in a book it was like 8% people who have any homosexual experience and 2% who actually claimed they were gay. Of course that was in men only so it would be lower than if you included women I think.
Except for the war we would have had slaves untill they became unprofitable in which then they would have been outlawed. Slavery by itself isint wrong to any great degree, its the way it was gone about in the south that was wrong.
The great thing about facts about gays is generally you can get a stastic and then another stastic that absolutely contradicts the first one. The problem arises when PC thugs start flaming you for using the stastics that do not agree with them.
So, I assume you would have no objection to being a slave, provided it was “gone about” properly?
Yeah, Asmodean, I’m curious, too: What WOULD have been the right way to go about making people slaves? Asking them very nicely? Not beating them with whips? Giving them nice clothes and the best food? Free medical care? Making people of ALL colors into slaves?
I’ve seen some offensive, ignorant, stupid posts on this board, but that has to be in the top five.
No, I think Asmodean is on to something. I heard somewhere that Slavery is Freedom.
Also something about War being Peace, and my brother watching me or something. But I wasn’t paying much attention.
To make amends for my iffy humor in my last post, I’ll advance the ball a bit here. Asmodean might be making the point that slavery as a purely economic relationship doesn’t have to exist in the same form as the U.S.'s race-based slavery. Jab1, you actually make some good suggestions for improving the economic lot of slaves. And, I’d argue that (in terms of relative repulsiveness), indentured servitude is better than the life imposed on African slaves here in the U.S. So, Asmodean isn’t completely insane.
Still, the conditions of one’s slavery is one thing – the fact of being a slave is something entirely different. Slavery is still morally wrong, and evil, no matter how nicely you institute it. People are not meant to be the property of others.
Slavery raises more than economic questions – and that is why it needed to be outlawed, no matter how profitable or unprofitable it was. It was morally wrong, no matter how many or few people were enslaved.
Uh, now that I’ve taken a bold stand on one of the burning issues of the day, what was the question again?
Hmm you quote me and yet you still didn’t read what I said. I think of slavery akin with taxes. Both are equally wrong.
Its amazing how some people just get worked up over nothing.
Pablo said:
and Esprix wondered:
I think Pablo just meant that whether you take the 3% or 10% figure for percentage of gays in the general population, the 1.5–5 million estimated lesbian moms discussed in the original article is still too high: in other words, what Cecil said. Not a prediction about trends in lesbian birthrates, as far as I can make out. 
Kimstu
Asmodean said in this post:
And said in a previous post that “Slavery by itself isn’t wrong to any great degree, it’s the way it was gone about in the South that was wrong.”
I did read what you posted, and I’m still not sure what exactly you are trying to say.
Are you saying that slavery, like taxes, was a nessecary evil that was simply inplemented unfairly?
Or that taxes, like slavery, are a gross violation of the basic human rights we are all born with, no matter what the conditions of taxes or slavery are?
Either way, I gotta say, both posts come off as pretty damn ignorant.
Pablo:
Esprix:
Me:
I’d assume it was an oral sex joke, Esprix.
RiboFlavin wrote:
My point was that I’ve seen people use the argument, “Well, there aren’t as many as everybody says there are, so why should they get those rights?” As if denying 3% of the population equal protection under the law were somehow more moral than denying 10% of the population.
Perhaps your point wasn’t made clearly, then, as I don’t recall what definition you were asking for. You’re always welcome to post again.
Esprix
C’mon Esprix, did you miss the joke?.
Not to play gang up wars, but…
Asmodean said:
I don’t think we’re getting worked up over nothing, I think you either made a wild and potentially inflamatory statement that slavery could be moral, or else that you very poorly stated your meaning and confused us. Let’s look again at what you said.
This is perhaps true. Without the Civil War bringing the issue to a head, slavery would only have lasted until it became uneconomical. However, that is debatable - people do seem to like the excuse to put down others for their own pleasure/benefit. And it is also arguable how long it would have remained economical - maybe it would still be economical now. But that’s another argument, so I’ll proceed with the real confusing part of the post.
Not necessarily. Just because it was no longer economical, that does not mean it would have become illegal. Merely that it would have ceased to have been practiced. Or at least greatly reduced in practice. That is not quite the same thing, as that condition still allows for slavery, i.e. possession of another human, it just means people would have incentives against it. Moving on.
This is the meat of the issue. You just declared that slavery is not morally wrong in and of itself, and that there is at least one way that it could be done that is not immoral. Please explain to us what method that would be.
Someone offered in another thread (that I won’t bother to look up) that we take everyone who wants slavery and put their name in a barrel, then draw half the names and they get to be the slave-owners, and the other names in the barrel get to be the slaves. It’s voluntary, you get an equal chance at being owner or slave, and it isn’t based on anything like color, race, religion, height, or any other “prejudicial” factor. It’s random. Is that a possibility you mean?
Then above you equate slavery with taxes. In what way? Is that what you mean by “how it was done”? Are you implying that the government makes slaves of us all by taxing us money?
One more comment. You said:
Why do you think so? I think that lesbianism is less disproved of than being gay, and that there are plenty of instances of menage-a-trois involving two females and a male. I would think those come close to being considered lesbianism, depending on how you rate things, and what happens in the group. Given an undercurrent of male sexual stimulation by witnessing lesbians, and the ever-popular male fantasy of multiple women, I can see it being a more common than expected occurrence of at least one same gender sexual experience among females, and being more common among females than males. And then there’s adolescents to consider. Without citing sources (and I know that leaves me open to criticism), I have read that teenage girls are much more likely than teenage guys to experiment with kissing and fondling on each other. Do you count those situations in the statistics?
Irishman:
Not that I want to agree with Asmodean, but I wanted to point out that it is true that nineteenth century slavery in the Amnericas was unusually bad. In contrast, in the Ottoman empire both the elite fighting force (the Janniseries) and the administrative forces were made up of slaves–boys of 10-13 were collected from the Christian part of the Empire (Islam permits the enslavments of non-Muslims, and you are allowed to keep them if they convert later). These boys, the devsherme were farmed out to Turksh familes for a few years to learn Turkish and be converted, and then they were enrolled in the palace school. Most went on to become Jannerseries–the elite guard, where they usually had long, profitable careers. The best and brightest stayed in the palace school and went on to fill every administrative position not held by the Sultan–they were the provencial and regional goveners, the tax-collecters, the grand vizers. They accumulated vast amounts of wealth, power, and prestige. Yet they were still slaves–never forget that. The exisited at the Sultan’s whim and had to do as he commanded. That is why the Ottomans set up the system: Western monarchs always used powerful noble families to do these same jobs. The problem with nobles is that they have an outside base of support that allows them to be troublesome–Family wealth, castles, fighting men that are loyal to them. Devsherme had no power base outside of the Sultan, and they were never left long in any one location in order to make sure that they didn’t develop one. Janneseries were not permited to marry until late in the Empire (during its decline) in order to keep family loyaties from interfereing. They were certainly never allowed to go home again. Despite all this, by the time of Suliman mothers were bribing the boy-collecters to choose thier boy, because slavery to the Sultan was a hell of a lot better than freedom.
A second mideastern example would be the Malmut Empire in Eygpt. Malmuts were slave armies that Middle-Eastern monarchs used to buy out of central Asia. They tended to be a rebellious bunch, and one group siezed Eygpt for a couple centuries. During that time succession was from general-to-general, not father to son, (although this happened too, when a son was avalible, and another general didn’t get to him first) and those generals had often started thier Military career in some Malmut army.
Then you have cases that aren’t technically slavery but that aren’t any better–for example, Russian serfs, who both before and after emancipation in 1861 lived lives of unbelievable poverty and want. They had an infant mortality rate that may have been (I’ve never quite believed this number) close to 50%. Slave babies in America were much more likely to survive. Slavery (as opposed to serfdom) was actually outlawed in Russia in the 16th or 17th century (can’t remember which) because too many serfs were enslaving themselves–by a quirk of Russian law, slaves didn’t have to pay taxes and serfs did.
By our modern definitions of freedom, I am tempted to say that 99% of the population of the world before 1700 was enslaved. The idea that the average joe has any inate right to control his own destiny at all is a fairly modern notion. Might made right to an unimagenable degree in the premodern world.
The real sin of American slavery is that it was unusually horrible and it happened in a time when people should have known better. Useing mortality rates again as a crude yardstick for “horribleness”, The US is the only place in the western hemisphere where the slave population did increase naturally. In Brazil and on the sugar islands they had to constantly inport new slaves because they were being worked to death much faster than they could reproduce. That is pretty damn hard to do–the human animal is amazingly resiliant and amazingly good at maintaining the specis. The sort of brutality that went on on the sugar islands boggles the mind. Coupled with the Middle Passage it is perhaps the only event in modern history that can compare to the Holocaust. There was slavery in Africa and slavery in the middle east, but it was never like that, or rather, it was often like that, but that was never the norm.
Americans were a little better, but that by no means gets us off the hook. Slavery here was misrable, degrading, painful and not uncommenly lead directly to premature death. It prevented millions of people from enjoying the rights we had given ourselves in the Constitution. It damned people to ignorance. It created oppertunities for rape and shocking abuse, and defined a group of humans as property for the sake of profit. Like I said before, before about 1700 the above applied to just about everybody, slave or the nominally “free”. Our shame was perpetrating such an anachonism.
I know this is about as far from the OP as I could possible get, but I suspect that Asmodian has heard some version of this and i wanted to set the record straight.