No day but today
I
can still remember how during my teenage years in the 1980's HIV and
AIDS were big news. I also vaguely remember the school nurse giving us
a talk about HIV, explaining that gay men have the highest risk of
infection since they tend to practice anal sex, or to translate the
curious term she used, "colon sex". I wonder what would happen if some
school nurse actually said that today, especially in America. But she
was close to retirement age anyways.
For some reason, Finland pretty much managed to avoid the whole epidemic, since in the nation of five million, the total cumulative number of HIV infections since the beginning of the epidemic is still less than 2000, according to this page. According to a chart on this page, a bit less than a third of these infection cases are foreigners living in Finland, which is rather strange when we remember that foreigners comprise perhaps about one percent of people in Finland. However, this massive discrepancy can be explained quite well with a certain hypothesis that I will hopefully later write a longer post about, so I leave it until then.
When we take these numbers and mix in the fact that the probability of HIV infection spreading from an HIV-positive woman to an HIV-negative man in a single act of unprotected sexual intercourse is about 1/200 at best, you can do the math pretty much any way you want and the end result is that if you are a straight man who doesn't use drugs, your odds of becoming infected with HIV are so vanishingly small that almost any other way of dying has a higher risk in real life. The average Western heterosexual male with his seven lifetime one-night stands and two or three long-term relationships probably has a bigger chance of dying by falling down the stairs than becoming infected with HIV. I realized this simple truth on my own some time around my second year at the university, well before I became familiar with Michael Fumento and his book "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS".
And it seems to me that this truth has now become mainstream thinking, ever since the mainstream straight people looked around and realized that neither they or anybody they know got infected. With this uncomfortable truth, leftists have long ago given up their scare-tactic predictions of how the HIV epidemic will ravage the West like the Black Plague, which they used to simply extract more taxpayer money for AIDS research and treatment. Of course, their predictions did become very real, it's just that this happened in the gay community and the parts of Africa that are not Muslim. Dang! I can't even begin to imagine how much this outcome must annoy leftists.
Things are also different today with all the advanced medications that are available. Being HIV positive is no longer an automatic death sentence, but HIV-positive people now get to live almost as long as the average American death row inmate waiting for execution. As another side note, it sure is funny how quickly leftists give up their alternative "holistic" and "non-invasive" treatments and become supporters of modern medicine and Western rationality and drug manufacturers when their own lives or lives of those that they idolize are at stake!
Even so, you still often see claims like "HIV doesn't discriminate" happily spread around. I find this particular claim rather strange, since if homosexuals were statistically overrepresented as much in rejected applicants of some employer as they are in new HIV infections (gay men, who are perhaps 2% of population, still comprise something like 50% of new HIV infections), I guarantee that leftists would be up in arms and scream discrimination. Malcolm Gladwell, on the other hand, might argue that since both straights and gays are represented in HIV infections in roughly equal numbers, it is irrational to go with your gut-level instinct and believe that a gay man is more likely to have HIV than a straight man. You know, the same way that you need to worry more about a human biting you than a pit bull biting you.
And just think about this a little. If anybody seriously proposed that money that is now spent in AIDS reseach and treatment should be diverted to fight other, more important ailments of humanity such as cancer and heart disease, which groups do you think would be up in arms the loudest? Right.
It's very easy for anybody with any common sense to see why gay men have so much larger risk of being infected. Since gay men are not constrained by women's general unwillingness to have anonymous casual sex with many partners, a modern gay man who is not physically deformed and doesn't live in some total backwoods typically has several hundred sex partners during his lifetime. Every serious and successful campaign to slow down the spread of HIV must necessary acknowledge this reality, and fortunately many of them do. When you think about it, it is actually fortunate that women have evolved to want casual sex so much less than men and are far more superficial and discriminating in their choice of partners, because otherwise the whole world would basically operate as a giant bonobo troop or gay bathhouse.
But there is still a lot that we can do. In fact, a while ago I noticed an anti-HIV poster campaign where movie actors and some other celebrities had their mouths taped shut. Apparently this was some kind of metaphor, but I wasn't exactly sure what it was. The campaign posters also suggested three things that I could do to help fight AIDS. I have already forgotten what those three things were, but I remember that I noticed to my great delight that I was already doing two of them simply by being in a monogamous relationship and not using drugs. Two out of three without even trying is not that bad for a selfish reactionary such as me!
Even so, I have to admit that a big factor in my decision of how much effort and sympathy I have for some victim group is how much effort and sympathy that group has respectively shown to my concerns. If some group considers me and my values and goals not worth acknowledging and advancing, I don't really feel that I have any kind of duty to acknowledge and advance their values and goals. I just don't want to be a rube, you see.
One simple way to think about this question is to imagine that a new deadly viral disease, which was statistically massively overconcentrated to thirtysomething white male bloggers with Ph.D. degrees because of their lifestyle choices and actions, broke out. Assume then that I happened to become infected. Would the people who today complain and whine loudest for AIDS victims show me the same compassion that they expect me to show to AIDS victims? Would these people march for the cure and lobby politicians for more health care funds to be diverted to fight this disease? Would they sit next to my hospital bed, comforting my fever with a cool towel like some Florence Nightingale?
Or would they simply mock me for being who I am and thus making myself vulnerable to the disease with my values and lifestyle choices? Would they find my death a great laugh, happily proclaiming that I sure got what I deserved?
The reader can now ask the same question adapted to his personal situation and ponder what the answer would be, but knowing what activist leftists are generally like, I am pretty sure that I know the correct answer to that question. For all their posturing of how morally superior and caring they are, leftists of all stripes have very little sympathy for anyone who is not useful for them in their revolution to create a leftist utopia. This group probably includes most of the people who read this. I therefore give leftists the same sympathy in this issue that they would give me, if the shoe was in other foot. That is, none. Or here's a quarter, go call somebody who cares.
The mechanism of HIV infection and the ways to prevent it is well-known public knowledge, so it's pretty much your own choice if you want to become a victim or not. With the exceptions of the few people who were infected by rape or blood transfusions (their share of HIV infections is much smaller than their visibility in leftist propaganda of movies of the week), pretty much every HIV-positive person can be said to have chosen his own fate, and no hysterical spouting of leftist slogans and epithets will change this.
For some reason, Finland pretty much managed to avoid the whole epidemic, since in the nation of five million, the total cumulative number of HIV infections since the beginning of the epidemic is still less than 2000, according to this page. According to a chart on this page, a bit less than a third of these infection cases are foreigners living in Finland, which is rather strange when we remember that foreigners comprise perhaps about one percent of people in Finland. However, this massive discrepancy can be explained quite well with a certain hypothesis that I will hopefully later write a longer post about, so I leave it until then.
When we take these numbers and mix in the fact that the probability of HIV infection spreading from an HIV-positive woman to an HIV-negative man in a single act of unprotected sexual intercourse is about 1/200 at best, you can do the math pretty much any way you want and the end result is that if you are a straight man who doesn't use drugs, your odds of becoming infected with HIV are so vanishingly small that almost any other way of dying has a higher risk in real life. The average Western heterosexual male with his seven lifetime one-night stands and two or three long-term relationships probably has a bigger chance of dying by falling down the stairs than becoming infected with HIV. I realized this simple truth on my own some time around my second year at the university, well before I became familiar with Michael Fumento and his book "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS".
And it seems to me that this truth has now become mainstream thinking, ever since the mainstream straight people looked around and realized that neither they or anybody they know got infected. With this uncomfortable truth, leftists have long ago given up their scare-tactic predictions of how the HIV epidemic will ravage the West like the Black Plague, which they used to simply extract more taxpayer money for AIDS research and treatment. Of course, their predictions did become very real, it's just that this happened in the gay community and the parts of Africa that are not Muslim. Dang! I can't even begin to imagine how much this outcome must annoy leftists.
Things are also different today with all the advanced medications that are available. Being HIV positive is no longer an automatic death sentence, but HIV-positive people now get to live almost as long as the average American death row inmate waiting for execution. As another side note, it sure is funny how quickly leftists give up their alternative "holistic" and "non-invasive" treatments and become supporters of modern medicine and Western rationality and drug manufacturers when their own lives or lives of those that they idolize are at stake!
Even so, you still often see claims like "HIV doesn't discriminate" happily spread around. I find this particular claim rather strange, since if homosexuals were statistically overrepresented as much in rejected applicants of some employer as they are in new HIV infections (gay men, who are perhaps 2% of population, still comprise something like 50% of new HIV infections), I guarantee that leftists would be up in arms and scream discrimination. Malcolm Gladwell, on the other hand, might argue that since both straights and gays are represented in HIV infections in roughly equal numbers, it is irrational to go with your gut-level instinct and believe that a gay man is more likely to have HIV than a straight man. You know, the same way that you need to worry more about a human biting you than a pit bull biting you.
And just think about this a little. If anybody seriously proposed that money that is now spent in AIDS reseach and treatment should be diverted to fight other, more important ailments of humanity such as cancer and heart disease, which groups do you think would be up in arms the loudest? Right.
It's very easy for anybody with any common sense to see why gay men have so much larger risk of being infected. Since gay men are not constrained by women's general unwillingness to have anonymous casual sex with many partners, a modern gay man who is not physically deformed and doesn't live in some total backwoods typically has several hundred sex partners during his lifetime. Every serious and successful campaign to slow down the spread of HIV must necessary acknowledge this reality, and fortunately many of them do. When you think about it, it is actually fortunate that women have evolved to want casual sex so much less than men and are far more superficial and discriminating in their choice of partners, because otherwise the whole world would basically operate as a giant bonobo troop or gay bathhouse.
But there is still a lot that we can do. In fact, a while ago I noticed an anti-HIV poster campaign where movie actors and some other celebrities had their mouths taped shut. Apparently this was some kind of metaphor, but I wasn't exactly sure what it was. The campaign posters also suggested three things that I could do to help fight AIDS. I have already forgotten what those three things were, but I remember that I noticed to my great delight that I was already doing two of them simply by being in a monogamous relationship and not using drugs. Two out of three without even trying is not that bad for a selfish reactionary such as me!
Even so, I have to admit that a big factor in my decision of how much effort and sympathy I have for some victim group is how much effort and sympathy that group has respectively shown to my concerns. If some group considers me and my values and goals not worth acknowledging and advancing, I don't really feel that I have any kind of duty to acknowledge and advance their values and goals. I just don't want to be a rube, you see.
One simple way to think about this question is to imagine that a new deadly viral disease, which was statistically massively overconcentrated to thirtysomething white male bloggers with Ph.D. degrees because of their lifestyle choices and actions, broke out. Assume then that I happened to become infected. Would the people who today complain and whine loudest for AIDS victims show me the same compassion that they expect me to show to AIDS victims? Would these people march for the cure and lobby politicians for more health care funds to be diverted to fight this disease? Would they sit next to my hospital bed, comforting my fever with a cool towel like some Florence Nightingale?
Or would they simply mock me for being who I am and thus making myself vulnerable to the disease with my values and lifestyle choices? Would they find my death a great laugh, happily proclaiming that I sure got what I deserved?
The reader can now ask the same question adapted to his personal situation and ponder what the answer would be, but knowing what activist leftists are generally like, I am pretty sure that I know the correct answer to that question. For all their posturing of how morally superior and caring they are, leftists of all stripes have very little sympathy for anyone who is not useful for them in their revolution to create a leftist utopia. This group probably includes most of the people who read this. I therefore give leftists the same sympathy in this issue that they would give me, if the shoe was in other foot. That is, none. Or here's a quarter, go call somebody who cares.
The mechanism of HIV infection and the ways to prevent it is well-known public knowledge, so it's pretty much your own choice if you want to become a victim or not. With the exceptions of the few people who were infected by rape or blood transfusions (their share of HIV infections is much smaller than their visibility in leftist propaganda of movies of the week), pretty much every HIV-positive person can be said to have chosen his own fate, and no hysterical spouting of leftist slogans and epithets will change this.
I think we already know, how much sympathy those men get, whose sexual market value is low. In this respect you are absolutely right, we don't need to be sympathetic to feminists' goals.
Posted by Anonymous | 1:41 AM
Ilkka says:
<some-weirdos> say that HIV doesn't discriminate
Well, that is true, in just the same way that an asteroid plowing into the earth does not discriminate.
However, that does not mean to say that your behavior has no influence on your lifetime probability of getting AIDS. If you limit high-risk behaviors (and we know what they are), you are much less likely to get AIDS.
In the same vein, if women limit risky behavior, they are much less likely to get raped even when most rapists are very discriminatory in who they target ...
C'est la vie!
Posted by beenaround | 2:33 PM