Turn the rainbow into a Jackson Pollock painting
Anyway, apparently there is some kind of big AIDS conference currently going on in Toronto, since that seemed to be the general theme of today's issue. One full spread of this paper was filled with facts about HIV and AIDS, and it informed me that in the West, HIV still spreads mainly with male-on-male sex, whereas in Africa, it mainly spreads through heterosexual intercouse, and in Asia and Eastern Europe, mainly through drug use. For some reason, HIV doesn't seem to spreading much in the hardline Islamic countries. Perhaps we could put our heads together and try to solve this curious mystery so that we could use this knowledge to prevent HIV here.
And thank Glub, finally somebody bothered to actually tell me how many AIDS deaths and HIV infections there have been. I have been looking for this simple tidbit for god knows how long for now. The article "Disease has simply rewritten the rules" informs us that there have been 65 million people infected with the virus, more than 25 million dead. That certainly makes me curious to hear what the Zero Population Growth crowd thinks about this epidemic.
Meanwhile, here in the normal parts of the West, the probability for a straight man who doesn't use drugs to get HIV is so minuscule that they don't really need to worry about it any more than they worry about falling down in the shower. This even if he sexually promiscuous and doesn't even use a condom. Just crunch the numbers such as the percentage of people who are HIV positive and the probability of HIV being transmitted during a one-night stand, and I don't know any mathematics that would make the result anything to worry about. All you straight dudes reading this, you are much more likely to develop breast cancer than get AIDS. And of course, real world data suppports these calculations, since the anxiously expected heterosexual AIDS epidemic that the gay activists predicted would make the straight population regret their bigotry completely fizzled. For example, I recently found out that Finland, with its population of five million, has had a total of less than two thousand HIV infections during the whole epidemic, and most of these are foreigners residing in Finland. Other places such as San Francisco probably get that many each month even as we speak.
According to the newspaper, over half of the new HIV infections in Canada still occur due to transmission via male-on-male sexual contact. This is quite an achievement from the group that otherwise comprises about 2% of the whole population, which therefore has about twentyfold overrepresentation in the new HIV infections statistics. Dammit, you'd think that after almost three decades of AIDS, even the most pigheaded gay men would have eventually learned how precisely HIV spreads and what steps you can take to prevent it. I read that part of the article out loud to my wife, and without even looking up from the section that she was reading, she just said that gay men are still men, and men just don't listen and learn but want to stick their wieners where it feels good. I certainly can't argue with her cynical point of view, based on such monstrous statistics.
Also according to this paper, gay communities in major cities currently have 25% of their members HIV-positive. You know, I suddenly understand a lot better why the Canadian gay rights groups are demanding those certain legislative changes that they are currently demanding. I also can't help but wonder what the health insurance companies think about this.
For a supposedly nondiscriminating disease that can strike anybody, in practice HIV seems to discriminate quite a lot against certain groups. If some corporation was equally discriminating against the same groups in its employment decisions, it would have been buried in lawsuits up to its ears a long time ago. As for Africa, the article "African tribe stays virtually AIDS free" and its paragraph
Simply put, many African women are given no choice about their sexual partners, can't reject philandering husbands and have no power to insist that condoms be used, says pioneering Toronto AIDS doctor Philip Berger, who worked with African AIDS patients for seven months last year.
makes me again raise my puzzled query why exactly
it is that leftists want us Westerners give up our evil ways and become
more like the noble and authentic Third World dwellers.
So the uplifting bottom line would be that there is still much that we can do to combat AIDS. For example, another article "A T-shirt tells one man's story"
applauds something that I vaguely recall conservatives and other nasty
bigots suggesting back in the day in the beginning of the epidemic.
Better late than never, I guess. We can only imagine what the state of
the disease would be today if from the very beginning, HIV-positive
people would have been treated the exact same way that carriers of
every other infectious lethal disease are treated. Quite a lot of human
misery and death might have been avoided simply by closing down a few
bathhouses. Like I have asked several times: if a couple of executions
of innocents is enough to completely abolish the death penalty, how
many deaths would be enough to completely abolish the gay bathhouses?
One
more article in this newspaper lamented the decimating effect that AIDS
has had in the engineering and hard sciences communities. No, that's
not really true, I just mischievously edited a few words in that
sentence. Can my readers guess what I changed, and how?
Of
course, as many people as AIDS kills, cancer and heart disease still
kill orders of magnitude more. So I would like to hear why exactly we
need to focus our attention and resources to a disease that is
trivially preventable with simple commonsense prudency. As for the
sympathy and empathy that I am somehow supposed to feel towards the
victims of AIDS, let's first have a simple thought experiment. Imagine
that another viral disease suddenly emerged so that this new disease
was otherwise exactly similar to HIV and AIDS, but tended to mostly
infect straight white men of rational worldview of future time
orientation and a middle-class values. How do you think that the people
who are currently wailing the loudest about AIDS would react to the
news? Well, just look at these people and read what they have written,
and you can see that the answer is "with a malicious glee!"
For
this reason, I will save my sympathy and resources to be given for
people and groups that would return the favour if the tables were
turned. For the groups now ravaged by AIDS, it is your problem that
resulted from your own choices and behaviour. So you solve it yourself,
I don't care, since you wouldn't listen to me anyways. There are simple
ways to completely avoid this disease, but whenever our side tries to
suggest them to you, you immediately start whining that we are
oppressing you and trying to control your choices to freely do whatever
you want. Well then, go on and do whatever you want, as long as you
don't then come and demand that I should pay for the consequences of
your stupid choices. But as a sign of good faith, I can give you one
free tip in case all those medicines are getting too expensive: perhaps
the homeopathic medicine and other alternative forms of healing would help.
"why exactly it is that leftists want us Westerners give up our evil ways and become more like the noble and authentic Third World dwellers."
You mean like the muslims, whose ways you suggest keep them from being ravaged by AIDS?
So Africa No, islamic third-worlders, yes.
Posted by Peter L. Winkler | 7:50 PM
Nonsense, Peter. The Arab world is quickly catching up with everyone else (with possibly as many as a million and a half cases). Their figures are kept low by the fact that treatment is inadequate, ensuring a brisk mortality rate. People aren't permitted to linger (and infect others) for decades as they are in Canada. That aspect of their "strategy" (and that alone) should be emulated.
Posted by von Manstein | 9:42 PM
...whereas in Africa, it mainly spreads through heterosexual intercouse
This is likely not true, as Michael Fumento has been suggesting.
Does it really make sense that a disease which barely spreads at all heterosexually here is spread heterosexually in Africa at such high rates? Or is it just more of the "AIDS is an equal oppotunity killer" shtick being foisted on us?
Posted by Glaivester | 12:47 AM
Micahel Fumento's credibility went out the window some time ago, when it turned out he was being funded by Monsanto for writing pro-corporate propaganda.
Google Fumento and Monsanto and check out the stories.
The AIDS epidemic in Africa has rendered his book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS oxymoronic.
Posted by Peter L. Winkler | 3:14 AM
Peter L Winkler says:
The AIDS epidemic in Africa has rendered his book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS oxymoronic.
Well, maybe it did and maybe it didn't.
What still remains to be properly explained is why AIDS behaves differently in Africa and the rest of the world?
Perhaps African men are more into anal sex than men in the rest of the world.
Posted by Loki on the run | 11:05 AM
And now Bill and Melinda Gates have jumped on the bandwagon:
And prevention must focus on more than condoms, they said, with strategies to allow women to better control their exposure to a virus that infected 4.1 million people globally last year.
Let me see, 0.1% of the world's population got the disease last year ... and I wonder how many of them were heterosexual females engaging in vaginal sex ...
Posted by Loki on the run | 2:58 PM
Glaivester: Does it really make sense that a disease which barely spreads at all heterosexually here is spread heterosexually in Africa at such high rates?
Yes, since the assumption of straight HIV epidemic fizzling rests on the assumptions that
- intercourse transmission from HIV-positive person to his/her partner is rather improbable, in the order of 1/200 or so per intercourse even without using of condoms
- an average men has only about ten short-term partners in lifetime
- a small percentage of population is HIV positive
None of these assumptions hold in Africa where the epidemic is now spreading, so the logic that shows that heterosexual AIDS is rarity in the West doesn't apply to Africa.
Would it really be more realistic to assume that the sub-Saharan Africa is presently full of gay people and IV drug users?
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 8:03 PM
Peter L. Winkler: The AIDS epidemic in Africa has rendered his book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS oxymoronic.
Whereas the reality of AIDS in the West among straight non-drug users has proven Fumento right many times over.
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 8:05 PM
Yes, since the assumption of straight HIV epidemic fizzling rests on the assumptions that
(1) intercourse transmission from HIV-positive person to his/her partner is rather improbable, in the order of 1/200 or so per intercourse even without using of condoms
(2) an average men has only about ten short-term partners in lifetime
(3) a small percentage of population is HIV positive
None of these assumptions hold in Africa where the epidemic is now spreading
Why, though, is assumption (1) true in other places, but not Africa?
(2) Number of sexual partners likely an actual major difference, so that is a good point.
(3) Pointing out that there is a large portion of hte population who are HIV-positive, so the risk of geting HIV is higher is rather begging the question, isn't it? How did AIDS spread so far initially when HIV positive people were only a small percentage of the population?
As I read it, Fumento's answer is that HIV in Africa is spread mostly due to poor meical hygiene vis a vis needles (i.e. needles are used on multiple people even in legitimate medical use). Some is spread hrough anal sex.
I have also read that some people are skeptical that all "AIDS" cases in Africa are really ÅIDS. There isn't so much testing done there and there is the possibility that a lot of people who get sick are just assumed to have AIDS.
Posted by Glaivester | 2:02 AM
Glaivester: Why, though, is assumption (1) true in other places, but not Africa?
In the presense of other STD's and diseases, the probability of HIV transmission in vaginal intercourse is much higher than it would be without them.
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 11:10 AM
In the presense of other STD's and diseases, the probability of HIV transmission in vaginal intercourse is much higher than it would be without them.
So true. People in the West and some other places have very good personal hygene ... because they can ...
Posted by Loki on the run | 2:08 PM