Spider Ilkkasalem and the scum of the land
It's
been a few weeks now since I have last been to the city, which is quite
rare for me since I am usually there once a week, even during holidays.
Earlier today I took off to the city with the 'skirts, first to get
some lunch in Chinatown and then go to the library while the womenfolk
went to the Hummingbird Center to see a musical. After that, the ladies
will go shopping for clothes, which is something that I don't really
feel like accompanying them with since it's so hot outside and
everything. So I'll rather just sit back, enjoy a cold beverage or
three and write down a few thoughts before retiring on the bed to read
a couple of new-to-me collections of the Transmetropolitan
graphic novel. Hey, perhaps I should start living like the main
character of this series, prowling the future city and revealing the
truth to the masses through my Internet columns, all the while living
like an edgy bohemian who doesn't give a damn. Or perhaps I have
already started doing that.
Since we have the rental car in our use until tomorrow, we drove down to the city instead of taking the public transit. Seeing the city from the point of view of a car gave me a whole new perspective about it. The whole city seemed to be quite busy, but at least there was relatively inexpensive parking available near Chinatown. The whole place reeked the way that Chinatown always reeks when it's hot like this, but you get used to the smell. When my wife complained about the putrid stench, I told her just to forget it, it's Chinatown. This made her laugh, and she said that she's never seen that movie. Well, if she hasn't, how does she know that was a line from a movie? Tell me that, genius. But not wanting to argue about this, I simply followed the standard cork pattern and asked her now what was that about some movie again.
It was actually my wife's idea to go dine in my very favourite place in Chinatown, a food court in an Asian mall in which the free market competition between five or six essentially identical Chinese food joints has lowered the prices down to the floor so that you can get a heaping plate of delicious food for $3.50. Beat that, anybody, especially since the guy piling up the food will tell you that your choice was "very good, boss, very good" no matter what you choose. I tend to eat there quite often whenever I am visiting the city, but my wife generally avoids this place because of something about "rats" and "rat droppings in food" and "the health inspectors closing the whole place down". I never heard of that, and I have never had any kind of health problems with the food in that place, unlike certain other places in the city that I could name. Usually when I go to that food court, I am the only non-Asian person around, but today I noticed an early-twenties hipsterish couple in there, the guy obviously showing the place for the girl. It's always fun to be a trailblazer, leading the way for gentrification!
After lunch, we drove to Hummingbird Center at which we parted ways. The convention center along the way at the Front Street seemed to be very busy, and we tried to look what the identical bags that the people were carrying said, but then we remembered that this is the big AIDS conference that is all the hoopla in the local media these days. I wrote about my thoughts about this disease in the earlier post "Turn the rainbow into a Jackson Pollock painting", whose comments turned into a discussion of why there is a heterosexual AIDS epidemic in Africa since it is virtually nonexistent in the West, so that a straight man who does not use drugs has a better chance of developing a breast cancer than he has of contracting AIDS. Now that I think about it, the theory of HIV spreading in Africa due to poor medical hygiene and especially because of reusing needles actually sounds quite plausible.
However, we also have the mystery of why the HIV is still so disparately prevalent in the gay communities of the Western countries. Why is it that despite everything and after all this time, gay men still account about half of the new HIV infections, when they are perhaps 2% of the whole population? Something is clearly out of the whack. (For all you nitpickers out there, these days the supposedly unisex word "gay" is universally used to mean specifically a male homosexual. Even the homosexuals themselves adhere to this usage by using the expression "gays and lesbians" and the acronym "GLBT", which are just nonsensical if we assume that the word "gay" refers to both male and female homosexuals.)
Thinking about this a little, I believe that the solution to this mystery can be found by simple analysis of incentives. Since he is not subject to the sociobiological and evo-psych constraints of the significantly higher female choosiness and lower female desire for casual sex, the life of an average gay man is basically a sex party that consists of casual sex with several hundreds, even thousands of partners. That simple fact already puts gay men to a much higher risk bracket compared to their straight brothers who have maybe five to ten partners on average during the lifetime. But as an explanaition for the higher incidence of HIV among gay men, this is still insufficient. After all, the HI-virus is actually pretty difficult to spread and unlike to transmit in a single sexual encounter, especially if condoms are used. Gay men get routinely tested for HIV and will quickly become aware of their status. To spread the disease as efficiently as would be needed to reach the current numbers, the HIV-positive men would have to keep rut-rut-rutting other men with the same gusto as before the infection. But why would they do that?
Like I said, the answer lies in the incentives. If a gay man becomes HIV-positive, please somebody tell me, what precisely would be his motivation to give up the sex fest with hundreds of other men? I certainly know that if my life was in this sense similar to those of the few men whose job title ends with the suffix "-star" and who can thus expect to enjoy sex with hundreds of attractive women in the future, I doubt that I would be willing to give up this joyride by making a number about my HIV-positive status. So it wouldn't really surprise me if at least a significant subset of HIV-positive gay men, once they have learned about their infection, simply kept on partying the same way they did before the infection. Hey, since you are already HIV-positive, it can't really get any worse for you, so what do you expect these guys to do, give up all that hot gay sex?
Second, each HIV-positive man actually benefits from there being more HIV-positive men. This gives them an incentive not to be too careful in spreading the disease. After all, as every "activist" should already know quite well, the more numerous a movement, the more money and other resources it can extract from other people and taxpayers. Since people with HIV and AIDS are by definition noble heroes in the eyes of the left, anything that these people do is good, so there will be no consequences of living as a "rebel" who challenges the mainstream ideas of monogamous sex. Since the government must allocate as much money to the treatment and research of HIV as needed, the HIV-positive man will get his meds regardless of whether there are ten or ten thousand other men waiting in line for them. In fact, the more HIV patients there are, the more pressure there is to make these meds free. There is also a social aspect in this as well. It would seriously suck to be the lone HIV-positive man in a community of gay men, but if lots of other people there were also HIV-positive, it wouldn't necessarily be quite as bad. Misery loves company, and once everybody is "poz", there is a helluva lot less stigma in that. And then everyone can again bareback each other like it's New York or San Francisco in the 1970's.
These two reasons would explain why the gay community just doesn't seem to learn and why the HIV infections continue to accumulate inside it, despite the fact that the transmission mechanism of the HI-virus is perfectly known and the transmission of teh virus is practically trivial to prevent. If I am right, all those millions of dollars and effort spent on the prevention are useless and will continue to be so. The exact same epidemic trend in which 25% of gay men are HIV-positive will continue far into the future, so that even in the year 2026, the majority of new HIV infections in the Western countries will occur in homosexual men. Were I a betting man, I would happily take a "long bet" on this.
But since I am not, perhaps I'll now put on my red and green glasses in style of Spider Jerusalem, and crash into the AIDS conference to present these facts to the delegates of the world. If some guards in black suits and sunglasses try to stop me, I'll just let my two kickass female bodyguards clear the way for me. Once I am on the stage, I could pull out my bowel disruptor and fire it at Bill Gates or some other post-cyberpunk bigwig and make him look like a real ninny. While the whole audience was laughing at this spectacle, I would give them a swearword-laden speech in which I would reveal the truth and the real culprits. Or at least that's the plan. If you don't see me in the evening news, you'll know that I failed and they "got" me before I could reach the stage.
Since we have the rental car in our use until tomorrow, we drove down to the city instead of taking the public transit. Seeing the city from the point of view of a car gave me a whole new perspective about it. The whole city seemed to be quite busy, but at least there was relatively inexpensive parking available near Chinatown. The whole place reeked the way that Chinatown always reeks when it's hot like this, but you get used to the smell. When my wife complained about the putrid stench, I told her just to forget it, it's Chinatown. This made her laugh, and she said that she's never seen that movie. Well, if she hasn't, how does she know that was a line from a movie? Tell me that, genius. But not wanting to argue about this, I simply followed the standard cork pattern and asked her now what was that about some movie again.
It was actually my wife's idea to go dine in my very favourite place in Chinatown, a food court in an Asian mall in which the free market competition between five or six essentially identical Chinese food joints has lowered the prices down to the floor so that you can get a heaping plate of delicious food for $3.50. Beat that, anybody, especially since the guy piling up the food will tell you that your choice was "very good, boss, very good" no matter what you choose. I tend to eat there quite often whenever I am visiting the city, but my wife generally avoids this place because of something about "rats" and "rat droppings in food" and "the health inspectors closing the whole place down". I never heard of that, and I have never had any kind of health problems with the food in that place, unlike certain other places in the city that I could name. Usually when I go to that food court, I am the only non-Asian person around, but today I noticed an early-twenties hipsterish couple in there, the guy obviously showing the place for the girl. It's always fun to be a trailblazer, leading the way for gentrification!
After lunch, we drove to Hummingbird Center at which we parted ways. The convention center along the way at the Front Street seemed to be very busy, and we tried to look what the identical bags that the people were carrying said, but then we remembered that this is the big AIDS conference that is all the hoopla in the local media these days. I wrote about my thoughts about this disease in the earlier post "Turn the rainbow into a Jackson Pollock painting", whose comments turned into a discussion of why there is a heterosexual AIDS epidemic in Africa since it is virtually nonexistent in the West, so that a straight man who does not use drugs has a better chance of developing a breast cancer than he has of contracting AIDS. Now that I think about it, the theory of HIV spreading in Africa due to poor medical hygiene and especially because of reusing needles actually sounds quite plausible.
However, we also have the mystery of why the HIV is still so disparately prevalent in the gay communities of the Western countries. Why is it that despite everything and after all this time, gay men still account about half of the new HIV infections, when they are perhaps 2% of the whole population? Something is clearly out of the whack. (For all you nitpickers out there, these days the supposedly unisex word "gay" is universally used to mean specifically a male homosexual. Even the homosexuals themselves adhere to this usage by using the expression "gays and lesbians" and the acronym "GLBT", which are just nonsensical if we assume that the word "gay" refers to both male and female homosexuals.)
Thinking about this a little, I believe that the solution to this mystery can be found by simple analysis of incentives. Since he is not subject to the sociobiological and evo-psych constraints of the significantly higher female choosiness and lower female desire for casual sex, the life of an average gay man is basically a sex party that consists of casual sex with several hundreds, even thousands of partners. That simple fact already puts gay men to a much higher risk bracket compared to their straight brothers who have maybe five to ten partners on average during the lifetime. But as an explanaition for the higher incidence of HIV among gay men, this is still insufficient. After all, the HI-virus is actually pretty difficult to spread and unlike to transmit in a single sexual encounter, especially if condoms are used. Gay men get routinely tested for HIV and will quickly become aware of their status. To spread the disease as efficiently as would be needed to reach the current numbers, the HIV-positive men would have to keep rut-rut-rutting other men with the same gusto as before the infection. But why would they do that?
Like I said, the answer lies in the incentives. If a gay man becomes HIV-positive, please somebody tell me, what precisely would be his motivation to give up the sex fest with hundreds of other men? I certainly know that if my life was in this sense similar to those of the few men whose job title ends with the suffix "-star" and who can thus expect to enjoy sex with hundreds of attractive women in the future, I doubt that I would be willing to give up this joyride by making a number about my HIV-positive status. So it wouldn't really surprise me if at least a significant subset of HIV-positive gay men, once they have learned about their infection, simply kept on partying the same way they did before the infection. Hey, since you are already HIV-positive, it can't really get any worse for you, so what do you expect these guys to do, give up all that hot gay sex?
Second, each HIV-positive man actually benefits from there being more HIV-positive men. This gives them an incentive not to be too careful in spreading the disease. After all, as every "activist" should already know quite well, the more numerous a movement, the more money and other resources it can extract from other people and taxpayers. Since people with HIV and AIDS are by definition noble heroes in the eyes of the left, anything that these people do is good, so there will be no consequences of living as a "rebel" who challenges the mainstream ideas of monogamous sex. Since the government must allocate as much money to the treatment and research of HIV as needed, the HIV-positive man will get his meds regardless of whether there are ten or ten thousand other men waiting in line for them. In fact, the more HIV patients there are, the more pressure there is to make these meds free. There is also a social aspect in this as well. It would seriously suck to be the lone HIV-positive man in a community of gay men, but if lots of other people there were also HIV-positive, it wouldn't necessarily be quite as bad. Misery loves company, and once everybody is "poz", there is a helluva lot less stigma in that. And then everyone can again bareback each other like it's New York or San Francisco in the 1970's.
These two reasons would explain why the gay community just doesn't seem to learn and why the HIV infections continue to accumulate inside it, despite the fact that the transmission mechanism of the HI-virus is perfectly known and the transmission of teh virus is practically trivial to prevent. If I am right, all those millions of dollars and effort spent on the prevention are useless and will continue to be so. The exact same epidemic trend in which 25% of gay men are HIV-positive will continue far into the future, so that even in the year 2026, the majority of new HIV infections in the Western countries will occur in homosexual men. Were I a betting man, I would happily take a "long bet" on this.
But since I am not, perhaps I'll now put on my red and green glasses in style of Spider Jerusalem, and crash into the AIDS conference to present these facts to the delegates of the world. If some guards in black suits and sunglasses try to stop me, I'll just let my two kickass female bodyguards clear the way for me. Once I am on the stage, I could pull out my bowel disruptor and fire it at Bill Gates or some other post-cyberpunk bigwig and make him look like a real ninny. While the whole audience was laughing at this spectacle, I would give them a swearword-laden speech in which I would reveal the truth and the real culprits. Or at least that's the plan. If you don't see me in the evening news, you'll know that I failed and they "got" me before I could reach the stage.
I wonder what the average life expectancy of an HIV positive gay person is?
With 25% already infected, the rate of new infections must be quite high, while the gestation time for new gays is at least, say 14 years ... (unless the gay community is willing to go lower) ...
So I imagine that the gay community will be dwindling in numbers.
Posted by Loki on the run | 6:10 PM
Tworeasons why AIDS spreads more quickly in the gay community that have nothing to do with higher promiscuity.
(1) Anal sex.
Anal sex transmits HIV far more effectively than vaginal sex. (Oral sex is, I believe, the safest of the three). As you pointed out in an earlier post, gays probably go anal a lot more than straights do (because obviously gay men cannot have vaginal sex with each other).
(2) HIV is spread far more easily from penetrator to penetratee than vice versa. This means that heterosexually, men can spread it to women, but in general the woman will not spread it sexually (even if she penetrates the man's rectum with her finger or tongue or a foreign object, it would have to be bleeding or covered in blood to spread the disease). However, with gay men the same person can be the penetrator in one encounter and the penetratee in another, so HIV can spread exponentially.
Posted by Glaivester | 6:11 PM
Glaivester says:
However, with gay men the same person can be the penetrator in one encounter and the penetratee in another, so HIV can spread exponentially.
I would have said penetratee in one and penetrator in another.
In addition, I think it is not so much that a male can be infected and then pass it on, while a female would find it less difficult to pass HIV on, but, as Ilkka points out, the much greater number of sex partners over a very short period of time that provides the exponential rates of infection, along with the fact that men penetrate.
Posted by Loki on the run | 6:23 PM
One problem with HIV in africa ( see peter deusbergs book on AIDS) is that medical funding is about 50 times greater for aids related diseases than anything else. Anytime aids is DIAGNOSED by a clinic, they get more money to treat aids. This has resulted in a great many diseases being "reclassified"
Additionally, the test for HIV ( such as it is) requires 4 matching points in north america to be declared positive, but in africa, they only use 2, the end result being that about 7 times as many people are declared hiv positive as in north america, when the test results would be declared negative if tested here.
Posted by John | 1:11 AM
This reminds me of possibly the most sickening thing I've found on the internet, not too surprisingly through SomethingAwful and their weekend web. Bareback Exchange is a forum for HIV positive gays that want to spread the disease. Including and especially to unsuspecting people that do not consent. The worst of the lot talked about not only infecting his wife, but drugging his son and having about 30 guys "breed" him without him remembering any of what occurred. The weekend web page is here but starts on the lower portion of the page.
The forum archives are only available to registered members (which I am not), but a google search for it brought up this substitute.
Posted by tggp | 1:54 AM
Bareback Exchange
http://www.somethingawful.com/index.php?a=3866&p=2
Posted by Anonymous | 8:02 AM
ANC condemns TAC action in Toronto
This is too sad for words ...
Posted by Loki on the run | 1:00 PM
IIRC, at the height of the "Aids awareness" kick at the end of the 90s or thereabouts, new HIV infections among gay men had been reduced somewhat impressively (and with only a decade of constant media saturation on the subject!), but then with the introduction of retro-viral drugs, the rate shot back up. Apparently, the thinking in the gay community was that they didn't have to worry about HIV anymore, because they'll just take the drug cocktail, so no need to worry about those buzz-killing condoms.
That style of thinking is... interesting enough on its own. But it also fails to take into account the fact that there are multiple strains of HIV, and that getting more than one reduces the effectiveness of the retroviral treatments, meaning that gays are working themselves back to square one.
But hey, small price to pay for raw butt sex.
Posted by Russell | 4:03 AM