Ingolfson, I guess you just haven’t been invited to the right hacker parties ... I’ve known quite a few who took Heinlein very (perhaps too) seriously

Come on over to the US and we’ll set you up with the right people so that Brock can’t browbeat you any more.  At least, not unless you ask him very nicely.

I could be wrong, but if what little memory I have serves me right, Heinlein endorses voluntary incest w/ that free lovin’ thang.

Regards,

ingolfson,

Alzheimer at 27. A scary thought…

I feel the same way....  You’re not alone, I think after 25 people’s minds start to go, at least mine has....

I could be wrong, but if what little memory I have serves me right, Heinlein endorses voluntary incest w/ that free lovin’ thang.

Another proof from Consi of the connection between homosexuality and incest!  Re Heinlein- my favorite is “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, close second is “Stranger in a Strange Land”.  The sex stuff actually seems pretty innocuous, if unrealistic for human beings, but I must say I find his crypto Social Darwinism a bit worrisome…

ingolfson; And while I’m at it, Zilch, can you tell me what the heck you’re holding in your gravatar picture?

A weed-covered ship anchor?

Schaut so aus, gel? Elwed hatte Recht- ein Horn aus Seetang.

I’ve the creeping feeling that I’m making more typing mistakes as I get older. Alzheimer at 27. A scary thought…

Warte nur, bis Du zweimal so alt bist.  There are compensations, however…

Yeah, Heinlein was a total perv.  Last night I read his story, “All you zombies” where a guy - hmm, this is hard to explain - was born female, grew up in an orphanage, was seduced by his older, time-travellin’ male self, bore a baby girl - himself - snatched the baby girl from the hospital and dropped it in an orphanage to be raised…

Well, suffice it to say Heinlein, while entertaining, may not be the best model of sexual feasibility.  But The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is just about my favorite novel, ever.  I always cry at the end when Mike… well, I don’t want to spoil it for anyone.

Yeah, DOF, he was definitely over the top.  I’m not sure he was as senile towards the end as people say; he might just have been trying to push buttons really, REALLY hard.  By the time he got to To Sail Beyond the Sunset, though, it had ruined his writing, if you ask me.

But yeah, I get all lumpy in the throat at that part too.  Lunch, anyone?

Lunch, anyone?

How much do you want for it, or are you trying to refute ol’ Bobby?

I consider Heinlein’s ideas about extended families to be a kind of social utopia, a sort of pleasant fantasy. I know this would never work for me, since I guess I’m way too suspicious a person to feel that much trust not only in one but in several people, but it strikes me as a direction in which our species might, hopefully, one day evolve.

Heinlein endorses voluntary incest w/ that free lovin’ thang.

He does. He also touches upon the genetic dangers of it though, and I’ll easily admit that it’s one of the most unrealistic parts of his invented societies (at least as a General practice - Lazarus Long’s love for Maureen actually reads pretty believable).

Yeah, Heinlein was a total perv.

He was I remember reading that he built a wall around his grounds because too many hippies were intruding on his privacy (a big no-no if you know his stories) because they kind of considered him one of their heroes after ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’.

Last night I read his story, “All you zombies� where a guy - hmm, this is hard to explain - was born female, grew up in an orphanage, was seduced by his older, time-travellin’ male self, bore a baby girl - himself - snatched the baby girl from the hospital and dropped it in an orphanage to be raised…

Yep. Easily one of his weirdest, and a mediocre one too, if I remember correctly. Very standard in the writing itself, though. Heinlein had a pretty set style from early on, I feel, and he only changed in how much he focussed - or wandered - in his later works.

Geekmom: Come on over to the US

I’ve been planning to, at some time. Maybe I’ll stop by

I’m not sure he was as senile towards the end as people say; he might just have been trying to push buttons really, REALLY hard.

I think both is partly true. He says himself (in ‘Extended Universe’ I think), that he was pretty much ‘not worth a hoot’ for several years before he had some sort of head operation.

But then he certainly liked bld statements. I mean, I formulated a lot of my political and social opinions by arguing with him (in my head*) while reading stuff like ‘Starship Troopers’.

*Good that I didn’t know he was already dead by that time, it just wouldn’t have been the same.

Zilch:

Warte nur, bis Du zweimal so alt bist. There are compensations, however…

Which? I’d like to hear about them - no way of avoiding it anyway, I guess

(You will excuse me if I won’t join in to the German talk. While it might be fun confusing the others, I guess this should still be readable for everyone

Warte nur, bis Du zweimal so alt bist. There are compensations, however…

Which? I’d like to hear about them - no way of avoiding it anyway, I guess

That’s worth another thread, but the brief answer is that younger minds are better at analysis, older minds are better at synthesis.  At least, that’s been my experience, and that of several friends.

(You will excuse me if I won’t join in to the German talk. While it might be fun confusing the others, I guess this should still be readable for everyone

Right you are.  Several of us here like playing around with language, and it can get out of hand.  It’s hard to know when insider jokes get too insidey and exclusive.  If some of the French and Canadian posters here were to comment in French, I’d have fun trying to figure out what they were saying, but if others posted in Hebrew or Japanese I’d just be nonplussed.  I’ll try to keep it unter Kontrolle.

Ich mag es, wenn Sie Deutsches sprechen!

Here’s my two cents- as a gay American (TM Guv. McGreevey), I have never once, in my entire life, wished I were straight- not even a little. Moreover, I do not feel I have had an unduly tough row to hoe. In fact, I am tempted to spite Consigliere by saying

I’m so grateful that I was gay because when I was a young man attempting to come to terms with my sexuality it was so much easier because I was gay.

I won’t say this, because it would not true; I don’t feel it was any easier. But do I feel it was much harder? Hell no. I am 100% okay with being who I am, and basically always have been.
You wanna know why I feel this way? Because I was raised in an environment totally free of all of the bullshit that makes most gay people feel bad about themselves. You see, my household resembled in many ways a conservative’s idea of perfection: married parents, upper middle class, house in the suburbs, parochial schools, potlucks and PTA meetings. We even attended church regularly. But there was one important difference. See, my father is white, and my mother is black. They met in 1974, a mere 7 years after interracial marriage became universally legal in this country. As such, they were aware that many people did not approve of their union. And really, why should anyone have approved of their relationship? Wanting to marry someone of a different race is a CHOICE, not something you are born with; few people do it, so it’s abnormal; and it offers no distinctive advantages over marrying someone of the same race. Nonetheless, and fortunately for me, my parents lived in a country where even widespread societal disapproval of your “lifestyle” was insufficient cause to make it illegal (or, more accurately, keep it illegal).
So my parents were able to get married, and they had me, and then my siblings. And they must have remembered the way some people viewed their relationship, because we were all raised to believe that what matters most in life is being a good person, not who you date. I know, I know, what a crazy notion, but thanks to them, I really have never had a problem with my sexuality, and, if anything, being biracial has been a greater source of consternation in my life. I guess, since my parentage didn’t exactly conform to societal expectations and thus caused me some difficulty in life, it was really unfair of them to have me and they probably should have been prevented, but there’s not much to be done about it now.
Now, as for whether being gay provides me with any benefits? Well, I’m not sure how to handle this question. Consigliere seems to think we should “fix” homosexuality because it “so screws up someone’s life”, and it’s “a helluva struggle.” But if we lived in a society where, say, only gay people were allowed to marry their partners, and raise kids, and got free chocolate for life, then no one would think being gay was a helluva struggle, right? So maybe the problem doesn’t lie with anything intrinsic to being gay itself.
I can say that on at least three occasions in the past year, I have had straight male friends tell me that they kinda envied me. Among the things they noted: on the weekends, my boyfriend and I often play Xbox all day long, while many of my straight friends get dragged around doing “girly” stuff with someone who will never, ever help them fight off the evil Covenant hordes. I save up money knowing that it will be spent on myself, while my straight friends save up just in case their girlfriends find themselves unexpectedly expecting. And my boyfriend and I have significantly cut down on laundry and cost of living expenses by sharing each other’s clothes, even though this sometimes makes me look like I’m shrinking.
So, has being gay ever presented any difficulties in my life? Of course! I wasn’t always comfortable around certain groups of people, for example (oftentimes the same groups I people I wasn’t comfortable being biracial around). And before I came out, I worried that my friends would feel like they hadn’t really known me as well as they thought. But do I think my life so far would have been any better had I been straight? Nope. And, unless certain deluded segments of the population get their way, I probably never will.
Anyhoo, sorry to get all David Copperfield on yall there, but I’m just tired of people like Consigliere blithely tossing off their opinions on things they know nothing about as if they were scientific fact.

Bravo!

Thanks Ulfrekr for sharing your history and your orientation experiences.

It can sound controversial to say one has never wished to be straight; difficult for others to believe at least, but I have to admit I’ve never been dismissive of my orientation either.

This is not to say I’ve never had regrets concerning other’s outlooks concerning it, but I’ve always seen my journey and difficulties as refining fires. Being gay continually allowed a sensitive and curious nature to develop. It forced me to consider my values and prejudices as stages to traverse and gave me a stronger sense of desiring to identify with others, not as a survival technique but through an intimate awareness of the complexities of human nature and a sincere interest concerning variations on a theme.

In other more simple words, being gay forced me to come to terms with and ultimately justified acceptance of my proclivities and allowed me to better reason through other’s unique struggles I could never experience personally. I wouldn’t change this part of my being now even if I could.

I can’t say I would have chosen it before hand if I’d had a chance to predesign my emotional and behavioral characteristics but that is more because I would not yet have known it’s serviceability.

I had to live being gay to appreciate it’s potential for personal and societal benefit.

Thanks for your thoughts on the issue Brock. By the by, I’ve been perusing this site for a while now, and I have to say, I heart your brain.
I think you make a very important point with

I can’t say I would have chosen it before hand if I’d had a chance to predesign my emotional and behavioral characteristics but that is more because I would not yet have known it’s serviceability. I had to live being gay to appreciate it’s potential for personal and societal benefit.

The argument from Consigliere and others like him seems to be that because something makes you unhappy, it must be a bad thing, and we must get rid of it. As your post indicates, just because something initially seems like a bad thing, doesn’t mean it’s ultimately a bad thing. I mean, I’m short. I used to haaaaate being short. I would have changed my height in a instant if it were possible. But I couldn’t, so ultimately I learned to live with it, and I think I’m a better person for it. But by Consi’s reasoning, just because I had a hard time being short at one point, there must be something horribly wrong with being short, and that’s just silly. I would still make myself taller if I could. I would also give myself the ability to kill a yak at a hundred paces with mind bullets. I’d change lots of things about myself. That doesn’t mean that I’m defective, it means that I’m human, and it certainly doesn’t mean that I have a problem being me or that I’m not better off the way I am in the long run.

Ulfrekr- what Les said: bravo.  Welcome to our corner of cyberspace.
So you’re biracial, short, and gay.  Pretty good, but I don’t know if that beats my friend Harold, who is not only Jewish, short, gay, and Polish, but also a violist… What the hell, you’re both Menschen.

Ulfrekr, let me add my “bravo!” to the chorus.  And Brock, too.  I also heart Brock’s brain. 

Your experience with being biracial is especially telling of how far we have not come - that any child or adult person should ever have to feel uncomfortable about race.  It shows that prejudice is entirely natural, so of course it has been integrated into religious memes.

You guys heart MY brain? You’re kidding, right?

What you’ve both said is a great compliment but I dare you to trade brains with me for a weekend.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but I could use the vacation.

Interesting discussion.

I never made a choice to be gay. If I did, I don’t remember it. That’s how significent THAT decision was, eh?

I quite enjoy being gay. It’s no holiday but I see my hetero friends and they’re not on holiday either.

I can’t see how gay people fit into the overall reproductive scene here on earth but I am also aware that we used to think stars were stuck onto the underside of a big bowl that covered the flat earth. People are kinda silly…

I don’t remember Jesus ever having a hassle with gay people. I know the church has for a long time (Pretty hard to keep all the straights in check when the queers are whooping it up in the carparks).

I got “married” two years ago. Not to usurp straight people. Not to “steal” marriage. I just loved the guy and I asked him and he said yes and we did it. Not in a church (way too expensive - funny that....), we did it in our backyard.

I’m not in the least bit interested in what god thinks. I doubt that god “thinks” at all. I think the idea of god thinking is so humancentric it’s outrageous. It denies the possibility that maybe god has another way of figuring stuff out - like maybe setting up models (earth) and seeing how it runs.

I’m sure there’s a Xtian out there who can tell me how god thinks and how he/she knows but frankly, until it’s relevant to my day-to-day existence I’d prefer not to be bothered with it. If god has a problem with me and where I stick my dick, he knows where to find me…

I can’t see how gay people fit into the overall reproductive scene here on earth but I am also aware that we used to think stars were stuck onto the underside of a big bowl that covered the flat earth. People are kinda silly…

Hhhhmmm, I’m going way out on a limb here, but maybe its a mechanism to prevent overpopulation? After all, it its supposedly influenced by hormonal levels in the womb… and THOSE might be influenced by “feelings of being crowded” on the part of the mother.

I’m reaching here. One would need studies on levels of homosexuality among high- and low-pop-density cultures to get more info on that. Though different social mores about homosex might make the data nearly useless.

But it would certainly blow the “choice” part out the water, EVEN if you considered it a bad thing.

Not wishing to rehash old points, but felt that the thread deserved an update with some additional science:

1. zilch pointed to a 1993 study regarding female homosexuality, and from that study he stated that there were likely genetic components to female homosexuality.  This is unlikely given that Dean Hamer, the author of the 93 study on male homosexuality that was trumpeted as the finding of the gay gene, takes issue with such a conclusion, and goes even further.  Mr. Hamer’s position is stated as follows:

A woman whose sister was a lesbian had a 6 percent chance of also being a lesbian. Astonishingly, the daughter of a lesbian had a 33 percent chance of being a lesbian. This result is genetically impossible. A mother and her child cannot be more genetically similar than two sisters. “But the pattern we observed could mean only one thing: being a lesbian, or a nonheterosexual woman, was ‘culturally transmitted,’ not inherited.” Angela M.L. Pattatucci and Dean H. Hamer, “Development and Familiarity of Sexual Orientation in Females,” Behavior Genetics 25 (1995)

Mr. Hamer’s work and writing has sometimes been suspect, but he is certainly not biased in favor of a finding against a genetic cause for homosexuality.  So, when he says that not only is there not a genetic cause, but that female homosexuality is not inherited, that is very strong statement. 

2. If there is physiological cause, and it remains unproven at this point, scientist seem to be leaning towards a theory that ingolfson has pointed out, that if there is a reduction in hormone secretion, it is because it confers a benefit on the parent or the siblings in some manner.  However, they seem to be leaning the other way as to the benefit. 

It’s been discovered that nature will sometimes encourage a negative condition to occur in a few people if it helps the many. For instance, when both parents carry the gene for sickle cell anemia, their children are born with a painful disease. However, if just one parent passes on the gene, the children are born with a resistance to malaria. Since passing on only one gene happens statistically more often, many benefit from the suffering of a few. Researchers think that other genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, may carry a similar protection—perhaps one we don’t recognize, since it’s no longer needed.

Homosexuality can be seen as a deficit by nature, since every species has reproduction as its major goal, so it doesn’t die out. But if having one or two homosexual children causes a woman to have many more children overall, nature would consider this to be “worth it.”

3. Above SS made the statement that there was no white gene, black gene or yellow gene (referring to skin color) that had been discovered.  At the time he made the statement it was true.  Now that statement is no longer true. 

The work also reveals for the first time that Asians owe their relatively light skin to different mutations. That means that light skin arose independently at least twice in human evolution, in each case affecting populations with the facial and other traits that today are commonly regarded as the hallmarks of Caucasian and Asian races.  Washington Post, December 16, 2005

Consi- if female homosexuality has a strong cultural component (which I have never contested) that does not prove that there is no genetic component.  Time and research will tell.

But if having one or two homosexual children causes a woman to have many more children overall, nature would consider this to be “worth it.�

Don’t know where this quote is from, but is there any evidence that this is the case?

is there any evidence that this is the case?

A mother and her child cannot be more genetically similar than two sisters.

No, but the child’s father can contribute genes that the mother’s sister does not have ...

“But the pattern we observed could mean only one thing: being a lesbian, or a nonheterosexual woman, was ‘culturally transmitted,’ not inherited.�

No, it doesn’t.  When you quote the “chances” of someone having or doing something, you’re talking correlation, NOT causation.  And when you hear a supposed scientist saying that evidence “could only mean one thing,” there is a really big bias hiding unsuccessfully in the background.

My $0.02 on the gay marraige issue is that I am all for it. To me, marriage is first and foremost about love, not procreation. Therefore, in my mind any two adults who love each other, regardless of their gender, have every right to get married should they wish to. Period.

To me, marriage is first and foremost about love, not procreation.

Yeah, but it’s the procreation part that inspires endurance of the marriage.

Sad, but true.

Yeah, but it’s the procreation part that inspires endurance of the marriage.

That’s not necessarily true. I know plenty of people who have been married for decades and have never procreated. If love is what the marraige was built upon, then external factors (such as children) should not determine how long the marraige will last.

I think too many people get married with only procreation in mind; thus, the marraige was not a strong one in the first place, and it does not last (or it only lasts out of a sense of duty to others). Since love is what marraige is all about (in my opinion), it should be enough to sustain it.

People can love each other and not get married; for example, I don’t really believe in marraige personally. It’s too traditional. But if other people want to get married, then in my mind it makes not one whit of difference whether they are both men, both women, or one of each gender--it’s whether or not they love each other and they both desire to get married. If so, go for it, I say!