Assuming for the sake of argument that sexual orientation is congenital as you suppose: with regard to your remark about "eugenics", regardless of whatever *I* might want, if it were to become possible for parents to maximize heterosexuality in their offspring through antenatal care consisting of dietary supplements or hormone treatment or whatever, don't you think they would?
Given that parents in some parts of the world routinely practise abortion to ensure more boys, don't you think they would just as quickly abort a foetus destined to be gay?
This is all about parental aspirations. Yes, divorce is a problem (and incidentally the increasing divorce rate is something I do speak out against very frequently) but it has nothing to do with the issue at hand and regardless of a parent's views on divorce they will still usually seek to avoid having homosexual offspring. This will happen no matter what you or I say.
You're just plain wrong and your imagination is working over time. There's no such thing as "recruitment". It's not possible. It's like recruiting people to become left-handed. It ain't gonna work.
Who do you think you are telling *me* what *I* have or have not witnessed? You are in denial. Get over it or don't get over it, but don't call me a liar. I have seen recruitment attempted many times. I have seen it succeed a few. In between I have seen normally heterosexual men tempted in a moment of weakness, lubricated by drink or drugs, to do something that they later regretted, but by which were forever changed. If you deny this out of ignorance then it is you who are misdirected.
If you deny it in the face of my honest testimony then your belief system is based on denial of the truth and it is you who are the bigot.
I am only moderately anti-gay in that I only want to not have your crap shoved in my face, invading my home and my kids' school, but you have consistently attempted to paint me as some sort of reactionary KKK-like figure. If you must insist on polarizing everything so that any attempt to get you to keep the more intimate and unsightly aspects of your personal life out of sight results in you characterizing me as a Nazi, then it is you who are hateful.
But I don't expect you to understand that; I think you are past all understanding and can't be reached. So I give up on this conversation. You want what you want and you are clearly incapable of taking on board anything that doesn't fit with the belief that you are right. I might as well talk to a lump of wood. I really am out of here now.
SpryGuy, I never meant to insinuate any special connection between paedophilia and homosexuality. I think we are talking at crossed purposes here. The recruiting of young people I was talking about - I have only witnessed this taking place in teenagers of the age of 16 or over. So leaving aside the issue of local variations in age of consent laws, and regardless of my personal distaste for the type of recruitment taking place, I do not consider it to be like paedophilia. It's a different category of thing altogether.
With regard to evidence about this recruitment, it would be ludicrous to expect me to name names here.
As to what form it takes, use your imagination: this is about sexual seduction of course. Also and just as important there is a seduction of social inclusion which is very tempting for those who are lonely, disturbed or otherwise emotionally vulnerable. And you might ask what is the harm in that, but it is a steep price to pay when the price is exclusion from what most of us consider a "normal" life, and exclusion from the gene pool.
I've seen both types of seduction employed upon friends of mine on two separate occasions when I was at college, and I've also seen how current gay friends of mine behave around impressionable youngsters, again employing both types of seduction. There's just no room for argument about this. I have seen it over and over again. Perhaps you and your friends don't behave this way: well if so, then that's really good. But I've seen it and it really does happen.
You've repeatedly made the point that there is no single gay lifestyle, that most gays don't participate in the sterotypical gay lifestle, and implied that I'm therefore railing against something that doesn't exist. Look, I'm well aware that there are many gay people who choose to keep their affairs relatively private. But I'm not complaining about them at all. I *am* complaining about the promiscuous gays. I *am* complaining about the recruiting gays. I *am* complaining about the militant gays necking in the street and campaigning for "positive images" of gays in young children's books, in school curricula and all over TV etc. so as to make it impossible for us ever to protect our children from their propaganda. Each of these types of gay person has a common subculture associated with them, places they hang out, things they say, things they promote. I think in fact that you do know exactly what I mean, given your reference to "Act-Up-in-your-faceness".
Good points about evolutionary benefit of gay siblings etc, BTW. This kind of stuff makes me sit up and listen. I'm really glad we're done with the name-calling.
All the same, a parent's anxieties might not be assuaged by this. Your argument presupposes that there are anough kids around in the first place for busy parents to benefit from extra assistance.
But suppose they only have one or two kids? The prospect of grandchildren is far from certain. Let's face it: like your straight friends, just as in the educated and affluent in general: birth rates are already falling rapidly. Marriage is less popular than ever, and those who do marry are more likely to divorce. In the current culture of the primacy of self-gratification, fewer people seem to able to face the responsibility of a truly lifelong commitment to a relationship, let alone children.
So those who do become parents and who are serious about it might well distrust any additional influences which could influence their offspring to drop out of the gene pool. As do I.
I don't consider adoption and two parents of the same sex to be an acceptable substitute and though this is an arrangement that is likely to become legal in the near future, it is not something I would personally want to encourage any more than I would encourage single parent families. A child needs a mum and a dad.
Falling in love, the issue of choice etc: I doubt it is possible to even have a conversation about this anymore. The Newspeak of the political correctness lobby has mov
Falling in love is indeed a voluntary phenomenon. Not only that, it requires active and willing mental participation. (I speak as someone who fell very, very hard for a girl a long time ago, and the experience is stamped into my soul so deeply I can never forget even the tiniest detail).
I know some people claim they have no choice and maybe it is different for them, but if so I believe the difference is only that they so much don't want to turn back, that they are so afraid of bursting the bubble, that they deny the very possibility.
Recent research showed that the brain mechanisms (neuroanatomical and neurochemical pathways) involved in falling in love are the same ones implicated in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. There is nothing really mysterious about it after all.
The fact is that no matter how attracted you are to someone it is always possible to make yourself turn away (though admittedly easier in the beginning than later when the obsession is fully-fledged).
Once you have put some distance between you the pain lessens somewhat, and the obsession fades over time, if not the memory.
It's clear from all this that "falling in love" is nothing more than a legacy from evolutionary psychology, intended to encourage humans to pair bond.
Other research shows that humans also "imprint" somehow for a certain type (for males the type is usually based on either their mother or the first person with whom an intimate bond of some sort was established) and this type forms a rough template which will bias preferences in a particular direction when seeking mates.
I don't think this is insignificant in the case of gays. Sexual preference and sexual behaviour are not nearly so hard wired in humans as they are in other mammals. Most sexually aware people know by experience that the response to a sexual stimulus becomes stronger when exposure to that stimulus is repeatedly associated with sexual stimulation.
This is exactly how fetishes are formed. It is also why sexual preferences in humans diverge so widely and become so ingrained. Human sexuality is exceedingly plastic, especially in the young. The process of training it to identify mates, which receives only a few rough cues from biology, is especially prone to being derailed. Hence, ex-public schoolboys with fetishes for caning or spanking. Hence, also, the higher incidence of homosexuality among alumni of such single-sex schools.
In other words, our sexual orientation is heavily influenced by experiences formed during childhood and puberty.
I haven't seen any complete theory of why exactly human sexuality should be so malleable compared to, say, ducks. But it is surely linked with the fact that physical morphology of male and female primates of the same species is essentially similar, and secondary sexual characteristics vary so widely that morphologies actually overlap. At the same time, racial and individual differences can be striking so that physical sexual cues are almost lost in the noise.
Also, for humans, the appearance of males and females varies so drastically between different cultures that human sexuality *must* be culturally programmable or else these cultural differences could not have arisen and would not work. Sexual ornamentation (lipstick, neck rings, penis sheaths) exists in order to guide potential mates through the morphological noise and help to identify the wearer as a potential mate. By the time one is "programmed" with the right cultural sexual cues, it is possible to provoke a sexual response with the ornamentation alone. Just the same as the school biology experiment with sticklebacks, where a red plastic blob is enough to make the male begin his courtship "dance".
Anyway, this is why I believe that societal and personal experiential influences are of primary importance in determining sexual orientation and why, therefore, care should be taken to polic
Intending to try stoking some enthusiasm for real life space exploration in my children, I just got through reading Stephen Baxter's "Voyage" to my eight and nine year old children (they read well enough themselves but they would never have read this).
Anyway, despite this being a thoroughly adult story about an alternate NASA history, heavy with politics and technical detail about NASA procedures and technologies, the kids just loved it. Where the book assumes an adult knowledge of twentieth century history, I kept having to stop to explain about things like Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and so on. I also had many opportunities to point out current news stories and draw parallels between the book's fictional NERVA accident and the recent Columbia disaster. But the compelling story made them pay attention.
Result: I asked my son the other day what was the main impact of Reagan's presidency on US national space policy. His answer: "Star Wars and the militarization of space". Nine years old! I asked my daughter how does Soviet space technology differ from America's. Her one-word answer: "Boilerplate!" They can also give, on request, potted career summaries of all the major characters (I suppose it's a pity the major characters were all fictional in this case).
Yesterday at dinner I mentioned the recent radar survey of Titan's surface and the theory that there may be large liquid methane oceans on the surface. My daugher pipes up "That's Saturn's largest moon!" And my son then says that he'd been reading about the Cassini mission and how the Huygens probe was designed to float if this methane ocean theory proved to be correct.
Mission accomplished!
Speaking for myself, despite the obligatory history classes at school I was never able to make any sense of it until I encountered Edward Rutherfurd's novels (Sarum, London, The Forest et al). These are like collections of short stories about people in a handful of families spread across many centuries of history, and woven together into a single narrative. Everything is relevant to and thoroughly explained in it's historical context. It really brings history alive.
So to sum up, it's the presence of a coherent narrative which grabs at your imagination, that is the key to learning. I'm certain of that now. This must surely have strong ramifications for educational policy.
Suitable games might be thin on the ground and also too expensive to develop under strapped educational budgets, but there are plenty of historical novels around which clearly exhibit much detailed research on the part of the author.
While I'm on the subject, has anybody else seen Izzard's hilarious Trek send-up routine? And more importantly, which of his videos is it on? I've bought two so far, and still no luck:o\
I was thinking exactly the same thing. It's hard to believe that the same thing didn't cross the minds of those folks at Google.
So what do we do? Maybe it's time for a week-long boycott just to show them we *can* get by without them - plus an email campaign to drive the point home.
The same reason Schwarzenegger is cool (er, used to be).
I was going to mention Willis, Stallone, Samuel L Jackson but actually those guys have all proven to have some acting skills whenever given the opportunity to do so.
Makes you wonder doesn't it. How many of those screen tough guys actually turn out to have significant acting skills, I mean. It's just the shitty scripts they normally get that prevent us from seeing it.
This is nothing new of course. I remember the first time I saw Kirk Douglas in "Lust for Life" and thinking Crikey, the man can really act, and how! (Why the hell isn't this movie available on DVD yet?)
And Rock Hudson in John Frankenheimer's You gotta see that one too: fantastic movie.
Seems to me there's nothing *making* them take the usual shitty scripts except the opportunity to make an awful lot of money. It's only when they get so freaking rich that they feel they can afford to pick and choose and make serious films.
Who to blame, then. The audiences I suppose, for preferring to spend their movie ticket money on action blockbusters populated with cardboard stereotypes.
Please accept my apologies for misusing the term "gender disorientation" - this is used almost exclusively to describe transsexuality. I should have said "sexual disorientation".
I promise it'll be worth your while to read this comment all the way through. I can't promise that you'll like it though.
I saw a report on this earlier today in the Times. Heh! I immediately though about you. What a gift! You must have been dancing in circles.
It's interesting all right. But to say that it proves what you say it proves would at least be premature at this stage. The researchers themselves probably aren't making such a bold claim; we've been down this route before with other similar research and those who did were eventually shot down in flames - so jumping the gun like that would look like a classic Career Limiting Manoeuvre.
Hold your fire and wait. Maybe it'll turn out to be relevant but it will take more research before we know *how* relevant.
Perhaps more importantly though, if there does prove to be some correlation between prenatal brain development and gender disorientation that's still a long way from saying that gender disorientation is universally determined by this one factor.
If you re-read my earlier comments in this thread you'll see where I already admitted that congenital brain factors could be *partly* responsible. But in general these things only influence predisposition to some degree which varies betwen individuals. They don't set an obligatory template for your life.
It would be very worrying if they did. Not only because of the ramifications for free will but also because of the ethical ramifications of society's probably reaction.
Already in some parts of the world it is possible (I say possible, not laudable) to have a pregnancy terminated on the basis of a crude genetic assay - eg on detection of various common birth defects or even simply the "wrong" sex.
If some parents think it's OK to abort because the foetus is a girl rather than a boy, do you think they would be more or less likely to terminate a foetus that was predestined to be gay?
Perhaps this isn't so likely to happen in a modern, Western, liberal (nominally Christian) country. I don't know. Think of the awful dilemma faced by right-wing conservative anti-gay anti-abortionists! Maybe the real winners would turn out to be the "pro-choice" lobby.
On the other hand, if the extravagant claims made by the newspapers today in reporting this research paper *do* turn out to be correct, then given time the "problem" could be simply made to go away by developing hormone treatments to give to pregnant mothers. Just like Folic acid supplements.
Either way, an established prenatal cause for homosexuality would be likely to result in a "cure" sooner or later. A cure that would be applied before birth. Or even instead of birth.
I doubt this is what the gay community wanted. I wonder if gays will soon start claming that their gender disorientation is not predetermined after all, but a matter of personal choice?
In fact I think you can pretty much count on that.
Transvestites aren't trying to take over the world and remodel it in their own image.
They don't appear to actively recruit young people the way that some gays do.
They don't rely routinely on invective as a means of discourse.
They're not inimical to the nuclear family and are perfectly capable of marrying and raising children. With a person of the opposite gender.
They don't use the words "ignorant bigot" in every other sentence and they don't shout in all caps.
The increasing acceptance of transvestitism in society has not led to increased incidence of references to deviant sexual practices in the mainstream media.
***
Don't you get it yet? Are you so steeped in your own preconceptions that you are incapable of listening? You have done everything in your power to drain your argument of any credibility; you must be the least convincing apologist for gay ideals that I have ever encountered.
Stop spraying spittle in people's faces, eliminate the bitter sarcasm, drop the "ignorant bigot" invective and maybe then people will listen to you. If, indeed, you have anything left to say at all.
Try appealing to reason, rather than wishful thinking. Seek support from established, properly peer-reviewed, objective evidence (if you can find any) rather than the ideology of political correctness or your own meaningless navel gazing.
***
How is it that my expression of my views is "pontificating"? I'm preaching to no-one; you challenged me, remember. I've already tried to end this conversation with "let's agree to disagree" but you keep coming back for more.
In what sense is it is "ivory tower"? My own views are based on practical knowledge *and* personal experience, mainly of other people's behaviour. In my youth, I held the opposite point of view. It took me many years to arrive at the conclusions I now hold to be evident.
Whereas the personal experience that you refer to is only internal reflection and counts only for you even if you're right about it and not simply deluding yourself as you really do seem to be.
And your interpretation of the available evidence seems to have confirmed only what you wanted to believe in the first place. Which raises serious questions about your ability to see things objectively. That has by itself been a critical factor in undermining the credibility of your argument.
***
By the way, you insisting that your points were valid doesn't actually lend them any validity. Duh.
I don't have time to read all of this but from just the first couple of paras I can see it isn't going anywhere new. You just keep repeating dogma that I know has no basis in fact. Also you need to realize that outside of your own head, your own personal experience is just a single data point and therefore as evidence to back up your assertions it is virtually useless, by itself.
Slashdot Mirror
That is just inspirational. Truly the greatest thing I have ever seen anywhere at any time. Everybody needs to know about this.
Israel's policy of supporting religious settlers in Palestinian territory could be construed as extremist.
Israel's policy regarding Palestine (and its aggression toward Lebanon) could be construed as terrorist.
Mossad is an instrument of Israel.
Mossad are not averse to committing hostile acts on foreign soil.
religious + extremist + terrorist = ???
You decide.
Given that parents in some parts of the world routinely practise abortion to ensure more boys, don't you think they would just as quickly abort a foetus destined to be gay?
This is all about parental aspirations. Yes, divorce is a problem (and incidentally the increasing divorce rate is something I do speak out against very frequently) but it has nothing to do with the issue at hand and regardless of a parent's views on divorce they will still usually seek to avoid having homosexual offspring. This will happen no matter what you or I say.
You're just plain wrong and your imagination is working over time. There's no such thing as "recruitment". It's not possible. It's like recruiting people to become left-handed. It ain't gonna work.
Who do you think you are telling *me* what *I* have or have not witnessed? You are in denial. Get over it or don't get over it, but don't call me a liar. I have seen recruitment attempted many times. I have seen it succeed a few. In between I have seen normally heterosexual men tempted in a moment of weakness, lubricated by drink or drugs, to do something that they later regretted, but by which were forever changed. If you deny this out of ignorance then it is you who are misdirected.
If you deny it in the face of my honest testimony then your belief system is based on denial of the truth and it is you who are the bigot.
I am only moderately anti-gay in that I only want to not have your crap shoved in my face, invading my home and my kids' school, but you have consistently attempted to paint me as some sort of reactionary KKK-like figure. If you must insist on polarizing everything so that any attempt to get you to keep the more intimate and unsightly aspects of your personal life out of sight results in you characterizing me as a Nazi, then it is you who are hateful.
But I don't expect you to understand that; I think you are past all understanding and can't be reached. So I give up on this conversation. You want what you want and you are clearly incapable of taking on board anything that doesn't fit with the belief that you are right. I might as well talk to a lump of wood. I really am out of here now.
OED accepts both "-ise" and "-ize" spellings now.
However in all civilised *and* civilized parts of the world this odd letter is referred to as a "zed".
Well if that disqualifies him then I should be on the list then, because my best work is in the future. Probably.
With regard to evidence about this recruitment, it would be ludicrous to expect me to name names here.
As to what form it takes, use your imagination: this is about sexual seduction of course. Also and just as important there is a seduction of social inclusion which is very tempting for those who are lonely, disturbed or otherwise emotionally vulnerable. And you might ask what is the harm in that, but it is a steep price to pay when the price is exclusion from what most of us consider a "normal" life, and exclusion from the gene pool.
I've seen both types of seduction employed upon friends of mine on two separate occasions when I was at college, and I've also seen how current gay friends of mine behave around impressionable youngsters, again employing both types of seduction. There's just no room for argument about this. I have seen it over and over again. Perhaps you and your friends don't behave this way: well if so, then that's really good. But I've seen it and it really does happen.
You've repeatedly made the point that there is no single gay lifestyle, that most gays don't participate in the sterotypical gay lifestle, and implied that I'm therefore railing against something that doesn't exist. Look, I'm well aware that there are many gay people who choose to keep their affairs relatively private. But I'm not complaining about them at all. I *am* complaining about the promiscuous gays. I *am* complaining about the recruiting gays. I *am* complaining about the militant gays necking in the street and campaigning for "positive images" of gays in young children's books, in school curricula and all over TV etc. so as to make it impossible for us ever to protect our children from their propaganda. Each of these types of gay person has a common subculture associated with them, places they hang out, things they say, things they promote. I think in fact that you do know exactly what I mean, given your reference to "Act-Up-in-your-faceness".
Good points about evolutionary benefit of gay siblings etc, BTW. This kind of stuff makes me sit up and listen. I'm really glad we're done with the name-calling.
All the same, a parent's anxieties might not be assuaged by this. Your argument presupposes that there are anough kids around in the first place for busy parents to benefit from extra assistance.
But suppose they only have one or two kids? The prospect of grandchildren is far from certain. Let's face it: like your straight friends, just as in the educated and affluent in general: birth rates are already falling rapidly. Marriage is less popular than ever, and those who do marry are more likely to divorce. In the current culture of the primacy of self-gratification, fewer people seem to able to face the responsibility of a truly lifelong commitment to a relationship, let alone children.
So those who do become parents and who are serious about it might well distrust any additional influences which could influence their offspring to drop out of the gene pool. As do I.
I don't consider adoption and two parents of the same sex to be an acceptable substitute and though this is an arrangement that is likely to become legal in the near future, it is not something I would personally want to encourage any more than I would encourage single parent families. A child needs a mum and a dad.
Falling in love, the issue of choice etc: I doubt it is possible to even have a conversation about this anymore. The Newspeak of the political correctness lobby has mov
Sounds like somebody talking up their own job, if you ask me.
Leaving homosexuality aside for the moment...
Falling in love is indeed a voluntary phenomenon. Not only that, it requires active and willing mental participation. (I speak as someone who fell very, very hard for a girl a long time ago, and the experience is stamped into my soul so deeply I can never forget even the tiniest detail).
I know some people claim they have no choice and maybe it is different for them, but if so I believe the difference is only that they so much don't want to turn back, that they are so afraid of bursting the bubble, that they deny the very possibility.
Recent research showed that the brain mechanisms (neuroanatomical and neurochemical pathways) involved in falling in love are the same ones implicated in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. There is nothing really mysterious about it after all.
The fact is that no matter how attracted you are to someone it is always possible to make yourself turn away (though admittedly easier in the beginning than later when the obsession is fully-fledged).
Once you have put some distance between you the pain lessens somewhat, and the obsession fades over time, if not the memory.
It's clear from all this that "falling in love" is nothing more than a legacy from evolutionary psychology, intended to encourage humans to pair bond.
Other research shows that humans also "imprint" somehow for a certain type (for males the type is usually based on either their mother or the first person with whom an intimate bond of some sort was established) and this type forms a rough template which will bias preferences in a particular direction when seeking mates.
I don't think this is insignificant in the case of gays. Sexual preference and sexual behaviour are not nearly so hard wired in humans as they are in other mammals. Most sexually aware people know by experience that the response to a sexual stimulus becomes stronger when exposure to that stimulus is repeatedly associated with sexual stimulation.
This is exactly how fetishes are formed. It is also why sexual preferences in humans diverge so widely and become so ingrained. Human sexuality is exceedingly plastic, especially in the young. The process of training it to identify mates, which receives only a few rough cues from biology, is especially prone to being derailed. Hence, ex-public schoolboys with fetishes for caning or spanking. Hence, also, the higher incidence of homosexuality among alumni of such single-sex schools.
In other words, our sexual orientation is heavily influenced by experiences formed during childhood and puberty.
I haven't seen any complete theory of why exactly human sexuality should be so malleable compared to, say, ducks. But it is surely linked with the fact that physical morphology of male and female primates of the same species is essentially similar, and secondary sexual characteristics vary so widely that morphologies actually overlap. At the same time, racial and individual differences can be striking so that physical sexual cues are almost lost in the noise.
Also, for humans, the appearance of males and females varies so drastically between different cultures that human sexuality *must* be culturally programmable or else these cultural differences could not have arisen and would not work. Sexual ornamentation (lipstick, neck rings, penis sheaths) exists in order to guide potential mates through the morphological noise and help to identify the wearer as a potential mate. By the time one is "programmed" with the right cultural sexual cues, it is possible to provoke a sexual response with the ornamentation alone. Just the same as the school biology experiment with sticklebacks, where a red plastic blob is enough to make the male begin his courtship "dance".
Anyway, this is why I believe that societal and personal experiential influences are of primary importance in determining sexual orientation and why, therefore, care should be taken to polic
I suppose we could always go back to reading tealeaves. Or chicken entrails, if it comes to that.
Or just picking fleas out of each other's fur; that used to be fun.
It's not just games that work, but novels too.
Intending to try stoking some enthusiasm for real life space exploration in my children, I just got through reading Stephen Baxter's "Voyage" to my eight and nine year old children (they read well enough themselves but they would never have read this).
Anyway, despite this being a thoroughly adult story about an alternate NASA history, heavy with politics and technical detail about NASA procedures and technologies, the kids just loved it. Where the book assumes an adult knowledge of twentieth century history, I kept having to stop to explain about things like Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and so on. I also had many opportunities to point out current news stories and draw parallels between the book's fictional NERVA accident and the recent Columbia disaster. But the compelling story made them pay attention.
Result: I asked my son the other day what was the main impact of Reagan's presidency on US national space policy. His answer: "Star Wars and the militarization of space". Nine years old! I asked my daughter how does Soviet space technology differ from America's. Her one-word answer: "Boilerplate!" They can also give, on request, potted career summaries of all the major characters (I suppose it's a pity the major characters were all fictional in this case).
Yesterday at dinner I mentioned the recent radar survey of Titan's surface and the theory that there may be large liquid methane oceans on the surface. My daugher pipes up "That's Saturn's largest moon!" And my son then says that he'd been reading about the Cassini mission and how the Huygens probe was designed to float if this methane ocean theory proved to be correct.
Mission accomplished!
Speaking for myself, despite the obligatory history classes at school I was never able to make any sense of it until I encountered Edward Rutherfurd's novels (Sarum, London, The Forest et al). These are like collections of short stories about people in a handful of families spread across many centuries of history, and woven together into a single narrative. Everything is relevant to and thoroughly explained in it's historical context. It really brings history alive.
So to sum up, it's the presence of a coherent narrative which grabs at your imagination, that is the key to learning. I'm certain of that now. This must surely have strong ramifications for educational policy.
Suitable games might be thin on the ground and also too expensive to develop under strapped educational budgets, but there are plenty of historical novels around which clearly exhibit much detailed research on the part of the author.
No, it's cross dressing from a trek fan.
While I'm on the subject, has anybody else seen Izzard's hilarious Trek send-up routine? And more importantly, which of his videos is it on? I've bought two so far, and still no luck
I was thinking exactly the same thing. It's hard to believe that the same thing didn't cross the minds of those folks at Google.
So what do we do? Maybe it's time for a week-long boycott just to show them we *can* get by without them - plus an email campaign to drive the point home.
Also, Vincente Minnelli's "Lust for Life" for those who are interested in this Van Gogh biopic.
Damn you, unpressed preview button!
The same reason Schwarzenegger is cool (er, used to be).
I was going to mention Willis, Stallone, Samuel L Jackson but actually those guys have all proven to have some acting skills whenever given the opportunity to do so.
Makes you wonder doesn't it. How many of those screen tough guys actually turn out to have significant acting skills, I mean. It's just the shitty scripts they normally get that prevent us from seeing it.
This is nothing new of course. I remember the first time I saw Kirk Douglas in "Lust for Life" and thinking Crikey, the man can really act, and how! (Why the hell isn't this movie available on DVD yet?)
And Rock Hudson in John Frankenheimer's You gotta see that one too: fantastic movie.
Seems to me there's nothing *making* them take the usual shitty scripts except the opportunity to make an awful lot of money. It's only when they get so freaking rich that they feel they can afford to pick and choose and make serious films.
Who to blame, then. The audiences I suppose, for preferring to spend their movie ticket money on action blockbusters populated with cardboard stereotypes.
Please accept my apologies for misusing the term "gender disorientation" - this is used almost exclusively to describe transsexuality. I should have said "sexual disorientation".
I promise it'll be worth your while to read this comment all the way through. I can't promise that you'll like it though.
I saw a report on this earlier today in the Times. Heh! I immediately though about you. What a gift! You must have been dancing in circles.
It's interesting all right. But to say that it proves what you say it proves would at least be premature at this stage. The researchers themselves probably aren't making such a bold claim; we've been down this route before with other similar research and those who did were eventually shot down in flames - so jumping the gun like that would look like a classic Career Limiting Manoeuvre.
Hold your fire and wait. Maybe it'll turn out to be relevant but it will take more research before we know *how* relevant.
Perhaps more importantly though, if there does prove to be some correlation between prenatal brain development and gender disorientation that's still a long way from saying that gender disorientation is universally determined by this one factor.
If you re-read my earlier comments in this thread you'll see where I already admitted that congenital brain factors could be *partly* responsible. But in general these things only influence predisposition to some degree which varies betwen individuals. They don't set an obligatory template for your life.
It would be very worrying if they did. Not only because of the ramifications for free will but also because of the ethical ramifications of society's probably reaction.
Already in some parts of the world it is possible (I say possible, not laudable) to have a pregnancy terminated on the basis of a crude genetic assay - eg on detection of various common birth defects or even simply the "wrong" sex.
If some parents think it's OK to abort because the foetus is a girl rather than a boy, do you think they would be more or less likely to terminate a foetus that was predestined to be gay?
Perhaps this isn't so likely to happen in a modern, Western, liberal (nominally Christian) country. I don't know. Think of the awful dilemma faced by right-wing conservative anti-gay anti-abortionists! Maybe the real winners would turn out to be the "pro-choice" lobby.
On the other hand, if the extravagant claims made by the newspapers today in reporting this research paper *do* turn out to be correct, then given time the "problem" could be simply made to go away by developing hormone treatments to give to pregnant mothers. Just like Folic acid supplements.
Either way, an established prenatal cause for homosexuality would be likely to result in a "cure" sooner or later. A cure that would be applied before birth. Or even instead of birth.
I doubt this is what the gay community wanted. I wonder if gays will soon start claming that their gender disorientation is not predetermined after all, but a matter of personal choice?
In fact I think you can pretty much count on that.
Now even your books will need to wear a tinfoil hat!
Transvestites aren't trying to take over the world and remodel it in their own image.
They don't appear to actively recruit young people the way that some gays do.
They don't rely routinely on invective as a means of discourse.
They're not inimical to the nuclear family and are perfectly capable of marrying and raising children. With a person of the opposite gender.
They don't use the words "ignorant bigot" in every other sentence and they don't shout in all caps.
The increasing acceptance of transvestitism in society has not led to increased incidence of references to deviant sexual practices in the mainstream media.
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Don't you get it yet? Are you so steeped in your own preconceptions that you are incapable of listening? You have done everything in your power to drain your argument of any credibility; you must be the least convincing apologist for gay ideals that I have ever encountered.
Stop spraying spittle in people's faces, eliminate the bitter sarcasm, drop the "ignorant bigot" invective and maybe then people will listen to you. If, indeed, you have anything left to say at all.
Try appealing to reason, rather than wishful thinking. Seek support from established, properly peer-reviewed, objective evidence (if you can find any) rather than the ideology of political correctness or your own meaningless navel gazing.
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How is it that my expression of my views is "pontificating"? I'm preaching to no-one; you challenged me, remember. I've already tried to end this conversation with "let's agree to disagree" but you keep coming back for more.
In what sense is it is "ivory tower"? My own views are based on practical knowledge *and* personal experience, mainly of other people's behaviour. In my youth, I held the opposite point of view. It took me many years to arrive at the conclusions I now hold to be evident.
Whereas the personal experience that you refer to is only internal reflection and counts only for you even if you're right about it and not simply deluding yourself as you really do seem to be.
And your interpretation of the available evidence seems to have confirmed only what you wanted to believe in the first place. Which raises serious questions about your ability to see things objectively. That has by itself been a critical factor in undermining the credibility of your argument.
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By the way, you insisting that your points were valid doesn't actually lend them any validity. Duh.
BTW I don't think your points were valid, they sucked. I just got tired running round in circles.
You're entitled to your opinion anyway.
LOL! Eddie Izzard rules.
Bzzt! Sorry, I invoke Godwin's Law. I win! Heh heh!
I see. Well if you are going to redefine words on the fly, then it's going to be kind of difficult to communicate isn't it!
Sorry but you're just not a credible witness and this is going nowhere but round in circles. I'm outta here.
I don't have time to read all of this but from just the first couple of paras I can see it isn't going anywhere new. You just keep repeating dogma that I know has no basis in fact. Also you need to realize that outside of your own head, your own personal experience is just a single data point and therefore as evidence to back up your assertions it is virtually useless, by itself.
Yeah, I agree. Get the FCC out of here! ;o)
Everything depends on you now. We need you to succeed so that others, such as the US, will be stirred to follow.