I'm sort of fond of OLD institutions, The Stella Artois logo and marketing pay homage to the Den Hoorn Brewery, established in 1366. The Hudson Bay Company is 365 years old. Mere children! Kongō Gumi Co., Ltd. (株式会社金剛組, Kabushiki Gaisha Kongō Gumi--no connection to gummy rats) is a Japanese construction company founded in 578 A.D. St. Benedict died in 547, which puts the Benedictine Monastic tradition in the same old-age league.

Must a believer think that the Jews became a people and the Christian Church arose because God intervened in history to make these happen in the way that they did? Or, can a believer think that the Jews constructed their history in the process of living it, and that the Christian Church was constructed without the participation of its divine founder?

I think Christianity was constructed apart from its founder. There was never a historical necessity for the Christian Church to exist. The First Century Roman scene offered a variety of possible belief systems. But, as it happened, Holy Mother Church was constructed from the available materials and it succeeded.

The humanly constructed church without divine guidance or intervention will be anathema to orthodox believers. The sacraments require God to have been present from the beginning, and God is required if ecclesiastic personnel are to have creditable religious standing. I'm OK with that. I can tolerate their position better than they can tolerate mine.

I believe that everyone who engaged in constructing Holy Mother Church did so with authentic, good motives. (In time, yes, there were bad actors all the way to the very top). The founding of Holy Mother Church was meritorious, even if wasn't "divine". The Church should be taken seriously, as should its rituals, sacraments, and traditions.

As I understand it, Christianity was constructed well after the deaths of Jesus, his disciples, Paul, the participants in the post-crucifixion home churches, and others. I presume there was a continuous community who carried their experiences, memories, and collective understandings forward, but they did not "construct" an institution.

The construction crew began work decades after Jesus. At the moment I can't cite a number. The crew had various writings in hand (like Paul's), oral material that was eventually committed to writing--some of which probably came directly from Jesus and the 12. How much? I don't know. They also had a fairly numerous body of 'Christians' (as they would eventually be called) who needed documentation to buttress their faith and experience. There was also a need to establish some sort of organization -- the early 'church' -- but not yet the organization that has come down to us,

The construction crew existed in a rich and varied cultural context. which influenced how they edited documents, what they accepted and what they rejected, and perhaps what intent they wrote to tie the fragmentary documents together. The construction did not take place in Jerusalem or thereabouts.

The thing is, the story of Jesus came together as a cohesive narrative supplied in the Gospels, but the letters of Paul, and by other authors. That's the document -- New Testament.

Thousands of believers scattered around the Mediterranean in the Greco-Roman world had their own local experiences, and over time developed rituals, liturgies, orthodoxies, and heresies.

Eventually the nascent bishop prick of Rome and some other centers became strong enough to promote the right kind of faith and suppress the wrong kind of faith.

So, here we are, after 1500 years+ of never-quite-kept-for-long-peace-and-harmony-in-the-Body-of-Christ.

Christianity Today is being deconstructed through several avenues.

1) millions and millions of people no longer participate in Christian religious activities.
2) scholarship (like the Jesus Project) undermines the historical record that was established by the early church. (This is different than the historical record of whatever actually happened in Jerusalem or on the Road to Damascus about which we have no objective sources.)
3) secularism and secular institutions supply many of the services the church alone once supplied

1) It isn't as if Christianity was on its last legs. It is, however, shifting from the active religion of Europe and the western hemisphere to the active religion of the global south -- particularly Africa.
2) Christianity is the leading faith, first before Islam, and most people in the world are followers of one religion or another.
3) In some areas, evangelistic Protestantism is supplanting Catholicism (South America). Protestants (Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans, etc.) who have substantial membership in Africa are being outflanked on their right by conservative churches--not fundamentalist or evangelistic, just more conservative theologically. The consequence is the fracture of groups, like the Methodists, into a new more conservative group and an established mainline group. Sexuality is often the gravel in the gears that leads to rupture,

Thanks for posting the document.

The plan calls for much more material about African Americans than I received in high school or college history courses (through the 1960s). That's all to the good. But how many courses is all this stuff supposed to be taught in and at what grade level? I can see teachers covering these materials in a very good school with literate, cooperative, attentive students. In schools where students are less literate, less cooperative, and less attentive it would be an uphill slog.

Florida ranks fairly highly in education, so maybe the course material is doable. Their racial gap between the performance of colored students vs white students is not as wide as Minnesota's, for instance, which is another state that ranks well in education

If they want to stir things up even more, they could do the same thing for working class whites, who have always been considered kind of trashy from the colonial period to the present. (See White Trash : The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg).

The facts of the working class, white and black, is a key piece of American history, which like the history of slavery, hasn't been treated honestly.

Once upon a time, the US had very conservative and very liberal democrats and very conservative and very liberal Republicans. On the Republican side, there was Barry Goldwater (very conservative) and Nelson Rockefeller (quite liberal). Liberal Democrats were to the left of liberal republicans. Conservative Democrats (particularly Dixiecrats) overlapped conservative Republicans.

In the big reshuffle, conservative southern Dixiecrats and conservative Republicans merged. Liberal Republicans just disappeared, and liberal Democrats occupied the territory left by the departed liberal Republicans. FDR-type democrats are now smeared as 'socialists', and are far fewer in number.

The progressive, liberal and socialist parties have moved increasingly centerward — Vera Mont

Are you talking about the USA? Outside of the Democrat and Republic parties, there is (for all practical purposes) NOTHING. Democratic Socialists? Progressive Labor Party? Socialist Workers Party? American Communist Party? Green Party? PFFFT.

All together, these parties command too few votes to win a dog catcher election.

I count myself as a socialist, but there is no party which is at risk of having to represent anyone in a legislature or city hall. I don't like it, but that's life under mature capitalism.

some American black people benefitted from slavery by learning trades such as blacksmithing. — frank

The statement, in itself, is true. Many slaves were skilled workers in various trades, both on plantations and in shops. Blacksmithing is one example. The US Capitol building and White House were largely built by skilled slave labor from several trades.

It is probably the case that some slaves either escaped slavery or were freed and used their salable skills to earn a living. Those facts do not take anything away from the evils of slavery.

This is why we need identity politics: there's always a racist, sexist, anti-gay politician looking to chip away at what the rest of us know is true. They — frank

Identity groups did not achieve major victories in improving society and reducing unfairness and injustice. It was broadly based efforts like the Progressive Movement, the FDR-era reform efforts, the Civil Rights Movement, and Women's Rights movement. These efforts were broadly based and were directed at diverse targets. Their work promoted a greater sense of unity across divides.

Identity politics tends toward ever more fractioning of a given group's identity. For example, sexual identity politics has achieved such a dizzying array of "sexual identities" that identity politics becomes impossible. Conversely, Blacks can organize around large issues, each one affecting large populations (hiring practices, real estate practices, health care practices, etc.). Blacks are a major demographic, less an "identity". The same goes for poor whites. They, like blacks are not an "identity" -- they are a large demographic segment. The very comfortable top 10%, the professional and wealthy class, are likewise not an identity group. Women cross different demographic groups, and are too large and varied to be called an "identity". What does it mean for 165,000,000 women to have "an identity"? Like as not they have many identities. The same for men.

So, no. I don't think we need "identity politics". We need economic justice across the board; major tax reform in favor of the working class. Higher wages and a greater share of profits for workers. Equity in health care, housing, and education. A serious reduction in the privileges of the elite class. Stuff like that.

Let's imagine there was a world whereby sex was unknown. All people knew was self-pleasuring..... The telling part is the cultural part. It is shared diffusion of information that otherwise would be unknown. — schopenhauer1

Certainly there is diffusion of information in society. The need to eat isn't "knowledge" but WHAT can safely be eaten certainly is. Trial and error, repeated naively over and over, leads to dozens of dead diners.

We can agree on that much. Sex? Maybe not.

Rather it is the whole artifice of "attraction to someone, romancing/courting/initiating with someone, and having sex with someone". That is a long complex conceptual web of ideas that don't just come innately. — schopenhauer1

Yes, this is all socially constructed. Showing up at the cave of one's love object with a haunch of deer, as an inducement to adjourn to a pleasant thicket in the woods, is the distant antecedent of showing up in at his steady's house in his father's new Chevy with a box of candy and plans to see Beach Blanket Bingo--and who knows what afterwards.

More social construction.

But what is likely to happen in the back seat of the Chevy doesn't need to be taught.

We disagree on this. That's fine. Disagreeing with EP doesn't make you a second class citizen, and you won't be arrested for thought crimes. Jesus loves the social constructionist about as much as he loves the evolutionary psychologist--which is not that much. Both of them will deny his grandmother's immaculate conception of his mother and Mary's perpetual virginity. Actually, Jesus doesn't care that much either way, but Saints Elizabeth and Mary are very dogmatic about it.

And, you might ask, WHY WHY WHY did immaculate conceptions and virgin births happen anyway? Well, it happened because these two people (Liz and Mary) were from that society where people just pleasure themselves, and hadn't heard the Gospel of S*E*X. They had apparently not been enlightened by any of the smart serpents one always finds slithering around, about the good work of a stiff dick. When the angel Gabriel explained to Liz and Mary how sex worked, they were horrified. So it was that Gabriel had to settle for the hocus hocus miracle method of reproduction rather than the usual down and dirty method that God invented for us and that Gabriel was looking forward to. The two hysterics stopped yammering and were duly impregnated in the most unlikely of ways.

Sometime later Jesus was born and we have no record of his pleasuring himself or anyone else. I suppose he, as a diety, could just imagine having sex with the entire human race at one time. Actual sex for the gods is sort of beside the point.

But I digress.

Where did they get the idea of mating? It’s not an innate concept. — schopenhauer1

We disagree on this. You think it's cultural; I think it's innate behavior -- a product NOT of our development as Homo sapiens, but the product of vertebrate evolution. To borrow a phrase from Dylan Thomas, it's "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower", applied to animals.

"Doing what comes naturally" doesn't mean doing it well, gracefully, or appropriately. There is a learning curve on the way to doing it well. What constitutes "doing it well" is a cultural matter. A stiff dick doesn't concern itself with "goodness" "grace", "propriety" or much else. Again, it's society's role to keep stiff dicks under control.

What is this mechanism that allows a story to be ingrained for 400,000 years? Racial memory (Jung's idea)? Some sort of encoding that is transmitted genetically? Some epiphenomenal process that the body passes from generation to generation?

There is the trope in culture, "When I reach X age, I am supposed to be attracted to someone and pursue them or be pursued (or mutually pursue or whatever)". — schopenhauer1

Come, come -- back to the real world. The 'trope' in culture is to put the brakes on the youngun's sexual drives, and discourage premature mating. Premature = before they are materially ready to independently provide for their own, their mate's, and their children's basic needs.

it SEEMS like there must be an evolutionarily biological reason for why we direct our pleasure towards someone else. — schopenhauer1

Seems, Sir? Nay, it's a necessity. Were this abstracted atomized pleasure all that was necessary, evolution would have never got off the ground and we'd all be single-celled prokaryotes instead of multi-celled eukaryotes.

Boredom appears in animals with enough brain matter to get bored. Chickens don't get bored; bright parrots do. Animals that are caged (or live in our houses) who become bored can be very problematic. BTW, dogs don't hump our legs because they want to mate with us; they are engaged in a dominance display.

However, "seeking out a mate" is a trope. — schopenhauer1

Baloney.

I don't know exactly why, but some people seem to like EP and some people don't. Both can find justifications for their preference.

So I think we are almost on the same page, but it is where the delineation should be made that we are disagreeing.

You seem to be saying that various appearances of the person and qualities are probably culturally derived, but the very drive "to fuck (someone)" is not.

I am saying on the other hand, that it is simply "pleasure" that is innate, and directing it "to someone" is STILL cultural. I gave the analogy to my previous post: — schopenhauer1

We are singing from the same hymnal at least; not sure if we are on the same page. I agree that pleasure-seeking is biologically driven, but we are also driven to achieve it with somebody else. Who that somebody else ought or ought not to be is a cultural matter. We are not naturally onanistic. We're a social animal.

We have a batch of drives from the most basic -- hunger, thirst, sex -- on to more complex ones: comfort, security, mental stimulation, touch, expression, love, freedom of movement (nothing political meant here)... various people have drawn up lists, like Maslow. hunger and eating are biologically driven; what we eat, where, when, how, and with whom is culturally defined. Sex and pleasure with somebody else or alone is a basic biological drive. My guess is that the basic "how" is pretty much baked in. The rest of the animal kingdom manages to mate without a guide and I think we can too, even if the Kama Sutra isn't hard wired. We require touch as infants and are driven to seek out touch, but where, when, with whom, and where not, when not, and with whom not are culturally defined.

And so on and so forth,

Yet homeless learn to do it, and the ones that like the lifestyle prefer um, "urban camping" (and not saying all or most homeless people do of course). — schopenhauer1

The homeless are outliers. Many of them are drunks and drug addicts, or MI, and as such, are destitute. Some of the homeless are destitute and don't have CD or MI issues. People sleep on the sidewalk (or in doorways, on steam grates where such things exist, or in shelters of some sort) where there is simply no alternative. The CD homeless can't use in in shelters, and the MI may not be stable enough to be housed in shelters.

99.99% of the population consistently avoid sleeping in the streets.

I am not saying that preferences aren't somehow "innate" or at the least, "individual to the person", but rather attributing those preferences or even BEING ATTRACTED ITSELF as somehow a cultural thing. That is to say, the culture reinforces being attracted AT ALL to SOMETHING. — schopenhauer1

Reminds me of this Jefferson Airplane chorus, particularly the imperative last line:

Don't you want somebody to love?
Don't you need somebody to love?
Wouldn't you love somebody to love?
You better find somebody to love!

Music has been flogging the importance of love for decades. All you need is love sung in 10,000 different songs. Quite often "love" is another term for sex.

On the one hand, hormones are the primary motive for us to go find somebody to fuck. Cultural expectations are secondary, but more elaborate. Fucking is fundamental. On the other hand, culture decorates the urge and gives it a more elaborate shape. There are culturally defined standards for prospective sex/love objects. Just any old slob won't do; a very exciting partner might be too unpredictable. We are expected to find a beautiful or handsome mate, curvaceous or muscular, blond or brunet, nicely dressed, etc. People are judged on the quality of their partners--someone you could confidently take home to meet your folks.

I guess let me clarify, the "ability to make up complex conceptual frameworks" might be evolutionarily evolved, but the specific "stories" within those frameworks, perhaps, were not, is what I am suggesting. — schopenhauer1

Good point. EP may produce all sorts of behaviors, but what we are going to be able to parse out is mostly pretty general.

But culture plays so much that even inborn ideas of justice (babies being pissed when you don't give them their deserved reward or something) can be quickly curbed such that maybe its more of a trait that is not even that significant. — schopenhauer1

Never mind babies. In experiments with chimps (not to make unflattering comparisons) when a subject was either not rewarded or was rewarded with an inferior snack (a cucumber slice instead of an apple slice they stopped cooperating with the experimenter. Dogs were a little more forgiving. They cheated dog would stop cooperating if one dog was rewarded and they were not. If they each got a reward (even if one got meat and the other a cracker) they were satisfied.

The animal evidence suggests that some sort of "fairness standard" operates in some social mammals, at least.

It isn't just "turtles all the way down". It's a meatloaf of biology, evolution, and culture all the way down. This meatloaf is the mostly unobservable brain -- by unobservable, I mean I don't know what most of my brain is doing, never mind my knowing what your brain is doing. We just know that small conscious bit. I can scan your brain with a fMRI which tells me just about nothing about culture and evolution.

Reminds me of E.O Wilson's theory of Biophilia. — schopenhauer1

I haven't read E. O. Wilson (yes, I should have but...) so I didn't get any ideas from him directly.

A lot of this discussion is revolving around whether our behavior is "essential" (bred in the bone) or constructed (taught). We are not one or the other, of course -- both come into play.

Some people think that homosexuality is constructed. I say NO, but the way homosexuality is executed is largely culturally constructed. An otherwise culturally isolated homosexual community probably won't develop a black leather and chains fetish sub-group--unless there were some male motorcycle clubs around wearing hot looking black leather and chains. Probably won't cook up rainbow flags, either, or call one another 'miss thing'.

Heterosexuality is not constructed either, but it is certainly culturally constructed. There is nothing essential and biological about the oft-cited Leave It To Beaver lifestyle of suburban living, (I never watched the show; we didn't have television at the time.). Suburban living was LITERALLY constructed.

I confess that I do not know how to separate out influences of evolution from all the other natural factors that shape us; or how to separate biological factors from cultural factors.

I further confess that I do not have much knowledge about all the evolutionary pressures our ancestors faced. Lions, tigers, and bears--an obvious pressure; finding enough food--another obvious pressure. Mating and successful child rearing, finding shelter from the stormy blast and a safe place to fall into unconsciousness for 8 hours, +/- every day. Some of that may explain why we don't just lay down on on a busy sidewalk and go to sleep and similar things we don't do.

The bands of hunter gatherers who are our kind since a few hundred thousand years ago also had social pressures. Of course the social pressures they had to deal with were simpler than ours -- they didn't have to coordinate their shoes, socks, trousers, jacket, shirt, and tie else be made fun of. (These days people wear all sorts of shit in public, so maybe evolution is entering a new phase.) I am pretty sure that questions like "who's in charge" was an issue. In other social animals, who is top chicken, top cow, top dog, top chimp is contested. That a social characteristic we seem to have inherited in spades. "Who does what" was, I suspect, also a recurring issue. I'm thinking less of gender roles here and more social status roles. Who gets the biggest hunk of meat, for instance. Who decides whether this or that rock outcropping makes a good place to stay for the night?

I don't think the paragraph above is a story. Though, why wouldn't Harari's story telling theory be an example of evolutionarily produced behavior? (I agree, though, that story telling is regularly used by humans to do everything from getting up in the morning (against the body's unwillingness) to why we should send a sample of our species to Mars.

Thank you!.

The Science article was useful -- particularly the map of major events (tipping points) that could/would/will/might occur at different increases in the global temperature. If we are very lucky, and extremely successful in our efforts to limit the climate increase to less than 2ºC, the climate tipping points will be bad enough, at 3ºC and 4ºC, much worse.

At <2ºC, we can have Greenland and West Antarctic ice collapse, failure of the North Atlantic circulation system, and thawing of the Canadian permafrost.

Where do existential threats kick in? Mass existential threats or local existential threats? Local existential threats are here. IF Phoenix, AZ were to lose electric power for a day or two, the total deaths would be in the thousands -- given tightly sealed buildings and dependence on air conditioning, ventilation fans, and water pumps.

At 115ºF in Phoenix, dry heat or not, if you don't have access to a cool refuge, you have a very good chance of dying. Unfortunately, warm blooded animals are designed to maintain body heat, not cool one down quickly. As the internal body temperature rises from 98ºF towards 104ºF --107ºF tissue starts breaking down at the cellular level; heart failure or general organ failure (or melting of cell walls) ensues.

There are a lot of climate disasters we do not have to worry about because, as Jeff Goodell explains in his new book, The Heat Will Kill You First.

Scientists have talked about "tipping points", that features of the climate will not change smoothly over time, but will display sudden patterns. Are the current round of exception heat, exceptional rain, exceptional drought, etc. the result of large systems "tipping", producing dramatic change?

Anybody?

There is reason to think visual artists can in some sense overcome the slightly misleading way we think about what we see. — Srap Tasmaner

That reminds me of Alexander Melamid's and Vitaly Komar's book, Painting by Numbers, edited by JoAnn Wypijewski, It is not 'hard' science, maybe not hard 'social science' either, but it is interesting and relevant here. The authors wanted to know what different broad cultural groups preferred in paintings and colors. (The authors produced their own paintings for the surveys.) They found broad preferences in groups. Blue was the most popular color, orange the least. Representative art (like landscapes) was much more strongly preferred over abstract paintings. Most groups preferred occupied landscapes (presence animals or people). Blue sky, green hills and grass, water.

It seems reasonable to me that people would like landscapes more than, say, abstract expressionism, for the same reason that people tend to find parks with trees, grass, flowers, etc. more pleasant than the the most splendidly designed concrete plazas.

Boston City Hall Plaza is an architectural failure, in my opinion. I like many brutalist (bare concrete) designs but this one failed to incorporate humane relief. The building dates to 1963. Some recent efforts have been made to change the building, ranging from demolition to redesign. Like many "urban renewal" projects, City Hall replaced what was described as a seedy but vibrant area. Can't have seedy! (Minneapolis did the same thing with Block E, a very seedy and very lively block in the middle of the downtown area. Once leveled, that part of the city died, and nothing they have tried has brought it back to life.

Boston City Hall



Boston Public Gardens

@schopenhauer1 When I reflect on the behavior of animals (setting human animals aside for a moment) they seem to have very similar behavior within their species. Chickens avoid deep water, ducks prefer it. Squirrels build characteristic nests, so do robins. Dogs, with which are very familiar, all exhibit quite a few specific behaviors. And so on.

How is it that animals behave in characteristic ways? We think they evolved to behave in certain ways that worked for them in the environments in which they exist(ed). Behavior, we think, is governed by brains--brains that have evolved, and through some mechanism (which I don't understand) produce consistent, somewhat predictable behavior.

Consistent, predictable behavior is what enables us to manage animals, and animals to interact with us. (I'm thinking of university campus squirrels, for instance, that are expert at spotting potential free food, and will "reach out" to said sources, maybe even climbing up a pant leg, if the subject stands still.)

Every animal learns new information, but they come from the mint with a package of behaviors which enable them to succeed (if they aren't eaten, run over, get shot, get sick, starve, etc.).

When it comes to the paragon of animals--our esteemed selves--a lot of people are squeamish about US evolving.

We aren't separate from the rest of nature, we are nature, and the workings of life have produced in us the kind of animal that we are. Just like it did everything else.

That's my basis for thinking that our behavior evolved, and how we developed technical abilities. There was a long stretch of time--hundreds of thousands of years--between the first stone tool (a rock to crush nuts) and the first brick. Between the first camp fire and the first fired brick, between the first club to kill something, and the first metal spear tip. Millions of years between the incessant chattering of our direct predecessor in an African tree and the equally incessant chattering of French intellectuals.

strong sense of self-awareness — schopenhauer1

conceptual cultural transmission — schopenhauer1

Probably evolved capacities.

I wasn't quibbling over the ghastliness of human trafficking, just the stats.

My assumption is that brains have been evolving as part of all animal bodies. Animal brains are initially shaped by genetics and the pre-natal environment of the developing fetuses, and then by experience interacting with brain tissue and more genetics.

Behavior is a product of brains. Bird brains manage the kind of singing each species (and each individual) performs. Bird brains also manage mating, nest building, egg laying, egg incubation, chick feeding, chick fledging, and so on. I don't know how birds do it all, exactly, but they do.

Animals that are closer to us than crows, like dogs, have bigger brains and have evolved to learn and do more things. You've heard of the border collie that has learned the names of about a thousand objects and can connect each object to its name. This collie also has grasped some rudiments of grammar. Dogs are uniquely able to look at us and identify what we are looking at. They can follow our gaze. Very few other animals can do that. They are good at manipulating us.

Most people don't have a problem attributing crow and dog psychology (their behavioral abilities) to evolution, What else would it be?

But then we come to our own case and suddenly the thought that our behavior might have evolved ranges from "Of course it evolved!" on over to "Evolutionary psychology is anathema!"

I'm of the former, rather than latter, view. But what does that mean?

We didn't evolve the ability to read and write. What we evolved was the ability to deploy language. Presumably we began talking early on. We talked for a long time among our small simple hunter-gatherer groups. Writing and reading came about (you know, 5K years ago) when the complexity of society developed enough that it became advantageous to capture abstract spoken concepts in abstract written symbols (like, in clay).

Learning to speak (Chinese, Arabic, Danish...) is very easy for children--all three at once, if the environment allows. That's an evolved ability. Learning to read and write the language we speak (or any other language) is difficult. Reading and writing are not evolved abilities.

We didn't evolve a preference for French Roast coffee (or some other inferior slop). What we evolved was the capacity to metabolize caffeine and feel slightly stimulated. The same goes for quite a few psychoactive chemicals.

One could go on for hours citing examples of what capacities we did not and did evolve.

The thing to avoid in thinking about evolved psychology is that we didn't evolve specific preferences -- houndstooth over plaid; vanilla over strawberry; antinatalism over pronatalism. What we evolved was the ability to prefer, and manage preferences. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Numbers on the trafficking of males are challenging to estimate and considered underreported

I'm always on guard when a report says that something is very difficult to measurer or hard to track, that there is not nearly enough solid information available, etc. AND THEN come out with an estimate which, according to their earlier statements, is probably not very accurate.

Still, I'm sure boys and men are trapped into prostitution. trafficking happens to women far more often and that's probably as much as can be confidently said -- until someone traipses through the sewers of sex trafficking and nails down hard numbers.

Sexual behavior, in general, is challenging to track because most people tend to behave sexually in private, and don't publicize what, exactly, they did.

The core nature of sex work may not differ around the world, but the details certainly do, depending on the culture, the local economy, "the local" in general.

The urgency of AIDS prevention efforts has helped researchers get behind some of the privacy screens people maintain. But the success of AIDS prevention varies from place to place too.

*****

If one doesn't have police records, or the police enforce law differentially, then one has to rely on participant observers, outside observers, and surveys. In surveys or interviews, self-definition matters. A man might think of himself as a whore (low self-esteem), a prostitute (better self-esteem), a sex worker (better esteem yet) or an entrepreneur (very robust self-esteem). Or, he may cleanly separate the sex work he performs from what he thinks about himself.

In affluent countries, one can carry out stealth sex work. You have heard the phrase, "slept his or her way to the top". I know a guy who did exactly that in the wake of gay liberation (back in the 70s). He was not a man of means but he was young, ambitious, good looking, charming enough and reasonably talented. He chose his partners carefully on the basis of their ability to help him get ahead. (Stupid me never thought of that approach.). Within a few years he was running a new national gay organization in Washington, D.C.

However, all that is about a small group of men. For most men, sex work is just a means to an immediate income, the way a million other jobs are, whether that's in an affluent or poor country. There are advantages and disadvantages, upsides and downsides.

Some historians (like Peter Turchin) Think the post WWII era economic regime was pretty close to that of Europe's social democracies: a proactive state (Medicare, Medicaid, AFDC, solid levels of education spending at the state level, etc.); labor/capital cooperation (reduction in taxes for workers, increase of taxes on wealth); a fair amount of labor stability; etc.

Social democracy a la EU isn't socialism, and it isn't a revolution -- but, comparing it to sex that is just OK, it's not that bad (paraphrasing Woody Allen).

The far right, the lunatic fringe, the tea party, crypto-fascists, etc. hate all that stuff--from social security onward to Obama Care. It's all burrs up their butts.

Would that the left had enough power ... We just don't. — fdrake

Would The Left please stop beating itself over the head for not launching a successful revolution.

The last time progressive labor (just an adjective, not the name of a party) had any power, and some of the aspirations of the left were met was during the post WWII economic expansion when government, labor, and capital cooperated to achieve a broad redistribution of of wealth. That happy time ended in the early 1970s. (Peter Turchin: End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration: 2023)

The hard core left of American communists, socialists, and so on (in the US) ended after WWII. Just like the "the labor movement didn't die a natural death; it was murdered", the left was also "murdered". The forces of capital (government, corporations, etc.) bore down hard on the left that existed before WWII. The parties were infiltrated, subjected to prosecution, massive negative propaganda, and so on. By the time the FBI's Cointelpro program was made public, the job was pretty much finished,

From the 1970s to the present, capital abandoned the government/labor coalition and returned to an earlier era of expansion, accumulation, and impoverishment of the working classes.

Capitalism was, is, and (in all likelihood) will be the overwhelming dominant paradigm in the US.

Hell yes – "unattractive" chronic masturbators need to get-off too! — 180 Proof

They do, indeed. One of the features of gay bath houses (with which I'm pretty familiar) is that an appropriately sleazy operation provides dim to dark venues where the least attractive can find pleasure. Charles Shively at Harvard theorized that "mandatory promiscuity" would insure that everyone had the opportunity to experience pleasurable sex. (Hey, I did my part back in the day.). James Nelson at United Theological Seminary in his book Embodiment discusses the importance of persons with deformities, immobility, movement disorders, mental illness, etc. being able to experience the sexuality they are embodied with, (He didn't get into methods. It was a theology book, after all.) Sex workers are the obvious solution for both men an women, gay and straight. (Good luck getting funding through the legislature.).

Have you seen the inside of a brothel? I have not; there are legal brothels only in some counties in Nevada. "No legal brothels" doesn't mean there are no illegal brothels of course. And presumably some of them, at least, are well run. Rebecca Rand was a Minneapolis madam who ran 2 upstanding brothels. At the time (in the 80s and 90s) there were 11 brothels in the Minneapolis and St. Paul dba "health clubs" or "massage parlors". She said, "There is nothing oppressive about prostitution; what is oppressive is going to jail." There were others, too, presumably, and other sex-for-sale businesses. "The Minneapolis Forum" was available in select establishments; it listed various sex-for-sale venues--not, of course, in so many words.

Were I to meet a woman or a man, for that matter, selling sex I would not refer to them as a whore, and probably not as a prostitute, either--for the same reason that I would use the stated preferred pronouns of a trans person. It's a matter of politeness in public situations.

I'm not always polite--sometimes I'm just plain rude--but there is a reason for those instances. I might call Senate majority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, an old whore for example. Ditto Donald Trump--maybe crazy old whore for him. I don't expect to get the chance in either case.

I don't object to sex work in principle, with several provisos attached--like it being uncoerced. The 'sex business' isn't subject to any regulation in the United States (just suppression except for some counties in Nevada). The chances of any given person in the sex business getting a raw deal are pretty high.

Please define your use of legitimate here. — Ø implies everything

"Legitimate" is a loaded word.

"Conforming to the law or to rules" is the first meaning of legitimate. "Socially acceptable" often matches the first meaning of "legitimate". The laws and rules are often clear enough, but what is socially acceptable is variable from group to group. Sometimes what is socially acceptable is contrary to the law or rules (a major problem of Prohibition). Many gay men consider various kinds of public sex (tea rooms, cruising parks, etc.) as socially acceptable, even though it is prohibited by law and rules.

According to a YOUGOV [not a government operation] poll, Women judge prostitution more harshly than men and are more likely to think it should be legal. 51% of men and 30% of women think it should be legal, and 36% of men and 50% of women think it should be illegal.

The thing that I don't like about marijuana is that it disturbs my sense of time passing, such that time seems to pass very slowly for a while. It has other effects as well.

Does anyone happen to what parts of the brain THC would have to affect to result in the sense of slowed time? Does that part of the brain also cause older people to feel time is passing faster than it did say, 40 years earlier? (This seems to be real, not just old folk's imaginations.)

This is the dark side of human invention. — Vera Mont

I have no idea whether artificial intelligence can decide to be evil, or whether evil code needs to be provided. But we know humans can decide to be evil in ever so many ways, AI is a new more powerful tool than what was previously available. Predatory governments, corporations, or powerful organizations will find ways of using AI to prey upon their preferred targets.

AI will be used for crooks' nefarious purposes (like everything else has been). What people are worried about is that AI will pursue its own nefarious purposes.

Okay, so this is my first learning moment. BC quoted me without mentioning me, and I did not receive a notification. This presumably means that quotes do not trigger notifications, and that I should mention people whenever I quote them? — Leontiskos

Mentioning somebody with the format @name (@ " name " -- but with no spaces)
replying to somebody with the little left-pointing arrow, and quoting someone (using a highlight and then clicking on the "QUOTE" should all trigger a notification.

Not getting notifications? It might be that your membership activity is still too low (I don't know, just guessing or it might be that something is wrong with the software at PlushForums (more guessing). IF you don't get notifications PDQ, contact a moderator or Jamal.

Thomas Aquinas — Leontiskos

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum, the leading philosophy web site available in Fly Over Land.

I heard that Tom thought that everything he had written was 'straw'. That was probably after a Dominican cook accidentally slipped some LSD into his soup.

Excellent! Nuclear winter would be a refreshing change of pace--personally, I'm getting bored with the same old CO2 and heat wave hysteria. Unlike the global toaster oven, the nuclear freezer wouldn't take long to start up. Why, this evening we could fire off 100 H bombs over urban areas that stand in need of urban renewal anyway, and the resulting firestorms would hoist megatons of smoke, dust, and soot into the atmosphere, where, of course, it would prevent solar heat from getting in and screwing things up.

True, the atmosphere would probably cool down too much and most of the plant life would die, which would be inconvenient. A lot of people would drop dead, but the elite -- safe in their long-term underground retreats, would be fine and in 10 years or so, once the dust settled, they would soon have nice weather again -- and a lot fewer annoying people around. There would just be the elite, fine folks all, and the virile fecund robust workers they put into storage ahead of time.

Do you happen to have a set of launch codes handy? It doesn't actually make much difference which cities get nuked, because only the elite will survive, and there will be nobody left to point accusing fingers.

China is the best example — Judaka

The next best example (because it doesn't exist anymore) was the Soviet Union, where the state operated as the corporation for which everyone worked, whether that was on a collectivized farm music school, or GUM Department Store. There was virtually NO private enterprise in the Soviet Union.

China is a weird hybrid mix. There are state owned businesses, privately owned businesses, military owned businesses, and so on. The economy is subject to state intervention without being a command economy exactly. The Party can, no doubt, command. it does this (I gather) through regular planning processes and documents. Xi Jinping can, I assume, also command things to happen, like having so and so disappear, maybe Jack Ma, for example. Jack seems to be back. Many who disappeared have stayed that way, so far.

Some people think China is a fascist state. There are some elements of fascism in China. I don't know if it qualifies as a fascist state or not.

It's all just part of neoliberal capitalism — Judaka

I'm not sure "neoliberal" describes capitalism; I see it most often used to describe conservative political policy with respect to regulation, government-sponsored social assistance programs, taxation, unionization and similar matters. I'm 100% anti-neoliberal politics. Capitalism is capitalism whether we're talking about companies making toilet bowels or fast fashion.

"Fast fashion" is the epitome of consumerism. High speed design, manufacture, shipping, low prices, and then "fashionable" clothing which is quickly thrown away. This isn't haute couture, of course.

then I believe that I'm correct in saying [u]it's[/u] irrelevant — Judaka

Sorry, I'm not quite sure what [u]it's[/u] is referring to.

We don't just buy fancy shoes, we buy respect, for status, to present an image, to be attractive, stylish, and so on. — Judaka

I confess that I have bought expensive shoes -- Allen Edmonds. They're made in Wisconsin and are all-leather (at least the all-leather models are). They're up-market but not fancy, just well built. They are 13 years old and still going strong. I also bought a pair of Allen Edmonds boots several years ago -- built like work boots. I didn't need a pair of brown lace-up work boots by any stretch of the imagination, I don't even go to gay bars where boots are obligatory (I used to go to such places). No, it is all in the image of the shoe, the boot. [Note: of course I bought them on sale :halo:]

I don't think consumer culture is a problem, or that it's causing any of these issues that are being talked about. — Judaka

Global heating, for instance, isn't being driven by fast fashion or fancy shoes, I would agree. Certainly not by MY shoes. It's being driven by a different grade and scale of consumption -- like automobiles, airplanes, and trucks; like heating and cooling buildings; like global shipping; by waste in gas and oil fields (venting and leaking methane into the atmosphere; by cows -- damn them! It's all that burping up methane while chewing their cuds. But I like beef.

We're inundated with different products, there's no basis in consumer culture for opposing change — Judaka

Opposing change or promoting change?

By the way, your OP for this thread is more relevant than a good many topics on the forum.

You mentioned the addictive nature of opiates. I'm not, never have been, addicted to alcohol or opiates, coke, or meth, etc. Instead I'm dependent on an anti-depressant. No doubt, I needed them, and may still need them. I'm not sure because discontinuing the small dose I am on is not an option. I've tried tapering off, etc. and after say 72 hours without, I feel positively horrible -- not depressed, just sick. I've been and am a very reliable customer for Effexor. This is something doctors don't talk about much, but after an extended period of taking these drugs, many people find it impossible to discontinue the drugs. That's why drug manufacturers prefer products like antidepressants to antibiotics. People take appropriate antibiotics for 2 weeks and they are cured. Not much profit in that! Statins and blood pressure meds are the same -- we take them for decades.

I withdraw aspersions I cast in the direction of Sherman. — Srap Tasmaner

That's OK, I'm don't hold any stock in W. T. Sherman & Company.

Right, that was very bad PR. I should read about Patton or find a PBS history program on him. SOOO much history, so little time.

Facts matter, a principle you probably uphold. Fact is, propaganda is important for winning a war. Motivating the troops, motivating the domestic populace, depressing the enemy, etc.

Allied troops, including Americans, had a fairly high rate of desertion during WWII in the European theater. There was practically no desertion in the pacific theater. What was the difference? Were the American soldiers in the Pacific braver, gutsier, tougher than their brothers in Europe?

No. In Europe, there was some place to go after you walked away from the battle. In the pacific, the battles were mostly on islands, and if you wanted to leave -- well, it was a VERY LONG swim.