some people seem to *really care* about what happens in other people's beds and i keep failing to comprehend why

@helene I personally get it I just don't think it's usually valuable to pursue.

@Moon oh? could you explain? i'd really like to try to understand it, honestly; it just always felt so foreign to me

asian girls' beds do not count btw

@helene Eris is right that private behavior actually does have an effect on society so in that sense it''s fair game for regulation.

@Moon @helene
isn't that kind of anathema to the free market thing, though? like saying "my externalities are not my problem, but yours are!!!" is... actually maybe it is understandable, when ideology promotes selfish-behaviour-only

@shmibs @helene if you're suggesting many right wing people are hypocrites you are correct. but some people would regulate both your private sexual activities and the market with equal zeal.

@Moon @helene
don't know any person decreeing such unless it's in both cases still "in my own favour" regulation, if openly valuing "cultural milieu better suits my personal tastes" over "other people can be alive and have families"

@shmibs @helene do you figure people select an ideology based on their temperament or do they weigh all the evidence and then adjust their life to match what seems to be empirically correct and then still probably select the evidence that matches their temperament>

@Moon @helene
honestly people start out not really caring either way about things that don't affect them much, and most still give nuanced answers when asked in a way that doesn't prompt group allegiance, but are trained into either vocal group loyalty or into silence. people do tend to naturally act selfishly in situations that are more of a threat to them, like "the machine took my job", but something like rabid gay hatred has to be trained

@Moon @helene
this is why estimates about prevalence of "minority groups" is so wildly inaccurate now (on the high end), because people are being trained to hate them, so the perceived influence of those people is inflated. left alone, the natural state of normal people to weirds is more just vague unease and distrust

@shmibs @helene I would actually dispute that you necessarioly need to be trained to hate certain things, conservative mind high disgust sense explains a lot of stuff.

@Moon @helene
the training is in associating that disgust response with the minority in question. this is why people doing signalling have to associate gay men with poop whenever possible, or old cartoons with japanese guys gave them buck teeth and weird yellow skin

@shmibs @helene I slightly disagree but I don't think me arguing about it is constructive right now, just registering my slight disagreement.

@Moon @helene
how's that?

like look around earth at societies without much that training and normal response is "that's kinda weird". then look at societies with lots that training constantly and it's "let's murder them immediately". wouldn't be that difference otherwise

@shmibs @helene I haven't done an exhaustive survey but my recollection from looking at the ancient world was that in many places female homosexuality was not even mentioned in moral or legal writing but male homosexuality was. my thinking is there must have been a reason for that but yeah now that were talking about it that's not a sure thing I guess. but it was pretty consistent.

@Moon @helene
if you're talking about places with writing you're already talking about unrepresentative societies

@shmibs @helene well that's a good point.

@Moon @shmibs @helene

there's a theory that the rise of monogamy was important for the rise of civilization, so finding a balance of what is accepted and not in public has been a part of government since then