Believing "Sex Pos" Propaganda Is More Likely To Kill You Than Creationism Is

That I live in the country and seldom go to cities anymore, that I'm an old man, means that I don't often talk to young LGBT people as I did Friday.    What I found out was a reminder that my generation's hard lessons learned from watching a large percentage of our friends and family die of HIV-AIDS may as well have been the Black Death for young people today.   Nothing I've heard outside of the risk to all life from global warming and environmental destruction has been so profoundly depressing as what these young people told me they believe about AIDS.   The porn-prostitution industry, the columnists (who are often in the pay of the porn-prostitution industry) the "sex pos" pimps and others had convinced these college students that promiscuity is perfectly safe and, indeed, a positive good and that it had nothing to do with the rise and spread of AIDS.   It isn't because these people are stupid, they are all good students who are interested in progressive politics.

I got heated responses when I told them that promiscuity had everything to do with the AIDS epidemic, that it would have spread a lot more slowly, if at all, if men had not been promiscuous, that, contrary to the line of tripe they'd been sold,  needle exchange was a relatively minor venue of infection.   Of the dozens of men and several women I knew who died of AIDS, not one of them was an IV drug user, though one of the was married to one.

While I know that these same young folks would be outraged by the denial of evolution as a violation of scientific fact they had no problem with denying the far, far more certain science conducted by institutions such as the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, science which is far more important to them than whether or not we evolved from a common ancestor we share with chimpanzees or bonobos.

This campaign of lies is directly traceable to the media, to places such as Salon, Alternet, to blogs peddling "sex pos" which these kids read.  As the advertising industry long ago proved, it's the easiest thing in the world to sell false information using sex and the media didn't take long to figure out they could use the same fact. Through such media, young people have learned a series of slogans that are as wrong as those peddled by the Discovery Institute while being far more dangerous to them.   And it is forbidden on the alleged left to talk about that violation of fact, of that violation of science because, unlike an issue of minor importance in these peoples' lives, like evolution, well, it's all about sex and those vulgar right-wingers, "Xians", people with cooties are against promiscuity.   I really don't think there is much more to it than that mixed with the juvenile desire to have sex with lots of people, pretending there are no consequences to that or, as was true, traditionally of straight me, that any consequences for that would fall most on other people.

That was a possible delusion to maintain when penicillin and other cheap antibiotics could take care of most of the infections you were bound to get by sleeping around, though there were still things like hepatitis and pregnancy.   But, with the knowledge learned from the AIDS pandemic, which is continuing and killing people around the world, today,  that short period of breezy innocence shouldn't be possible.

One of the kids in the discussion, during the assertion that needle exchange, not sexual promiscuity is to blame for AIDS, mentioned hemophiliacs who were infected.  Apparently some columnists and/or "sex pos" bloggers are using them to lie about the overwhelmingly predominant role that sexual promiscuity played in spreading HIV.

I pointed out that no one predicted that something like AIDS was going to result from the would-be freedom of the 1970s and even in their naive belief that drugs had taken care of that problem, there is no reason that the same medium in which HIV mutated into a pathological form and spread,  the bodies of those engaged in world-wide promiscuity,  won't give rise to other deadly pathogens, perhaps some more deadly and even more intractable than HIV has been.   The publishing industry, the broadcast, cabloid and online media are engaged in an anti-scientific campaign that is far more dangerous and consequential than the one that the creationism industry is.   Only it's supposed to be all right because it's our side that's doing it, not theirs.

Update:  I have decided to publish this comment because it is such a good example of the kind of lies that have come to be believed by younger people, pushed by professional scribblers such as the one who wrote it.  I will comment on it more when I get the chance to give it the response it deserves.

steve simelsMay 17, 2014 at 4:48 PM

Oh puhleeze. The usual half-truths and out and out paranoid pulled out of your ass bullshit ("the columnists (who are often in the pay of the porn-prostitution industry").

Here's a clue, Sparky. HIV is a really difficult bug to get -- you have to really, really work hard at it to get infected. Unfortunately, in the 70s and 80s, far too many people -- mostly homosexual men, and the occasional straight woman who was unlucky enough to be shtupping a homosexual man and/or IV drug user -- were working really really hard at it.

Those days are long gone, thank the Invisible God Being who doesn't do shit, and here in 2014, the average 20 something in a First World Country who engages in the average amount of non-promiscuous casual sex is about as likely to get infected with HIV as I am to be stomped on by Godzilla on the New Jersey Turnpike.

And please, spare me the sob stories about your dead friends. I lived in NYC back then, and I lost just as many as you. Schmuck.