(no subject)

[fj]

See, I too, like copperred, am more of a diarist than a Blogger. I'd love to be a Blogger, with people all hanging on my every next post on some coherent topic, but instead I just throw everything right out there, and it is mostly little thoughts.

I just can't find the passion to write a nicely political blog about US politics, or homo politics in US politics which would be my natural niche: I do not feel involved in them, I consider myself a transient who just needs to survive well until he moves out. I would write about Dutch politics, but since the I only read the interviews and columns in which the most egregious comments are made a week after the fact when the newspaper finally ends up on my doorstep, I'm not very useful either. I could do technology, but as said, I'd be walking such a fine line there with my current employer.

What's left, my current obsession with the tawdry February scandals that have me glued to http://TMZ.com and http://PerezHilton.com while at the same time hating myself for supporting these outfits that make life utter hell for performers who are in the public eye? Not much longevity there. I shoot too little to be a photo moblogger. I think I am just good at leaving endless comments.

However then, something that has been on my mind as I have been discussing the limits and ethics of parental control and modifiability over their very young children.
1) If the strongest component of same-sex attractions turns out to have a genetic basis,
(twin studies show evidence for that)
2) And if that basis can be switched off without hampering the child beyond, say, making it worse at picking color or dropping 20 IQ points or having slightly worse impulse control, say,
(diversity within people with same-sex attractions seem to point to no correlation with other innate traits anyway)

then having same-sex attractions will be a pre-natal healthcare issue, which, in the US and countries without socialized healthcare means it will be a class issue. Rich people will opt to have it switched off in their kids, poor people will be unable to, and globally, have a bigger chance of having homo or bi kids since they tend to have more kids. Charities will be setup where people can give to give poor warped fetuses a chance to grow up straight, and good Christian geneticists will do their pro-bono stints in Africa along the lines of Operation Smile. If in this environment homos stay organized enough to come out and give each other support, they will stay segregated from the upper classes due to mutual resentment, while the homos will both emulate and parody the upper- and middle-classes they will exclusively engage only as service people for decoration and landscaping and party planning and some mechanicals and secretarial jobs, engaged as a sort of charity, but with no access on the inside.

I used to think there was a good chance bis and homos might be extinct in 3 generations. Now I think upper- and middle-class bis and homos will be extinct in 3 generations, with some upsurges when rich mommies get in the fad of letting nature run its course in some decades.

Comments

dairy of fj

[tkn1114.livejournal.com]

I like reading the dairy of fj! Or just to look at. But once in a while, my pretension eggs me, and I gasp, "O, dear! Look what LA's doing to our Darl-bulous fj!" I mean, wasn't that what Tennessee Williams decided about LA and his mental health?... Just sayin' :-0)

[qnetter]

Jonathan Tolins got there first.

[fj.livejournal.com]

Including the economic stratification and Operation Straight charity aspect?

[qnetter]

As for the economic stratification, well, sorta: the test is brand new, so we can assume it will be available only to the rich.

As for Operation Straight: too early in the timeline to tell. You innovator, you.

[italiangm.livejournal.com]

Despite warnings that folks should know what they're tampering with before they do, I sorta hope the scenario you suggest plays out.

See, I think homosexuals serve in non-conceptive functions likes the maintenance of alliances that aid in resource competition, or perhaps cooperative defense. Either way, homosexual behavior is a positive evolutionary selection because it is a survival strategy, not a reproductive strategy.

If short-sighted breeders fuck around with the evolutionary balance, I'm fairly certain their smug satisfaction will be short-lived. I'm betting major gaps in needed support resources will eventually appear, adding the reduction on queers to the list of tipping point issues like global warming.

[fj.livejournal.com]

Because I think most reductions of queers will be local phenomena, I think that if the gaps appear, they will appear on smaller scales than global warming. But I agree with your intuition that gaps will appear. I do not think they will be recognized unless sociology takes flying leaps as a science of finding answers in very ambiguous situations.

[italiangm.livejournal.com]

Why do you believe the reductions will be localized?

The gaps will become painfully apparent when the 'glue' that supports hetero bonding disappears.

Hetero males aren't metro enough to fill the gap at the numbers required to provide the 'glue', and if history holds, development won't occur fast enough to avoid the tipping point.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

what will we do for socratic philosophers?

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

and, where do the 500 million surplus chinese men in the pipeline play out in this?

[fj.livejournal.com]

They will do what countries do with surplus men: get them killed in a war. With India, which is under related pressure for resources, and Russia, which will be both ripe for picking and not going to give up without a fight. It seems inescapable to me. It is also a separate question from the extinction of homotude trickling down the global classes: it's not like those half billion men will turn gay for lack of women.

As far as philosophers go, it doesn't seem like current society feels a need for them anyway.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

so they'll make war not love. bad news.

[dpnash.livejournal.com]

Actually I'm not sure upper class people would "switch it off." I vaguely remember something in a sociology class many years ago about levels of gay acceptance by class strata, and the most accepting were the upper and lower classes. I think the idea was that the rich don't really care what you do, because their money buys privilege. (Though this sometimes goes along with "sleep with men if you like, so long as you also marry a woman and have some babies to continue the family line." It's a rather old aristocratic notion, I think.)

Meanwhile on the lower class end, they're just more accepting of all kinds of differences because they don't have the money or power to do otherwise.

It's the middle classes who are forever fretting over their in-between position, and who get overly concerned about how they appear to others, who freak out when their kids turn out gay. So I think it's them who would first jump at a pre-natal treatment to ensure straight kids.

At least, that was a theory I read once, and I do think there's some truth in it.

[fj.livejournal.com]

I can see that, yes, but I also then think of how way more people call themselves middle-class, on both ends of the income scale, than actually are. I think that would play into lower acceptance rates of not changing the queer zygote. But yes, I can see the royalty and gentry of the world just being careless about checking.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

As opposed to now, when teh gay is equivalenced with higher class, popular-stereotype-wise.

Once upon a time, somewhere else on the Internet, someone posted a joke-thing about Brokeback Mountain, where the idea was that you were looking at the protagonists' notional shopping lists as the plot of the movie went on. So it started out with cheap beer and hot dogs or whatever, and eventually wound up with fancy champagne and prosciutto and other foofy exotic-sounding stuff like that. Because, you know, they're Turning Gay.

[gloeden.livejournal.com]

I wish I cared, but I thought about some of these things a while back I can truly say it doesn't matter to me if homosexuality or bi-sexuality disappears.
I'm quite attached to it, but I don't think it means very much really.
Except for the fact that it's so obviously against God's plan to do such a thing.
Not saying i don't care about your thought on the matter, of course.

[fj.livejournal.com]

I am not sure if I care about the extinction either. I feel bad for the glbts who have less and less around as it gets erased.

[biaggi.livejournal.com]

Um, I don't think so. This is good paranoid science fiction, but that gene--if it exists--is going to be attached to something else, too, and who knows how you're going to control for getting rid of, oh, I dunno, computer scientists along with the homos. Besides, homos have been around for a long, long time (pace Foucault), and it'll take a bit more than a few generations of upwardly-mobile bourgeois to stamp that out. And the rich? Please. We've got super-wealthy trying to turn their kids gay. So genuine, don't you know.

[fj.livejournal.com]

Same-sex attractions do not seem to be strongly correlated against any other traits, so I think it can be shut off without too many repercussions. There's still the unknown enviromental factor to account for, but without the genetic base, I bet it won't do much.

As I said, there will be fads of gay kids.

[italiangm.livejournal.com]

Homosexual expression, at least in men, appears to have a strong correlation to exhibiting a set of (yet poorly defined) female traits that I bet have more impact than you think.

[hlee.livejournal.com]

And what would happen if the high costs were significantly more (10X) for "treating" males than females or vice versa? Say $50,000 compared to $500,000?

IRL I don't think such a severe notions as heterosexuality vs homosexuality are expressed genetically. Far too much unnecessary effort for too little benefit. Darwin constantly warns that perfection is not a goal of natural nor of sexual selection.