Yes, the surgeon, EMS, transfusion victim are all popular arguments against discipline, and it's true, these people are just unlucky. But the overwhelming majority of AIDS cases do not some from those activities.
I'm not trying to insist on a prudish outlook, married monogamy and that's it, though it would be very difficult for AIDS to spread at all in such a scenario. Sex is also an important part of human relations, but having seen what I've seen in high-schools and colleges, I have to comment. When promiscuity is rampant, as it is in Africa BTW, people are at exponentially greater risk. Mebbe you have a handful of partners in a lifetime, and that's one level of risk, and then you take some populations where people have a handful of partners in a year/month/week and those are altogether in another class of risk.
People need to be more careful with themselves, it's really just that simple.
You are right, but i just wanted to moderate your comment. Same can be said about cancer, in many cases cancer will not occur if people did not smoke or drink. But it's not a reason to stop all the research about cancer and not try to cure them.
Sometimes i think that if we just cure unlucky people we will not cure many people. we will erase from our list all people suffering from smoke related cancer, all people with cirrhosis coming after alcohol or hepatitis B (afterall if he is not vaccinated, it' s his fault or his parent's fault), all people suffering from overweight, all people with sport accident : if they did not make sport they will not be wounded ...
At the end if you remove all this people who suffer from a illness or an accident due to their behavior, you will not have many people to cure.
That's why as a doctor we should try to cure all the peoples wether they haven taken care of them or not.
You quickly assign fault as an excuse from "help", I didn't, even if it sounds that way. Fault itself is not a bad notion to keep in play, nor is blame, though that doesn't mean you don't help people, sometimes it is a way to start helping people -- I refer to discipline/responsibility/control, because they are (in my mind) just plain better council, better "cures" -- it isn't that I don't trust your profession, "doc", but once you end up in a doctors hands, the outcomes are rarely good.
Take Africa (areas of, like Sierra Leone) with Rampant AIDS epidemics. All the drugs in the world won't "cure" AIDS in that region unless attitudes can also be changed. I would wager that unless attitudes can be changed, then any medicine is wasted medicine. Do you give a liver transplant to a patient who just keeps drinking?
You quickly assign fault as an excuse from "help", I didn't, even if it sounds that way. Fault itself is not a bad notion to keep in play, nor is blame, though that doesn't mean you don't help people, sometimes it is a way to start helping people -- I refer to discipline/responsibility/control, because they are (in my mind) just plain better council, better "cures" -- it isn't that I don't trust your profession, "doc", but once you end up in a doctors hands, the outcomes are rarely good.
Take Africa (areas of, like Sierra Leone) with Rampant AIDS epidemics. All the drugs in the world won't "cure" AIDS in that region unless attitudes can also be changed. I would wager that unless attitudes can be changed, then any medicine is wasted medicine. Do you give a liver transplant to a patient who just keeps drinking?
Control/discipline/responsability is good and merit to be promoted. Anyway it would be overoptimistic to think that discipline alone will cure aids or any other illness.
If you take the example of aids in africa, most of the problems of bad habits are related to poverty. Poverty imply bad education, a lack of information and control, a lack of condom ...
add a taste for multiple sex partners and you have dynamite.
Disciplin should help africa, but it's difficult to promote it in a countrie suffering from starvation, diseases, no future and an average low level of education. Many child are infected, have lost their parents infected by aids and are raised by their grand-parents. Some others parents are still alive, but canno't work due to aids. It's important for their kids that they could work : the cure is important for the whole family and the whole economy.
I am OK to promote disciplin in Africa (and they try to do it), but it will not be sufficient alone.
There's already a very inexpensive cure for AIDS, but for some reason it isn't a popular perscription: discipline.
I was going to say some thing like that, only the word I was going to use was "abstinence."
Although, I do have to back off a bit on that. Abstinence and fidelity would indeed slow if not outright stop the spread of AIDS, at least here. (I've read about AIDS being spread by reused needles, and not by drug addicts, in Africa.) I know a woman who contracted AIDS from her husband who contracted it from blood transfusion after a motor cycle accident. Yes, she has been living with it that long, although her husband wasn't as lucky.
Quite frankly, I don't expect them to ever find a cure. I'm just that cynical.
i remember seeing (on one of those tv news magazines i think) that if all the money put towards aids/hiv was instead put into some other disease (i think they said parkinson's, or maybe m.s., or maybe something else i cant think of) that the ailment could have definitely been cured by now.
I think it should be said that before AIDS, we knew next-to-nothing about viruses. Very little money was spent on researching their biology. The reason, of course, was that it doesn't take much understanding to make a vaccine (we thought) - in some cases, just heat the virus over a bunsen burner and inject. And vaccines are incredibly safe and effective for all the important killer viruses (we thought). AIDS forced us to realize that viruses can be way more dangerous than we had come to believe, and as a result our knowledge about their biology in general (not just HIV) has been growing exponentially for twenty years. Besides helping us deal with other viruses - HPV's, the hepatitises, influenza, etc - it will put us in a much better position if and when a real killer airborne virus comes along. Some of the technology and understanding derived from the study of HIV was applied very effectively to SARS, for example.
Edit: And, of course, science follows the research dollars. "AIDS" research funds a huge amount of basic science that is often only tangentially related to HIV. If the money came from somewhere else, the reseachers would do the same vital research, only call it "cancer-related" instead of "AIDS-related".
typical condom usage results in a 12% pregnancy rate. that would indicate that in typical use, condoms are not 99% effective. (as far as pregnancy is concerned. not sure i'd want to risk that getting pregnant but not AIDS is a good solution)
also, technically, if condoms are 88% effective, and abstinence is 100% effective, that does not make condoms 88% as effective as abstinence. it makes it 0% as effective.
also, technically, if condoms are 88% effective, and abstinence is 100% effective, that does not make condoms 88% as effective as abstinence. it makes it 0% as effective.
Strange stat, the 0% as effective is wrong.
If i follow your line of reasoning :
If you consider tht nothing is 5 % effective, with your line of thinking it will read it makes also 0% as effective.
Now if you consider if you employ heavy condomn and it's 99 % effective , you will said it's 0 % effective.
So 99 % equal 5 % because they both are 0 % as effective.
I do agree that people need to be careful, but that starts with oneself. We need to realize that we cannot really "blame the victim" for not being careful.
And it has nothing to do with promiscuity. Use a condom every single time, and feel free to have the occasional one-night stand. Or even to do it every Friday night. The "all condoms, all the time" slogan should be adhered to religiously, and you really are not at risk. On the other hand, the person who gets only one new partner per year, and doesn't "always" use a condom is at much, much higher risk than the condom-wielding bar-hopper.
You agree that people need to be careful, but you don't agree that they need to be careful? Congradulations, you've just been promoted to an extremely high risk attitude! Care, in your description, has been confined to a solely technical aspect, but since the technology is far from perfect, the general attitude of "all sex, all the time" is what gets you into trouble.
I would posit the exact opposite, that a person who has only a few partners in a lifetime, regardless of safe-sex practice, will be generally more selective of their mates, and only choose other people who are also more selective, and thus turn out far safer than a "condom-wielding bar-hopper" on the basis of numbers alone.
Latex does not mitigate stupidity, it can only help people who help themselves.
powerdoc the weirdness comes in when you include the phrase "as effective as". in logical terms, that means equals.
if condoms have a failure rate of 12%, and abstinece has a 0% failure rate, condoms are infinately less effective than abstinence. (12/0= ∞ )
however, as tonton pointed out, i'm sure there are a lot of people who say they're going to abstain, and don't. those are probably the same people who say they're going to use condoms, and don't. (hence the 88% effective rate vs. the 99% theoretical rate).
condoms are a good idea, but low-risk behavior seems a much safer route. you don't have to be a prude to keep your dick in your pants. (but it helps. ) sorry.
anyway, sleeping with one person at a time, only after you've known them for a long time and trust them is a good start. also, get STD tested before sleeping with anyone.
problem is, in theory abstinence is great, but in theory condoms are almost as good. in practice both leave a bit to be desired, but at least with condoms you're still getting laid.
It's a little far fetched, but what the hell, let me throw this out there:
How about heterosexual marriage being the societal standard, and no sex before marriage?
Aw, forget it---that's crazy. With all the stable homes for kids and all the money we would save on AIDS, and STD related costs---where's the drama? We need the fun of sportfukking across entire cities to make our lives complete. Homosexual behavior? Oh hell it's not like if we were all homos mankind would cease to exist---homosexual desires are harmless---especially when you combine them with an amphetamine/viagra cocktail and night on the town.
We need to accelerate the use of drugs, condoms and promiscuity to maximum effect.
It's a little far fetched, but what the hell, let me throw this out there:
How about heterosexual marriage being the societal standard, and no sex before marriage?
Aw, forget it---that's crazy. With all the stable homes for kids and all the money we would save on AIDS, and STD related costs---where's the drama? We need the fun of sportfukking across entire cities to make our lives complete. Homosexual behavior? Oh hell it's not like if we were all homos mankind would cease to exist---homosexual desires are harmless---especially when you combine them with an amphetamine/viagra cocktail and night on the town.
We need to accelerate the use of drugs, condoms and promiscuity to maximum effect.
Nothing else makes sense.
The problem with your perfect little world is that AIDS is already into the hetro population. Drugs are a bad problem on their own but having a different lifestyle or doing drugs isn't the only way to get it. I don't think going back to the illusion of what the 50's were will help. It lead here remember. Plus I don't think turning quaker and sticking our heads in the ground is the answer.
The problem with your perfect little world is that AIDS is already into the hetro population. Drugs are a bad problem on their own but having a different lifestyle or doing drugs isn't the only way to get it. I don't think going back to the illusion of what the 50's were will help. It lead here remember. Plus I don't think turning quaker and sticking our heads in the ground is the answer.
Oh no, jimmac I totaly aggree, we need to continue, if not enhance and promote the behaviors that have got us here in the first place. It's the only sensible solution. It got us this far, I'll bet it'll get much further.
Amen brother!! Praise Larry Flint and pass the KY jelly! Where's my lesbian porno---I need a rush!!
The problem with your perfect little world is that AIDS is already into the hetro population. Drugs are a bad problem on their own but having a different lifestyle or doing drugs isn't the only way to get it. I don't think going back to the illusion of what the 50's were will help. It lead here remember. Plus I don't think turning quaker and sticking our heads in the ground is the answer.
Speaking of fantasy worlds...I was just re-reading a history of the American Revolution, and even back in uber-conservative hyper-religious Puritan New England, where laws required you to attend services and where only those who had witnessed public conversion events could be full members of the congregation, even there premarital sex was implicitly tolerated. There was a custom of having courters spend the night together in the girl's home, basically unsupervised - the idea being that it was a "trial" for their marriage, however you want to interpret that. It was offically a sin for a child to be conceived before marriage, but it was such a common occurance for children to be born less than six months after the wedding that churches had standardized paperwork for the sinful parents that allowed them to confess their sin and promise penance with just a signature.
Remember, too, that this was a world where people got married at 17 or 18 and immediately started having kids. So let's get real. In a society where, for economic reasons, most people put off marriage until their late 20s, and kids to their 30s, telling people to deny their basic human nature for the better part of their adult life just won't work for 99.99% of them.
HEHE, Did I do this: set the left and right wings flapping?
Ah well, can't be helped, I guess. But I think I've fallen squarely in the reasonable center of these two rather extreme views. That is, that technology can help to mitigate biology or ammend it to social realities, but it cannot excuse you from your own behavior. If your choices are basically unwise, condom or not, you have much higher risk than someone who is generally more careful and gathers a peer group of people (friends and a lover of three) who are also more careful in their choices. To extend the argument in the extreme of either case seems unrealistic and irresponsible. I believe those are both radical cases, and while we tend to view "abstinence" as a radical case, perhaps justly, we tend not to view "latex sealed promiscuity" as a radical case, but I think it is aswell; in this case we expect technology to shoulder the burden of responsibility, to cover a problem of practice, as we do in many other cases, downloading responsibility for ourselves into a faith in rubber?
Speaking of fantasy worlds...I was just re-reading a history of the American Revolution, and even back in uber-conservative hyper-religious Puritan New England, where laws required you to attend services and where only those who had witnessed public conversion events could be full members of the congregation, even there premarital sex was implicitly tolerated. There was a custom of having courters spend the night together in the girl's home, basically unsupervised - the idea being that it was a "trial" for their marriage, however you want to interpret that. It was offically a sin for a child to be conceived before marriage, but it was such a common occurance for children to be born less than six months after the wedding that churches had standardized paperwork for the sinful parents that allowed them to confess their sin and promise penance with just a signature.
Remember, too, that this was a world where people got married at 17 or 18 and immediately started having kids. So let's get real. In a society where, for economic reasons, most people put off marriage until their late 20s, and kids to their 30s, telling people to deny their basic human nature for the better part of their adult life just won't work for 99.99% of them.
There is a lot of truth there, too many people look back at history and assume things got more "prudish" starting with the 50s and getting more conservative as you go back in time.
When promiscuity is rampant, as it is in Africa BTW, people are at exponentially greater risk.
...
People need to be more careful with themselves, it's really just that simple.
You're wrong. In Africa, they're discovering that AIDS isn't spreading through 'promiscuity' as people have believed up until now. The rate of spreading is virtually equal across all peoples, educated and condom using or not. What they've discovered is that hospitals in Africa suck so much that dirty facilities are spreading AIDS faster than 'savages that can't control their primal urges' as some people believe.
mebbe now, and add people being born with the disease to that, but promiscuity is a huge problem. It may not fit a westernized definition of promiscuity when a man has 7 or 8 wives, because we tend to also imply infidelity or immorality when we say promiscuity, but one look at the birth rate tells you that there's far too much sex going on, and women aren't getting pregnant from dirty needles. Don't imply a racist tact when none was made. There are some culturally embedded practices that make for easy pickings to a disease like AIDS, that's all, as there are here in the good old "western" world as well.
Comments
Originally posted by Matsu
Yes, the surgeon, EMS, transfusion victim are all popular arguments against discipline, and it's true, these people are just unlucky. But the overwhelming majority of AIDS cases do not some from those activities.
I'm not trying to insist on a prudish outlook, married monogamy and that's it, though it would be very difficult for AIDS to spread at all in such a scenario. Sex is also an important part of human relations, but having seen what I've seen in high-schools and colleges, I have to comment. When promiscuity is rampant, as it is in Africa BTW, people are at exponentially greater risk. Mebbe you have a handful of partners in a lifetime, and that's one level of risk, and then you take some populations where people have a handful of partners in a year/month/week and those are altogether in another class of risk.
People need to be more careful with themselves, it's really just that simple.
You are right, but i just wanted to moderate your comment. Same can be said about cancer, in many cases cancer will not occur if people did not smoke or drink. But it's not a reason to stop all the research about cancer and not try to cure them.
Sometimes i think that if we just cure unlucky people we will not cure many people. we will erase from our list all people suffering from smoke related cancer, all people with cirrhosis coming after alcohol or hepatitis B (afterall if he is not vaccinated, it' s his fault or his parent's fault), all people suffering from overweight, all people with sport accident : if they did not make sport they will not be wounded ...
At the end if you remove all this people who suffer from a illness or an accident due to their behavior, you will not have many people to cure.
That's why as a doctor we should try to cure all the peoples wether they haven taken care of them or not.
Take Africa (areas of, like Sierra Leone) with Rampant AIDS epidemics. All the drugs in the world won't "cure" AIDS in that region unless attitudes can also be changed. I would wager that unless attitudes can be changed, then any medicine is wasted medicine. Do you give a liver transplant to a patient who just keeps drinking?
Originally posted by Matsu
You quickly assign fault as an excuse from "help", I didn't, even if it sounds that way. Fault itself is not a bad notion to keep in play, nor is blame, though that doesn't mean you don't help people, sometimes it is a way to start helping people -- I refer to discipline/responsibility/control, because they are (in my mind) just plain better council, better "cures" -- it isn't that I don't trust your profession, "doc", but once you end up in a doctors hands, the outcomes are rarely good.
Take Africa (areas of, like Sierra Leone) with Rampant AIDS epidemics. All the drugs in the world won't "cure" AIDS in that region unless attitudes can also be changed. I would wager that unless attitudes can be changed, then any medicine is wasted medicine. Do you give a liver transplant to a patient who just keeps drinking?
Control/discipline/responsability is good and merit to be promoted. Anyway it would be overoptimistic to think that discipline alone will cure aids or any other illness.
If you take the example of aids in africa, most of the problems of bad habits are related to poverty. Poverty imply bad education, a lack of information and control, a lack of condom ...
add a taste for multiple sex partners and you have dynamite.
Disciplin should help africa, but it's difficult to promote it in a countrie suffering from starvation, diseases, no future and an average low level of education. Many child are infected, have lost their parents infected by aids and are raised by their grand-parents. Some others parents are still alive, but canno't work due to aids. It's important for their kids that they could work : the cure is important for the whole family and the whole economy.
I am OK to promote disciplin in Africa (and they try to do it), but it will not be sufficient alone.
Originally posted by Matsu
There's already a very inexpensive cure for AIDS, but for some reason it isn't a popular perscription: discipline.
I was going to say some thing like that, only the word I was going to use was "abstinence."
Although, I do have to back off a bit on that. Abstinence and fidelity would indeed slow if not outright stop the spread of AIDS, at least here. (I've read about AIDS being spread by reused needles, and not by drug addicts, in Africa.) I know a woman who contracted AIDS from her husband who contracted it from blood transfusion after a motor cycle accident. Yes, she has been living with it that long, although her husband wasn't as lucky.
Quite frankly, I don't expect them to ever find a cure. I'm just that cynical.
Originally posted by thuh Freak
i remember seeing (on one of those tv news magazines i think) that if all the money put towards aids/hiv was instead put into some other disease (i think they said parkinson's, or maybe m.s., or maybe something else i cant think of) that the ailment could have definitely been cured by now.
I think it should be said that before AIDS, we knew next-to-nothing about viruses. Very little money was spent on researching their biology. The reason, of course, was that it doesn't take much understanding to make a vaccine (we thought) - in some cases, just heat the virus over a bunsen burner and inject. And vaccines are incredibly safe and effective for all the important killer viruses (we thought). AIDS forced us to realize that viruses can be way more dangerous than we had come to believe, and as a result our knowledge about their biology in general (not just HIV) has been growing exponentially for twenty years. Besides helping us deal with other viruses - HPV's, the hepatitises, influenza, etc - it will put us in a much better position if and when a real killer airborne virus comes along. Some of the technology and understanding derived from the study of HIV was applied very effectively to SARS, for example.
Edit: And, of course, science follows the research dollars. "AIDS" research funds a huge amount of basic science that is often only tangentially related to HIV. If the money came from somewhere else, the reseachers would do the same vital research, only call it "cancer-related" instead of "AIDS-related".
also, technically, if condoms are 88% effective, and abstinence is 100% effective, that does not make condoms 88% as effective as abstinence. it makes it 0% as effective.
Originally posted by alcimedes
also, technically, if condoms are 88% effective, and abstinence is 100% effective, that does not make condoms 88% as effective as abstinence. it makes it 0% as effective.
Strange stat, the 0% as effective is wrong.
If i follow your line of reasoning :
If you consider tht nothing is 5 % effective, with your line of thinking it will read it makes also 0% as effective.
Now if you consider if you employ heavy condomn and it's 99 % effective , you will said it's 0 % effective.
So 99 % equal 5 % because they both are 0 % as effective.
It looks weird
Originally posted by tonton
I do agree that people need to be careful, but that starts with oneself. We need to realize that we cannot really "blame the victim" for not being careful.
And it has nothing to do with promiscuity. Use a condom every single time, and feel free to have the occasional one-night stand. Or even to do it every Friday night. The "all condoms, all the time" slogan should be adhered to religiously, and you really are not at risk. On the other hand, the person who gets only one new partner per year, and doesn't "always" use a condom is at much, much higher risk than the condom-wielding bar-hopper.
You agree that people need to be careful, but you don't agree that they need to be careful? Congradulations, you've just been promoted to an extremely high risk attitude! Care, in your description, has been confined to a solely technical aspect, but since the technology is far from perfect, the general attitude of "all sex, all the time" is what gets you into trouble.
I would posit the exact opposite, that a person who has only a few partners in a lifetime, regardless of safe-sex practice, will be generally more selective of their mates, and only choose other people who are also more selective, and thus turn out far safer than a "condom-wielding bar-hopper" on the basis of numbers alone.
Latex does not mitigate stupidity, it can only help people who help themselves.
if condoms have a failure rate of 12%, and abstinece has a 0% failure rate, condoms are infinately less effective than abstinence. (12/0= ∞ )
however, as tonton pointed out, i'm sure there are a lot of people who say they're going to abstain, and don't. those are probably the same people who say they're going to use condoms, and don't. (hence the 88% effective rate vs. the 99% theoretical rate).
condoms are a good idea, but low-risk behavior seems a much safer route. you don't have to be a prude to keep your dick in your pants. (but it helps.
anyway, sleeping with one person at a time, only after you've known them for a long time and trust them is a good start. also, get STD tested before sleeping with anyone.
problem is, in theory abstinence is great, but in theory condoms are almost as good. in practice both leave a bit to be desired, but at least with condoms you're still getting laid.
It's a little far fetched, but what the hell, let me throw this out there:
How about heterosexual marriage being the societal standard, and no sex before marriage?
Aw, forget it---that's crazy. With all the stable homes for kids and all the money we would save on AIDS, and STD related costs---where's the drama? We need the fun of sportfukking across entire cities to make our lives complete. Homosexual behavior? Oh hell it's not like if we were all homos mankind would cease to exist---homosexual desires are harmless---especially when you combine them with an amphetamine/viagra cocktail and night on the town.
We need to accelerate the use of drugs, condoms and promiscuity to maximum effect.
Nothing else makes sense.
Originally posted by ena
I have an idea!
It's a little far fetched, but what the hell, let me throw this out there:
How about heterosexual marriage being the societal standard, and no sex before marriage?
Aw, forget it---that's crazy. With all the stable homes for kids and all the money we would save on AIDS, and STD related costs---where's the drama? We need the fun of sportfukking across entire cities to make our lives complete. Homosexual behavior? Oh hell it's not like if we were all homos mankind would cease to exist---homosexual desires are harmless---especially when you combine them with an amphetamine/viagra cocktail and night on the town.
We need to accelerate the use of drugs, condoms and promiscuity to maximum effect.
Nothing else makes sense.
The problem with your perfect little world is that AIDS is already into the hetro population. Drugs are a bad problem on their own but having a different lifestyle or doing drugs isn't the only way to get it. I don't think going back to the illusion of what the 50's were will help. It lead here remember. Plus I don't think turning quaker and sticking our heads in the ground is the answer.
Originally posted by jimmac
The problem with your perfect little world is that AIDS is already into the hetro population. Drugs are a bad problem on their own but having a different lifestyle or doing drugs isn't the only way to get it. I don't think going back to the illusion of what the 50's were will help. It lead here remember. Plus I don't think turning quaker and sticking our heads in the ground is the answer.
Oh no, jimmac I totaly aggree, we need to continue, if not enhance and promote the behaviors that have got us here in the first place. It's the only sensible solution. It got us this far, I'll bet it'll get much further.
Amen brother!! Praise Larry Flint and pass the KY jelly! Where's my lesbian porno---I need a rush!!
Originally posted by jimmac
I don't think going back to the illusion of what the 50's were will help. It lead here remember.
Originally posted by jimmac
The problem with your perfect little world is that AIDS is already into the hetro population. Drugs are a bad problem on their own but having a different lifestyle or doing drugs isn't the only way to get it. I don't think going back to the illusion of what the 50's were will help. It lead here remember. Plus I don't think turning quaker and sticking our heads in the ground is the answer.
Speaking of fantasy worlds...I was just re-reading a history of the American Revolution, and even back in uber-conservative hyper-religious Puritan New England, where laws required you to attend services and where only those who had witnessed public conversion events could be full members of the congregation, even there premarital sex was implicitly tolerated. There was a custom of having courters spend the night together in the girl's home, basically unsupervised - the idea being that it was a "trial" for their marriage, however you want to interpret that. It was offically a sin for a child to be conceived before marriage, but it was such a common occurance for children to be born less than six months after the wedding that churches had standardized paperwork for the sinful parents that allowed them to confess their sin and promise penance with just a signature.
Remember, too, that this was a world where people got married at 17 or 18 and immediately started having kids. So let's get real. In a society where, for economic reasons, most people put off marriage until their late 20s, and kids to their 30s, telling people to deny their basic human nature for the better part of their adult life just won't work for 99.99% of them.
Ah well, can't be helped, I guess. But I think I've fallen squarely in the reasonable center of these two rather extreme views. That is, that technology can help to mitigate biology or ammend it to social realities, but it cannot excuse you from your own behavior. If your choices are basically unwise, condom or not, you have much higher risk than someone who is generally more careful and gathers a peer group of people (friends and a lover of three) who are also more careful in their choices. To extend the argument in the extreme of either case seems unrealistic and irresponsible. I believe those are both radical cases, and while we tend to view "abstinence" as a radical case, perhaps justly, we tend not to view "latex sealed promiscuity" as a radical case, but I think it is aswell; in this case we expect technology to shoulder the burden of responsibility, to cover a problem of practice, as we do in many other cases, downloading responsibility for ourselves into a faith in rubber?
Originally posted by Towel
Speaking of fantasy worlds...I was just re-reading a history of the American Revolution, and even back in uber-conservative hyper-religious Puritan New England, where laws required you to attend services and where only those who had witnessed public conversion events could be full members of the congregation, even there premarital sex was implicitly tolerated. There was a custom of having courters spend the night together in the girl's home, basically unsupervised - the idea being that it was a "trial" for their marriage, however you want to interpret that. It was offically a sin for a child to be conceived before marriage, but it was such a common occurance for children to be born less than six months after the wedding that churches had standardized paperwork for the sinful parents that allowed them to confess their sin and promise penance with just a signature.
Remember, too, that this was a world where people got married at 17 or 18 and immediately started having kids. So let's get real. In a society where, for economic reasons, most people put off marriage until their late 20s, and kids to their 30s, telling people to deny their basic human nature for the better part of their adult life just won't work for 99.99% of them.
There is a lot of truth there, too many people look back at history and assume things got more "prudish" starting with the 50s and getting more conservative as you go back in time.
Not the case.
Originally posted by Matsu
When promiscuity is rampant, as it is in Africa BTW, people are at exponentially greater risk.
...
People need to be more careful with themselves, it's really just that simple.
You're wrong. In Africa, they're discovering that AIDS isn't spreading through 'promiscuity' as people have believed up until now. The rate of spreading is virtually equal across all peoples, educated and condom using or not. What they've discovered is that hospitals in Africa suck so much that dirty facilities are spreading AIDS faster than 'savages that can't control their primal urges' as some people believe.
Originally posted by alcimedes
...and abstinence is 100% effective....
That's just false. Take my example from above. The rampant spread of AIDS in Africa is not sex related.