Posts by George Darroch
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Idiot Savant,
I don't work on rheumatic fever, or any other respiratory disease so this really isn't my area. I can't tell you how much impact these will have. But the first three of those are fairly standard in malaria; diagnosis and treatment, surveillance, and community education. In diseases which are easily recognisable by non-experts, community education is more than a token response, it's crucial to reducing the disease below transmission thresholds.
They're reasonable policy responses. They would have consulted within the area before choosing them. And cutting the incidence of a disease by two thirds in just five years is a useful target, if it drives the necessary responses and causes an increase in the scale of investment. But the gap between aspiration and implementation is something to be questioned. If they put very large amounts into this, then they could get there - but such amounts are almost certainly something that would have to show up on budget balance sheets. If there isn't a funding announcement then the target is useless. Particularly when the Government is undermining the underlying conditions which facilitate the spread of the disease.
I like the immunisation target though. And the repeal of s59 is likely to have had its intended impact in removing the expectation that violence against children is acceptable (under any circumstance). So, a little progress: it's not all negative.
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A good day for mediaphiles.
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How completely awesome is this, as an explanatory tool? A schematic diagram of non-monogamy. Venn-porn.
ETA: Also, Comic Sans.
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Meanwhile, Jezebel reminds us to stand strong against robosexuality.
Robosexuality is a choice. No one is just "built that way," no matter what Lady Goto10 sings. The sooner the robodomites stop playing with each others' dipswitches, toggles, and ports and accept the programming of Robot Jesus, the sooner they will be autosaved.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Max Rose,
Exactly! While the "born this way" idea has been a focus for some, who cares whether it's an inclination, an orientation, a predilection or just a whim? No-one should be telling anyone else who or how they can (consensually) shag.
Exactly. I want behaviours to be as legitimate as tendencies.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Emma Hart,
The best birth control in the world is for men. But yes, it's not available yet.
There's a bit of work before it's available, by the looks of things - not as the result of any conspiracy, but because serious technical problems need to be sorted by clinical trials. It might be a while.
I'm entirely confident that within this century we'll have vaccines for every sexually transmitted disease. Vaccines are amazing (as anyone who follows me would know), but they're only really coming into their own at the moment; knowledge has improved vastly but there's still a lot of trial and error and cost involved.
HIV is of course the most significant and serious, but the rest put a real dampener on sexual practices, even within committed relationships between people who know each other well. It's anyone's guess what will happen after they're out of the picture.
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Sorry to jack your thread. Back to Roman-porn...
I like the idea of a utopian, inclusive, sex-positive society (even if I quibble over some of the details), but I'm not sure how we get there. A series of thousands of minor steps, or a sexual revolution. The former seems more likely, but then I think about how far towards a society that accepts queer and other sexual practices we've come in just a few decades. These are long decades, of course, and we're a very long way from where we need to be. But in the scope of human history (thousands of years), rather rapid changes.
I'm looking forward to male hormonal contraception being widely available. While I don't think it will have anywhere near the effect of female contraception - which I hold responsible for invigorating the great majority of post-1950 change - I think it will further our ability to reconceptualise sex. Other technologies which reconfigure the body, such as gender reassignment technologies (surgery, hormones, and others) are further expanding our scope. I'm not a techno-utopian by any means, and the Romans certainly made do without, but different things change the pressures felt by different members of society.
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^correction: biebians.
I suspect that much of the bile that gets sent the way of Bieber is in part because he doesn't act out the narrow definition of what a successful male (at even a young age) is supposed to fit.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Russell Brown,
BTW, I had a Twitter conversation a while ago with a teenaged trans-man (who I’d mistaken for a lesbian) who was sporting both a Justin Bieber haircut and a Justin Bieber t-shirt. That was quite meta.
Beautiful. Existing in that wonderful meta-zone, bebians are an ironic meme.
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a male singer marketed to teenager *girls* as aggressively masculine. There must be some
I'm thinking Usher, early 2000s.