open challenge: can anyone debunk this homophobic rhetoric?

Xurtio · 06-01-2015, 01:09 PM

I know JWB is bi and I didn'T call him homophobic for the record, I think it has more to do with the common fallacy of applying linear relationships in social mechanisms.

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth

nope. all i have questioned is arguments that seem less than convincing to me. mostly because i know that if i don't play devil's advocate here, nobody will. it's just not socially acceptable to do so. people are too afraid of appearing hateful. but for the record, i never said 'homophobia doesn't cause mental illness' or anything remotely close to that.

if you say so... that just doesn't seem self evident to me. i mean would you extend that logic to a scenario where 15 are homos, 1 is homophobic, and the rest are complacent? you'd expect homosexuals to be just as affected by 1 man's homophobia as they would if it were a relatively popular sentiment? that just sounds counter-intuitive to me.

or to bring it back to the real world... a gay man living in san fran vs a gay man living in saudi arabia.. you think they would be equally closeted and repressed?

I don't think it's a constant for all m, where m is the number of homophobes. I said it was not linear (it's also not one dimensional). The difference between Saudi Arabia and San Francisco is one's a country with systemic national support of homophobia (with regards to both policy and religion) and the other is a city in a state in a country. The number of violent/abusive homophobes is certainly a factor, but the availability of support (from legalization of gay marriage to local family/friend support) goes a long way to reduce the marginalization that could lead to isolation and persecution that could lead to mental illness.

Further, the impact of having a violently homophobic father on mental illness would be more than that of someone who had a supportive family but got beat up once by a homophobe. A single homophobe in each of these cases has a different impact based on their relationship to the victim.

~~John Wilkes Booth~~ · 06-01-2015, 01:17 PM

right... i understand that the relationship wouldn't necessarily be linear, but there would be some relationship, no? what he's saying is the stats are more or less the same in european countries which have a very different cultural attitude towards gays than america. which is surprising, if there is any relationship at all. yes the gay kid with the homophobic dad scenario can still pop up in the more progressive countries, but if anything you'd expect that scenario would at the very least be more common in less progressive countries/regions.

btw he might just be bull****ting about the stats for all i know. he's basically an online troll. that's why i brought it up here cause i figured someone who cares more about this topic might be more up on the stats than i am.

Xurtio · 06-01-2015, 01:30 PM

That's the problem with most stats research today though, it's oversimplified and confounding factors are ignored. Which makes it a great way to do research with political agendas to support obe's preconceived notions.

Another factor is the critical point at which the complacent people engage homophobes. Maybe 5/100 homophobes isn'T enough to warrant a response, but 20/100 homophobes, and complacent people start seeing their brothers and friends get assaulted over their orientation and they prop up more support groups.

Bottom line is that social issues and correlations are so spurious and subject to multiple factors that it triggers muh rant face when I see people casually interpret statistics.

Chula Vista · 06-01-2015, 01:36 PM

Real People > Stats

~~John Wilkes Booth~~ · 06-01-2015, 01:48 PM

right well i mentioned in my initial post that i saw some flaws in his logic, the one that really comes to mind is that if there was some correlation between homosexuality and mental illness, i.e. even if homosexuals are x% more likely to be mentally ill than heteros, it doesn't mean that homosexuality is a result of mental illness or vice versa. it could just be a correlation. i've only taken the intro required classes on psychology but i remember from that the textbook stressing that you can't draw causation from a correlation alone.

but my question/thought experiment for you is, say such a correlation exists. just hypothetically speaking, say that homosexuality is caused by that hormonal flush or whatever in the womb, and that same hormonal flush can also cause the child to be bi polar or some other mental illness. and as a result the statistics say homosexuals are more likely than straight people to develop these disorders. how would you ever differentiate between that and the disorders being caused by suppression and homophobia?

~~John Wilkes Booth~~ · 06-01-2015, 01:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chula Vista

Real People > Stats

false. there are more statistics in the world than there are real people. you need to go back to school, chula

Xurtio · 06-01-2015, 02:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth

right well i mentioned in my initial post that i saw some flaws in his logic, the one that really comes to mind is that if there was some correlation between homosexuality and mental illness, i.e. even if homosexuals are x% more likely to be mentally ill than heteros, it doesn't mean that homosexuality is a result of mental illness or vice versa. it could just be a correlation. i've only taken the intro required classes on psychology but i remember from that the textbook stressing that you can't draw causation from a correlation alone.

but my question/thought experiment for you is, say such a correlation exists. just hypothetically speaking, say that homosexuality is caused by that hormonal flush or whatever in the womb, and that same hormonal flush can also cause the child to be bi polar or some other mental illness. and as a result the statistics say homosexuals are more likely than straight people to develop these disorders. how would you ever differentiate between that and the disorders being caused by suppression and homophobia?

The most obvious way is to have a better understanding of the physiological mechanisms so you could measure it in the brain and compare brains of lots of people .

Psychologists already have a stress-diathesis model (two different people exposed to the same environmental stimulus - one might trigger a mental illness due to biological differences) which is part of the more general "biopsychosocial" model - that is, acknowledgement that influence in mental illness outcome depends on a combination of social, biological, and psychological factors.

These factors are separated by monozygotic twin studies, and those might inform you somewhat to the degree which illnesses (or homosexuality) may be social vs. biological in general, but to further correlate them would require some careful case by case statistics and intervention studies (but it would obviously be unethical to try to induce mental illness in people) to establish causation. You could start a homosexual support group and see if correlation between homosexuality and mental illness goes down in 20 years, but then you'd also be ignoring any biological changes and assuming them fixed.

Chula Vista · 06-01-2015, 02:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth

false. there are more statistics in the world than there are real people. you need to go back to school, chula

F*ck that. I have enough trouble getting out of bed for f*cks sake.

rheumatoid arthritis

~~John Wilkes Booth~~ · 06-01-2015, 02:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xurtio

The most obvious way is to have a better understanding of the physiological mechanisms so you could measure it in the brain and compare brains of lots of people .

Psychologists already have a stress-diathesis model (two different people exposed to the same environmental stimulus - one might trigger a mental illness due to biological differences) which is part of the more general "biopsychosocial" model - that is, acknowledgement that influence in mental illness outcome depends on a combination of social, biological, and psychological factors.

These factors are separated by monozygotic twin studies, and those might inform you somewhat to the degree which illnesses (or homosexuality) may be social vs. biological in general, but to further correlate them would require some careful case by case statistics and intervention studies (but it would obviously be unethical to try to induce mental illness in people) to establish causation. You could start a homosexual support group and see if correlation between homosexuality and mental illness goes down in 20 years, but then you'd also be ignoring any biological changes and assuming them fixed.

so in other words... you can't?

Xurtio · 06-01-2015, 03:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth

so in other words... you can't?

If you were able to establish a lot of these individual correlations and make useful inferences, and you had some mechanistic understanding of a specific mental illness that fit the paradigm, then you could synthesize a reasonable claim. Maybe it's already been done, I don't know. Rather than saying you can't or you can, all you can do is analyze the veracity of the claim (I. E. Think spectrum, not binary).

06-01-2015, 01:30 PM	#63 (permalink)
Xurtio Brain Licker Join Date: Apr 2014 Posts: 1,083	That's the problem with most stats research today though, it's oversimplified and confounding factors are ignored. Which makes it a great way to do research with political agendas to support obe's preconceived notions. Another factor is the critical point at which the complacent people engage homophobes. Maybe 5/100 homophobes isn'T enough to warrant a response, but 20/100 homophobes, and complacent people start seeing their brothers and friends get assaulted over their orientation and they prop up more support groups. Bottom line is that social issues and correlations are so spurious and subject to multiple factors that it triggers muh rant face when I see people casually interpret statistics. __________________ H̓̇̅̉yͤ͏mͬ͂ͧn͑̽̽̌ͪ̑͐͟o̴͊̈́͑̇m͛͌̓ͦ̑aͫ̽ͤ̇n̅̎͐̒ͫ͐c̆ͯͫ̋ ̔̃́eͯ͒rͬͬ̄҉

06-01-2015, 01:36 PM	#64 (permalink)
Chula Vista Toasted Poster Join Date: Oct 2014 Location: SoCal by way of Boston Posts: 11,332	Real People > Stats __________________ “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

06-01-2015, 01:17 PM	#62 (permalink)
~~John Wilkes Booth~~ Account Disabled Join Date: Jul 2013 Posts: 2,235	right... i understand that the relationship wouldn't necessarily be linear, but there would be some relationship, no? what he's saying is the stats are more or less the same in european countries which have a very different cultural attitude towards gays than america. which is surprising, if there is any relationship at all. yes the gay kid with the homophobic dad scenario can still pop up in the more progressive countries, but if anything you'd expect that scenario would at the very least be more common in less progressive countries/regions. btw he might just be bull****ting about the stats for all i know. he's basically an online troll. that's why i brought it up here cause i figured someone who cares more about this topic might be more up on the stats than i am.

06-01-2015, 01:48 PM	#65 (permalink)
~~John Wilkes Booth~~ Account Disabled Join Date: Jul 2013 Posts: 2,235	right well i mentioned in my initial post that i saw some flaws in his logic, the one that really comes to mind is that if there was some correlation between homosexuality and mental illness, i.e. even if homosexuals are x% more likely to be mentally ill than heteros, it doesn't mean that homosexuality is a result of mental illness or vice versa. it could just be a correlation. i've only taken the intro required classes on psychology but i remember from that the textbook stressing that you can't draw causation from a correlation alone. but my question/thought experiment for you is, say such a correlation exists. just hypothetically speaking, say that homosexuality is caused by that hormonal flush or whatever in the womb, and that same hormonal flush can also cause the child to be bi polar or some other mental illness. and as a result the statistics say homosexuals are more likely than straight people to develop these disorders. how would you ever differentiate between that and the disorders being caused by suppression and homophobia?