You may have a point as far as the culture vs. man/boy love. But I do think the economic system has a big influence on the culture. My point here was to say that the taking down of these blogs and videos was more about a ritualized proclamation of allegiance to the prevailing groupthink, than it was about controlling information. But mechanisms that control information in our society do play a larger role in helping to establish and guide consensus opinions -- aka groupthink. Including the opinions people hold about man/boy love. I think it's important for us to recognize that the bullshit spewed by the media about us is one small part of a more general pattern to spew bullshit about almost everything. Why is the media full of trivial and banal content which tends to reduce rather than increase people's general level of factual knowledge about the world? And why is the price of a TV station in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars? Here's the thing about IQ: It's easier to take advantage of dumb people, to fleece them and manipulate their voting and shopping behavior. Well it's also easier to take advantage of poorly informed people, in all the same ways. This creates a powerful incentive for major economic and political actors to fill the airways (networks) with bullshit and bring down general levels of knowledge. Man/boy love, in addition to suffering from historical antipathy toward sex and homosexuality in our culture (and equal antipathy toward nurturing children rather than punishing them), is also a victim of this active dumbing down process. It's just a part of the challenge we face. In seeking to crack this misinformation problem around the nature of man/boy love, we are tackling deeply ingrained cultural biases and the assumptions based upon them. But in addition to this, we also set ourselves, in at least some sense, against the entire economic system. I mean, imagine someone going on Ellen and trying to talk meaningfully about a substantive issue for more than seven seconds. That's just how I see the challenge. sg -=- |