Homosexuals admit: We recruit

[Guest]

I like how you say this even though I offered a direct link to a thread where you offer a classic skeptic's canard and I post an extensive refutation backed with volumous links to the research.

What canard was that. Be specific please.

You insist you are undefeated and all you hear is assertions.

Nope. Over the years, I've posted numerous extensive logical, evidence grounded arguments supported with reams of links to competent and eminent scientific individuals and professional journals. It has never done any good and never will, because AGW is not a scientific theory but an ideology and, indeed, a religious doctrine connected root and branch to the quasi-religion of environmentalism (when it isn't just - as it many times is, just the old socialism/communism with a Green tint).

What canard. There are several posts on that page. Global cooling? That's scientific fact, supported by strong empirical data (unlike AGW, which is purely the conjectured construct of computer models that have long been discredited as anything approaching legitimate scientific knowledge about future climate) and has been established for the entirety of the last decade. Global temperatures ceased rising after the big El Nino warming of 1998 (Phil Jones himself admits warming flattened out as early as 1995) and plateaued until about 2002, when a measurable cooling set in that has become fairly pronounced. This is empirical science, not computer modeling (and, of course, the CGM's completely missed it).

Yes, the climatists have an ad hoc argument, which is that all the extra heat is being taken in by the oceans and being pulled into very deep water, thereby evading detection. There isn't any empirical basis for the claim, and the physics involved are pretty rubbery, but the ideology has to be protected at all costs, even the cost of the delegitimation of much of earth science as an intellectually honest pursuit of knowledge (AGW is now "too big to fail," as the gravy train of both money and ideology is coming down a steep mountain pass without brakes).

In any case, AGW is immune to falsification, and has been constructed to be so. Its understood to cause cooling and ice ages, as well as dangerous to catastrophic warming, so any hype from true believers about "the science" is, for all intents, moot.

Everything is evidence of AGW. Therefore, of course, nothing is.

We could have all moved along from this a number of years ago when the Hockey Stick was exposed as a brazen scientific fraud, because there never was, we now know, anything to see here. Climategate 1 and II, as well as mountains of continuing revelations regarding the utter politicization and intellectual corruption of the IPCC and other government funded science organizations, here and outside the U.S., has nailed the coffin shut on this anti-human ideology of civilizational dismantling for all intellectually honest persons willing to look critically at the facts and evidence as they stand, as well as the sordid history of the AGW movement.

[_Droopy]

Big talk for someone who takes his arguments from organizations like Narth, which actually are pseudoscientific.

And upon what basis do you make this claim?

http://narth.com/menus/officers.html

http://narth.com/menus/advisors.html

Yeah, that's a lot of High School diplomas I see there.

Oh, they don't agree with you? That's why their "pseudoscientific." So says the true believer in the fundamentalist religion of AGW.

http://jcem.endojournals.org/content/85/5/2034.full

This kind of thing demonstrates nothing as to genetic or biological causation. Not all of the smug, sanctimonious secularist moral self congratulation you can muster, Delusion, can extract what you desire from this kind of brain science when you wish to posture as morally superior to those who hold to gospel standards of sexual morality and understand its true purpose and meaning.

Attempting to use empirical science, especially studies in their infant state who's findings are ambiguous, inconclusive, and which admit logically of multiple interpretations, all tentative, if that, is the classic refuge of secular humanists for generations who seek to circumvent philosophical reflection and moral imagination by flight into the fanciful certainties of reductionist, determinist scientism.

You might want to do a better job sourcing what is about to follow. I guess linking anti-gay pseudoscientific oganizations like here:

http://www.cwfa.org/articledisplay.asp? ... yid=papers

This is not an "anti-gay" organization, nor has it ever claimed to be a scientific organization. Its a conservative think tank, and what its against is the homosexual lobby and activist movement who's core mission is to delegitimize heterosexual marriage as unique and definitive of the concept and indoctrinate grade school children through mandated sex ed programs in the practices and ideology of the homosexual subculture.

Stop playing so bloody dumb.

Yet in your world no plausible mechanism can even be entertained. Go figure.

Again, the finger lenght studies may or may not demonstrate something, but its not what you and the cultural Left need it to demonstrate. Roll the dice again.

Yes, there's good research to indicate that it's a subset of lesbians who have that trait. Those women that have it tend to be lesbians. And they tend to correlate strongly with what we think of as "butch" lesbians, which strongly indicates a congential basis for their sexual orientation.

This is vague language, and it obscures what you and the Left need to show, that there is no free will involved in the generation of SSA. What is a "congentital basis," and how is this different from a congentital bias, predisposition, or tendency?

Is homosexuality a bio/psycho/social phenomenon, or is it centered wholly in biology?

I'm sure you were reading the Archives of General Psychiatry one day and came across this.

And it hardly matters, does it, whether or not I did, so long as the material exists there as quoted. Please stop with the smug I'm-one-of-the-Annointed-and-you're-lucky-I'm-even-paying-attention-to-one-of-the-hoi polloi routine. I know it well and I know precisely what it is and from what kind of mentality it comes.

Conservapedia? I haven't been there in years, and I've never used it as a source for anything (not that there's anything wrong with it. I actually never read it at all.

. There is no specific biological etiology of homosexuality that has been shown. The operative word is "specific." That is to say, no one has thus far outlined a specific biological cause that produces homosexual orientation. That doesn't mean there aren't understood biological factors that predispose same sex attraction or help us predict it.

You clearly haven't even been following my arguments here for all the years I've been making them, and haven't been following them now (so intent are you on stroking your own sanctimonious secularist ego). This is what I've been arguing all along - for years. The one difference is that what I'm claiming is that there never will be a specific biological etiology of homosexuality because there is none. Homosexuality is a confluence of a very complex, subtle, and interconnected body of biological, psychological, and social/environmental factors that, under certain circumstances, create a strong enough influence on psycho-social development that SSA manifests itself at some point and in some form.

It comes from what amounts to a phamplet put out by the APA. The full text contradicts all manner of things you are assert regarding homosexuality, which suggests you haven't read it at all, but instead are just repeating this cherry-picked line rend from the greater context. If you regard this source as credible, do you regard the other content in it likewise?

Did it say what the quote said it said, Maestro, or did it not? It hardly matters to me at all, because I think Freudian psychodynamics is bosh, period. The authors of that pamphlet were commenting generally on the state of brain science regarding causal factors. Psychiatry long ago sold out to political correctness in this vein (and in many other ways, as well) as did the American Psychological Association, which, however, later redacted their position and accepted the possibility and effectiveness of reparative therapy for motivated individuals uncomfortable with their homosexuality (and anyone being uncomfortable with being "gay" really throws a wrench in it, doesn't it, E?)

Nice try pretending you know what your talking about, Delusion, but the whole shell game is too transparent to take seriously. Homosexuality is a complex human behavior centered primarily in perception and self image, and whatever biological predisposition may exist (and neuroscience is nowhere near understanding what this may be, in any substantive way), homosexual behavior, and the "gay" identity (or, more precisely, gay identities, as there are a number) are choices and represent a path of psychological and intellectual trajectory animated by will and volitional decisions comprising a manner and way of life.

The brain science literature looks very impressive, bathed as it is in medical jargon and careful experimental construction, but no one should be lulled into accepting the interpretations and inferences of such experimental results (especially by experimenters with socially liberal views looking at empirical science for confirmation of aspects of their worldview) as definitive. They're not anything approximating it, and all of them - all of them - have methodological problems and inferential limitations that make the search of a biological cause of homosexuality (which is what the homosexual lobby and the Left desire) an exercise in extracting deterministic certainty from deeply and pervasively ambiguous and tentative experimental data.

[Guest]

I like how you say this even though I offered a direct link to a thread where you offer a classic skeptic's canard and I post an extensive refutation backed with volumous links to the research.

Or was the "canard" the well known scientific facts regarding the average 800 year lag between all known warming episodes and CO2 rise? If so, E did a very poor job with refuting it by linking to the notorious Micheal Mann activist front Realclimate. Realclimate is not a science site per se, but an activist website dedicated to supporting the "team" and keeping the AGW gravy train on the tracks that has a long and notorious history of deleting and spiking commentary its moderators don't like, including from numbers of PhDs who do not buy into the Romper Room science and ideological histrionics (who took to posting serious argument and commentary at a couple of popular sites that do deal with the science as well as the economics and politics of AGW, Watts up With That and Climataudit, among others).

Did Realclimate "refute" this "canard?" Let's take a look:

This is an issue that is often misunderstood in the public sphere and media, so it is worth spending some time to explain it and clarify it. At least three careful ice core studies have shown that CO2 starts to rise about 800 years (600-1000 years) after Antarctic temperature during glacial terminations. These terminations are pronounced warming periods that mark the ends of the ice ages that happen every 100,000 years or so.

Does this prove that CO2 doesn't cause global warming? The answer is no.

The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data.

The 4200 years of warming make up about 5/6 of the total warming. So CO2 could have caused the last 5/6 of the warming, but could not have caused the first 1/6 of the warming.

It comes as no surprise that other factors besides CO2 affect climate. Changes in the amount of summer sunshine, due to changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun that happen every 21,000 years, have long been known to affect the comings and goings of ice ages. Atlantic ocean circulation slowdowns are thought to warm Antarctica, also.

From studying all the available data (not just ice cores), the probable sequence of events at a termination goes something like this. Some (currently unknown) process causes Antarctica and the surrounding ocean to warm. This process also causes CO2 to start rising, about 800 years later. Then CO2 further warms the whole planet, because of its heat-trapping properties. This leads to even further CO2 release. So CO2 during ice ages should be thought of as a "feedback", much like the feedback that results from putting a microphone too near to a loudspeaker.

In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway. From model estimates, CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases CH4 and N2O) causes about half of the full glacial-to-interglacial warming.

So, in summary, the lag of CO2 behind temperature doesn't tell us much about global warming. [But it may give us a very interesting clue about why CO2 rises at the ends of ice ages. The 800-year lag is about the amount of time required to flush out the deep ocean through natural ocean currents. So CO2 might be stored in the deep ocean during ice ages, and then get released when the climate warms.]

This is too easy. In the first place, the entire argument is a purely hypothetical ad hoc defense of the AGW theory for which he offers no empirical evidence or empirical data. The purely conjectural content of this text, combined with an utter lack of observational evidence from nature in confirmation of its speculations is all that is required to send this class this argument as exercise in hypothetical, speculative tweaking that assumes what it wants to appear to demonstrate. For true believers, nothing else is really necessary, and the moderators of Realclimate know their audience. Look at the language here.

The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data.

Some (currently unknown) process causes Antarctica and the surrounding ocean to warm. This process also causes CO2 to start rising, about 800 years later. Then CO2 further warms the whole planet, because of its heat-trapping properties. This leads to even further CO2 release. So CO2 during ice ages should be thought of as a "feedback", much like the feedback that results from putting a microphone too near to a loudspeaker.

In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway. From model estimates, CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases CH4 and N2O) causes about half of the full glacial-to-interglacial warming.

One major problem in all of this "what if" reconstruction of hypothetical climate dynamics: there is not as yet a shred of empirical evidence that CO2 drives, or could possibly drive, given its chemical nature and vanishingly tiny presence in the atmosphere, planetary warming cycles, in either the past or the present.

The climatists have not as yet even approached scientific confirmation of their fundamental premise upon which rests the entire edifice of AGW, which is that CO2 has anything to do with the generation and measurable intensification of global warming, and until that happens, the theory was, for all practical purposes, stillborn as a scientific hypothesis (and its Frankenstein-like life is not a matter of scientific evidence, and never has been).

As the present paleoclimatological data stands, we have a 650,000 ice core record that shows no case in which CO2 precedes planetary warming. That's what the empirical science tells us, thus far. What the actual evidence suggests is that as the earth warms, the oceans release CO2 and CO2 thereafter climbs in tandem with planatary warming. Does C)2 amplify the warming? Probably, but if modern warming is any indication, its to a virtually unmeasurable, trivial degree. There's no evidence, as of yet, of any other possibility involving CO2 as a driver of that warming, for which no empirical evidence exists. CO2 is a very minor greenhouse gas with distinct and severe logarithmic limits as to its ability to trap heat.

Some combination of solar activity, cosmic high energy particles reaching earth from deep space, and ocean currents drive global warming and cooling (as well as the earth's precession, and other contributing factors).

The other salient point is here:

In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway. From model estimates, CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases CH4 and N2O) causes about half of the full glacial-to-interglacial warming.

These people just refuse to do empirical science (and we have long understood why) preferring to run very sophisticated (and thoroughly discredited, for the purpose they're being used) computer programs on equally sophisticated supercomputers, at taxpayer expense, that they themselves have constructed precisely to generate the results they obtain. The entire edifice of AGW has been erected upon the assumption of CO2's power to drive climate warming, and the existence of "positive feedbacks" that empirical observation has not detected and which look increasingly to be a chimera.

AGW is an ideological immantization of the Christian eschaton, just as leftism qua leftism has been historically an immanantiztion of the Christian religion itself. Its purpose is to destroy capitalism, western living standards, and classical liberal political values. Its hijacking of science for that purpose has precedent in the historic past, from Comte to Marx to Adorno to Lysenko to Skinner.

[_Morley]

Droopy: So, what you're saying in the two previous posts is that we shouldn't trust either science or its practitioners (i.e., scientists). And that that applies to both the so-called hard sciences and the oft-termed behavioral sciences. Am I reading that correctly?

[_Droopy]

Droopy: So, what you're saying in the two previous posts is that we shouldn't trust either science or its practitioners (i.e., scientists). And that that applies to both the so-called hard sciences and the oft-termed behavioral sciences. Am I reading that correctly?

No, that's not what I'm saying if you mean "scientists qua scientists" for no other reason than that they are part of the class "scientists."

The question you need to ask yourself is, should most people have trusted the scientific consensus and popularity (around the world, not just in America) of eugenics among progressives in the 1930s?

Should Lysenko and his supporters have been trusted?

Should Comte be trusted today regarding his views of a properly organized and rational society?

What about Walden?

Marxism, let us not forget, was promulgated for generations as a scientific account of history and human motives.

[_Morley]

Droopy: So, what you're saying in the two previous posts is that we shouldn't trust either science or its practitioners (i.e., scientists). And that that applies to both the so-called hard sciences and the oft-termed behavioral sciences. Am I reading that correctly?

No, that's not what I'm saying if you mean "scientists qua scientists" for no other reason than that they are part of the class "scientists."

....

Then what are you saying?

[_EAllusion]

Yeah, that's a lot of High School diplomas I see there.

All of a sudden what it takes to not be pseudo-scientific is having degrees above the high school level? I'd like to point this argument to the Droopy above who is calling all manner of ideas forwarded by accomplished Ph.D's pseudoscience. Those two Droopy's can fight it out.

Oh, they don't agree with you?

No, that's you projecting your faults onto others. It's because they spend a lot of effort attempting to look scientific while spending most of their time misrepresenting research and generally misleading while not doing any significant, sound research themselves. That's what pseudo-scientific organizations do.

This is not an "anti-gay" organization

Yes it is. Concerned Women for America is a classic anti-gay group.

how is this different from a congentital bias, predisposition, or tendency?

Do you know what a biological predisposition is? I get the sense that you think there is some ghost floating in your body that merely takes suggestions from the brain and decides how to act.

Is homosexuality a bio/psycho/social phenomenon, or is it centered wholly in biology?

I've pointed this out to you before, but I had a professor who would automatically fail any students who wrote a paper with its thesis that some psychological trait was a byproduct of nature and nurture. Why? Because that's trite. All psychological traits are a byproduct of nature and nurture. Saying so is the antithesis of insightful. Sexual orientation is wholly in biology in the sense that biology is the substrate through which psychology expresses itself. But that substrate necessarily interacts with the environment in complex ways to produce cognition and behavior. This is the case for all psychological traits. But that's not what we are interested in. We are interested in how this interaction occurs to produce the orientation and how to explain the variance in sexual orientation. (What explains the fact that some people are gay and some people are not?). To explain the variance, you need to find the differences that explain the differences in the population. Heritability (i.e. genetics) explains a good amount, though not everything. Prenatal factors add another powerful layer of explanation. This fact and what this means for the fluidity of orientation was already explained upthread. You continue to tilt at windmills.

Conservapedia? I haven't been there in years, and I've never used it as a source for anything (not that there's anything wrong with it. I actually never read it at all.

You got those references not from reading the source material, but through a collection at an anti-gay website. That's obvious. Hey, maybe your source's source is conservapedia. You sure as heck aren't linking what your actual source is to those references (which is customary) because you are rightfully embarrassed by them.

Did it say what the quote said it said, Maestro, or did it not? It hardly matters to me at all, because I think Freudian psychodynamics is bosh, period.

What does Freudian psycho-dynamics have to do with that pamphlet? Nothing, as best I can tell. You're just making up stuff now while clearly having not read the source you linked or apparently having even an elementary grasp of what the APA is. (Humorously, you seem to think psychology is infatuated with Freud.) This is odd, since it is readily available online. The problem is that same pamphlet says other things that you disagree with. Since you quoted it as though we are supposed to take what it asserts on authority, I'm wondering if you'll be consistent there. Here's a hint: It has something to say about whether orientation is a "choice" that just possibly might undercut everything you're attempting to argue.

[_Buffalo]

Going around and around and around and around the sugar bowl, again and again and again and again, repeating the same mantras and assertions, does not increase the cogency of your position or the viability of the evidence presented as evidence.

At present, neuroscience can tell us nothing regarding the "cause" of homosexuality beyond theoretical conjectures extrapolated from ambiguous and inconclusive studies that suggest nothing beyond tendency, predisposition, and bias.

I can give you a similar laundry list of sources, from professional journals and competent researchers, poking holes in any claim of genetic "cause."

There's no point in doing so, in your case, at least, as you are not open to education or serious thinking on the matter (note: Oaks speech on SSA, which you craftily snuck into the mix as if it had been a scientific paper, agrees with my general position as expressed here and in other forums. Joseph Nicolosi is a distinguished clinical psychologist who has done pioneering work in reparative therapy, and is a founding member of NARTH. Nice bluff, Sir Bluffalot.

http://www.josephnicolosi.com/resume/

You have yet to even begin to address any of that evidence, let alone refute it. I'm happy to keep posting it until you do.

[_Droopy]

Going around and around and around and around the sugar bowl, again and again and again and again, repeating the same mantras and assertions, does not increase the cogency of your position or the viability of the evidence presented as evidence.

At present, neuroscience can tell us nothing regarding the "cause" of homosexuality beyond theoretical conjectures extrapolated from ambiguous and inconclusive studies that suggest nothing beyond tendency, predisposition, and bias.

I can give you a similar laundry list of sources, from professional journals and competent researchers, poking holes in any claim of genetic "cause."

There's no point in doing so, in your case, at least, as you are not open to education or serious thinking on the matter (note: Oaks speech on SSA, which you craftily snuck into the mix as if it had been a scientific paper, agrees with my general position as expressed here and in other forums. Joseph Nicolosi is a distinguished clinical psychologist who has done pioneering work in reparative therapy, and is a founding member of NARTH. Nice bluff, Sir Bluffalot.

http://www.josephnicolosi.com/resume/

You have yet to even begin to address any of that evidence, let alone refute it. I'm happy to keep posting it until you do.

I and others have refuted it years ago, over and over and over and over again. I would encourage you to visit the NARTH website for a large corpus of heavily referenced, scholarly discussion of the issues by psychologists, psychiatrists, and behavioral scientists with long experience in this area for an alternative view.