Rebuttal: Would you like to live in one of those civilizations that did not accept homosexuality?
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I would be more curious to see how many of these civilizations failed once the concept was introduced to blame someone else for all of lifes ills.
Deflecting all blame in the society to another group, rather than finding the real causes and doing the hard work of dealing with those seems to be a repeating theme used by those who wield some power over others.
Sometimes it is successful for a very long time, and sometimes when people challenge the notion those who were blamed manage to become more mainstream, and often quickly join the blaming of the next scapegoat.
Think back to the history of the US.
Blacks were held down (still are in many areas) - and sometimes still experience the mantle of all of the ills of society.
They are being replaced with illegal immigrants (read brown people) being the reason things are bad.
Gays are always thrown into the mix, with breathless evil opined and attributed to them. Of course once people learn these people arenât all baby eating demons straight from hell, they start to see people are people not easy labels.
Look at the history of immigration, where it was the Italians, Chinese, Irish etc etc who came here seeking the American Dream, and were branded as the thing to blame for all of the bad happening by those who were told the newcomers were the reason for things getting worse for them. Of course things were getting bad because those with power to liked to assign blame were doing better by hiring the newcomers for less and would then give great speeches about why the newcomers were the reason they had to fire workers who were getting a better wage.
Every civilization that accepts putting the blame for all evils on a group fails, because it is used by those in power to keep the citizens anger deflected from the leaders where it should belong.
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This is a really good point. There are a few books on this, and about how different cultures (and our culture, in fact) have imagined sexuality different than just the gay/straight binary we tend to think about today (though of course, there are tons of shades of gray there that isnât always acknowledged - bisexuality and polyamorous⌠er, ness (how would I say that?)). Desiring Arabs by Joseph Massad is a good book about that topic and how western ideas about sexuality have changed sexual practices, as is Women with Mustaches and men with out Beards by Afsaneh Najmabadi (about Persia). Chauceyâs book Gay New York is excellent at showing how sexuality and sexual practices went from being gender based to object based in the 40s and 50s. And of course, Foucault, History of Sex.
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Ooh. I know this âŚ
Every homosexual who has accepted failure is civilised.
Every failure who has accepted civilisation is homosexual.
Every civilisation which has kowtowed to spellchecking is civilized.
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Even the civilizations which have failed didnât do so thanks to their stance on homosexuality. Here are a few well-documented reasons why some things just didnât work out.
ROME: The History Channel has a surprisingly good page on â8 Reasons Why Rome Fellâ. âAcceptance of Homosexualityâ just isnât on the list, and it really shouldnât be. Expansionism, political corruption, and heavy funding of an aggressive military were far more important factors.
GREECE: Ancient Greece had problems with both infighting between city-states and conquerors from neighboring countries. This short answer sums up what happened to end the Golden Era.
The war between Athens and Sparta destroyed many city-states because all of the city-states took a side. The war left Greece in ruins and open for attack. Then the Romans came and conquered most of the Mediterranean area.
ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN: Earlier cultures (Bronze Age) in the same area may have been wiped out by an extended - 300 year - drought. So it was the weather that may have killed off people unable to provide food, water, and shelter at that early development stage.
USSR: In modern times, the USSR fell and that also had nothing to do with acceptance of homosexuals. Under Stalin, homosexuality was illegal. The fall of the USSR was mainly an economic collapse. It was after the fall (under Yeltsin) that homosexuality became legal again.
So there are a few counter arguments to her claim if it was about ancient civilizations and only those that have fallen. Basically, history doesnât tell us that homosexuality has been a crippling factor to society - only homophobes say that.
I stand by @SpunkyTWS in wishing the Redditor good luck.
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Sorry I just mean that the influences of all those things may belong more to those great empires than the originators of such concepts.
Like say how Edison didnât invent the incandescent bulb, but his contribution to it may be the primary reason it became so widespread, so people often mistakenly credit him with inventing it. He didnât invent it, but his influence was greatest.
In that case, as in the case of the contributions of Greco-Roman times as listed, the influence of their adoption of pre-existing concepts is what now matters more than crediting the numerous contributions that converged to become, say, democracy, for example.
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âdemocracy = actually fairly widespread through various cultures, but the Greeks had enough influence that one of their words has become the word for it.â
Democracy in the sense of a constitutional electoral democracy was first developed in Athens. There were other participatory governments, though the thing we call âdemocracyâ is rooted in the Greek idea.
ârepresentative government = I thought you were talking about the Greeks and Romansâ
While Greek democracy wasnât representative of the whole of the populace, it was a form of representative governance. Fully representation governance has yet to be exist. The Tribune of the Plebs in the Roman Senate was another form of representative governance.
âaqueductsâ - there were other earlier forms of water transit, though Roman engineering was a massive leap over the comparatively primitive earlier forms.
âmulticulturalismâ - kind of depends what you mean. The Romans did have a society that was open to a plurality of languages, religions, and ethnicities, though the word âmulticulturalâ is vaguely defined.
âtheaterâ - if weâre talking about staged actors enacting dramas for the entertainment of an audience, then thatâs a thoroughly Greek invention, which once introduced spread rapidly to Rome, India, and beyond. Some scholars have pointed out that religious masked dramas were performed earlier, but these werenât for entertainment, but a kind of communion with the sacred.
âphilosophyâ - in the formal sense of the term the Greeks were first. While there were some vague cosmological ramblings in early religious texts, they werenât the analytic analysis that the Greeks first began. The separation of investigations of nature and reality outside religious cosmology into an intellectual analysis was very Greek.
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Polyamory
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Every civilization that has accepted heterosexuality has failed.
There. I said it.
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Did the Romans invent Public Relations?
Thank you!
That was Edward Bernays⌠nephew of Freud and father of public relations⌠purely American:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/bernprop.html
and:
I remember Adam Curtisâs documentary The Century of the Self, the first episode was about him. Well worth watching, like everything else by Adam Curtis.
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Agreed. The whole thing used to be up, but I think only that first episode is floating around. I should get a physical copy of that at some point.
Parmenidesâ main work was a poem about a revelation from a goddess. Analytical philosophy is a modern debasement, and imposing analytical standards on any tradition of ancient philosophy, or even trying to separate religious from purely philosophical ideas in any tradition of ancient philosophy is likely to lead to trouble.
Aristotle deserves credit for systematizing logic, and systematizing many other fields, in response to Plato.
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You are warping things dramatically to force an assembly (which was practiced in Greece before democracy) as constitutional democracy.
Sure, though you were denying that the Romans has a multicultural society, I was pointing out that they met some criteria of the nebulous term.
[quote=âMarjaE, post:36, topic:41820â]
Theater is likely to be as old as humankind. And Greek theater could be a religious ritual too.[/quote]
Greek theater in its early stage did have a religious element, but it was still the first thing that met the typical criteria of what we think of as âtheaterâ with new scripts being written, dedicated actors, direction, staging, and an audience attending for entertainment. That evolved out of earlier religious rites, but those predecessors werenât theater, properly speaking.
Sure. The pre-Socratics set the stage that philosophy evolved from, it was much more Parmenidesâ student Zeno who formalized things to the point of moving philosophical analysis into a formalized rational approach based on Parmenidesâ system that was expressed poetically. The Greeks began the formalized system rational inquiry into the nature of reality, reason, and the world that we think of as philosophy before other cultures got to it, much as with theater.
Yup 
Newcastle boy did it, just like the steam turbine and the windscreen wiper.
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tvchaos, if you want a good british TV tracker, now the Box is no longer with us.
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Hereâs another good one:
God didnât make Adam and SteveâŚhe made Adam and Eve.
Well according to the KJV of the story. His original plan was just Him and Adam.
Adam would stay at home and take care of the gardenâŚand tend to the pets,.
Adam wasnât allowed to wear clothes, and he was to obey his Masterâs word at all times. Eve was an afterthought and thing rapidly spiraled out of control when she showed up.
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