Hmm. Yup, looks like I’m remembering changes to make it possible to authorise gay marriages, and laws passed around the same time against anti-gay hate. Pretty close but not exactly the same.

To clarify, I meant SE Asia as the region, and I was mentally comparing against Africa or the rest of Asia. It’s not the West, but Thailand and Singapore have legal gay marriage now.

Do I dare ask about which part?

Neat explanation. I’m going to add “energy is conserved” to this; we expect people to know that and make the connection to calories, but better safe than sorry.

Good for you! How long ago was that, and did you gain it back? That’s usually the really hard part.

Has any place in the world ever been actively “flooded” with migrants of a vastly different culture in recent history?

Any place that borders a very culturally different country that has a massive crisis. They usually get banned from working and shoved in refugee camps, though.

But anyway,

Why are humans like this?

Probably stuff that happened in prehistory, some quirk of evolution. It’s definitely not rational.

The really successful religions and eventually empires just happened to be homophobic, so anyone conservative globally is likely to be homophobic.

It’s actually a pretty LGBT friendly region anyway, it’s legal in most of Indonesia, even, but they border Malaysia where gay stuff gets hard prison time.

Edit: As in, SE Asia is a relatively gay-friendly region, for whatever reason. It’s not because social conservatism is out of style.

Indonesia itself is meh. Better than Malaysia, worse than Thailand. And the Muslim part will cane you for it, per the article.

Arabia hasn’t been closely involved for a long time. Actually, I don’t know if it ever was or the someone like the Mughals were an intermediary, off the top of my head. It’s far away from the Middle East.

Religious conservatives gonna religious conservative. If you go back to ancient history sometimes they were fine with homosexuality, or even expected some amount, but that died out along the way. Because of the European empires, but only because they were more successful, so I wouldn’t blame Europe either.

Maybe it’s like the smoky tomatoes you can buy in cans?

I mean, that is what you’d expect if were hormone-based.

Tribalism is ancient for sure. As is cultural bigotry. Hating people primarily do to skin colour and related features is a thing that specifically developed 1500-1700, as the trans-Atlantic slave trade got going (and needed to be rationalised).

When the Romans or Mesopotamians hated on their neighbors, it was over food preferences, language and customs. If they ascribed anything biological to it, the prevailing theory was more about response to the local climate than heredity. Then, once monotheism got going deviation from religious orthodoxy became the most popular way to hate. It’s not a coincidence that “Slav” and “slave” sound similar, because pagan Slavic people were a major source of slave labour in medieval Europe. It drove the crusades, and it had a role in the early stages of expansion into the new world.

The first slave ship came to English North America in 1619, but the passengers were treated as normal indentures, and at least some became free later on. They kept coming, though, and by 1700 or so black people had to be slaves and that was pretty much it. (Colonial Spain had their own, somewhat divergent system a bit earlier)

The Romans had emperors drawn from Africa and the Middle East, and had conflict with Germanic and Celtic people that could easily have been Latin by appearance. The first sub-Saharan African in Japan was made a Samurai, and now there’s a videogame about it. That’s not to say the difference in appearance wasn’t noticed or remarked upon (they tried to wash the dark off of Yasuke, and Heterodotus makes special note of the woolly hair and stature of the distant Africans) but in every pre-modern story I can think of it was gotten over quickly compared to other, behavioral things.

Anyway, I guess the point is just that there’s been steps backwards as well. There would have to be, otherwise ignorance would have gone extinct over the millennia, right? Maybe it still will; we live in a totally transformed world now, but it’s going to require continuous effort. Hate is always shifting and changing and evolving from things that might even have started off as harmless or positive (Jesus is less controversial than later Christians).

What do you mean? Almost everyone wants more, and will gladly take it if they have an opportunity. That’s why lotteries exist, right?

Big history is full of open questions, but there’s counterexamples. Short-lived republics are a dime a dozen, while Egypt lasted for thousands of years. There are known cases where inequality actually increases with the end of an empire, like how Roman Britain with it’s public bathhouses directly gives way to dark ages Britain with feudal lords and manors. In some cases, a disenfranchised group getting a bit of power is destabilising.

Ah yes, pretending intransigence isn’t happening to stop different intransigence. Definitely a sustainable strategy, and definitely not part of why Hamas doesn’t trust US negotiators in the first place. /s

The short term plans have been shit like this. The long term “plan” has been slogans and platitudes. Repeat for decades and unsurprisingly it escalates to genocide. This has been the shame of the West in my lifetime.

Community, status and not being economically punished are way bigger motivators than being abstractly correct, right? Nobody really goes looking for inconvenient truths. Unless those naturally nice, understanding conservatives start meeting a lot of very different people, like if they move, the worldview will probably stay put.

To be a little more doomer than you, I’d actually say there’s lots of people that go the other way as well, and go looking for a cult to join as an outlet for whatever nastiness is inside of them. Consider that in the grand scheme of things, monotheism and racism are both new.

Yeah, that was another red flag. Margins of error on any kind of calculation like this are going to be big; “roughly half” would be a strong claim. Coming out with an exact percentage about a social sciences issue is crackpot territory.

He’s makes his money as a popular writer, and actual historians say he’s a hack.

Interesting! Thank you.

Wow, Jared Diamond and a tabloid.

This seems no more or less likely than before.

They do exist in places where it’s just the default politics. One has to suspect that if they seriously learned and thought about things, they’d move left.

Do you prefer visual porn, or written erotica/smutty novels?

I don’t ask this both because of the obvious privateness, and because I don’t want to put anyone on the spot if their choice doesn’t align with what’s typical for their gender identity, but I do wonder.