If there were a pill to make me straight, I would not take it

I'm all for eugenics, but I don't see sexuality or "race" as things in need of pruning. To tell the truth, I'd cut the whole tree down, dynamite the stump, and salt the earth where it grew. Lucky me, there are plenty of powerful people with the same objective, even if they don't say it out loud

 

Hail, @Chained

 

(Removed)

 

Please, people, let's leave Hitler and the Nazis out of this thread, even as a joke. No good ever comes of including this kind of imagery. Mods are watching this thread, and we don't want to see it slide downhill.

Thanks in advance!

 

Fine. Whatever we need to do.

 

I think @Oscar Leigh was meant to send this imagery through...

 

I second to u completely.

 

I'm not gay, but I'm asexual. I've been told I'm broken and that corrective rape is what's going to fix me. I know who I am, and that's fine. If someone gave me that pill to "fix me", I'd rather die than be something I am not.

 

Thank you. This deserves an Oscar. Well said.

 

Yeah, that's apparently a thing

 

That is my favorite part of writing SciFi/Fantasy: coming up with people who are better than we are.

Have I shared with you the misanthropic interpretation of Maslow's Hierarchy that changed my life after I found it?

 

A couple jurisdictions have flat-out banned "conversion therapy", which is encouraging.

 

It's ironic, considering that Maslow came up with the Hierarchy to show people how to become their best:

Humans care primarily about Physiological needs (the four Fs of biological survival: food, fight/flight, reproduction), then about Security needs (making the world predictable: laws, schedules, organization, structures), Social needs (friends, family, popularity), Esteem needs (being an important part of the world), and finally Self-Actualization needs (art, philosophy, individuation). When a lower Need is not met, any actions taken based on higher Needs are merely means to an end: making friends for Strength In Numbers in a hostile environment rather than for its own sake.

When I first learned the trick of characterizing non-humans by re-arranging their Hierarchies (Malmooth in my Doctor Who fanfic start with Social Needs, then Esteem, Physiology, Self-Actualization, and Security), I noticed that humanity's hierarchy was more tribalistic than some other possibilities: we fear death more than anything else (Physiological needs comes first), we gather in tightly regulated groups for strength in numbers (Security/Social needs), we care more about our own Group than about the world at large (Esteem), and we tend to see anything new – either in ourselves or in others – as a threat to the group cohesion that's keeping us alive (Self-Actualization).

We don't see people as individuals who are important to the world (Esteem, Self-Actualization), we see them as Members of Groups (Security, Social) who either exist as tools for our own lives (Physiology) or who do not. We fear death above all else, and the existence of anything not part of Our Group is seen as the first step to a death threat. Every great atrocity in human history has boiled down to one group saying "If we don't kill Them all, then They're going to kill us!" (retroactively proving "Them" correct in having said exactly the same thing).

I thought this was a good description of humanity at our worst, but I assumed that it was our extreme worst, not our common ill.

Then I read someone else who found the same trick I did, but who changed some of the terminology: "Physiological needs" was shortened to "Food," Esteem needs became Contribution, Self-Actualization became whichever Need was the final, Social needs became Relationships, and our specific Self-Actualization need was renamed "Specialness" (my Malmooth Hierarchy would now be Relationships-Contribution-Food-Specialness-Security).

He also took the tribalism further than I did, claiming that humanity was a fundamentally Lawful Evil species and that our afterlife according to the Dungeons and Dragons cosmology would be Acheron: one of the 3 "Lawful Evil" afterlives (primarily Lawful, secondarily Evil).

I thought this guy was taking it too far, but then I started thinking about the Stanford Prison experiment, Milgram obedience, Asch conformity, the Bystander effect, the Monkey Sphere... and have decided that he was right: humanity is not – as I'd thought – a basically True Neutral species with a few more Lawful Evil people than Chaotic Evil, but rather a basically Lawful Evil species that occasionally produces Chaotic and/or Good people.

 

OK, I'm curious.

(Crossposted.)

 

Good timing

 

Conversion theraly isn't really a straight pill, which is what makes it so stupid and twisted. It's mentally and sometimes physically abusing you until you pretend to be straight, often convincing the person they are cured via their brain wanting to believe it so they can be free of the pain. It's truly insane.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._jurisdictions_banning_conversion_therapy_for_minors

 

I wasn't trying to imply that it was, or that it worked, just telling Moose that it was finally getting addressed legally.

Although I've just remembered that the first I ever heard of it was in The Naked Lunch. Burroughs had the conversions going the other direction though.

Or was it Gravity's Rainbow?

Shoot...