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Look, I see that it's a relevant article today. But I don't think it's saying much, and it has a weird homophobic/racist current running through it. For example

Look, I see that it's a relevant article today. But I don't think it's saying much, and it has a weird homophobic/racist current running through it. For example, Epstein mocks the idea that the US government exacerbated the AIDS crisis (which it clearly did.) He says slavery ended "more than a century" ago - slavery effectively continued several decades after the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. Now, I don't like the idea of tearing down a good article just because the author is an asshole. But in this case, I think the article isn't very good, and the author also happens to be an asshole: this is the same guy that was "revolted" by the idea of "fags" (both his words, though he later switched to using "homosexuals".) The same guy that criticized people writing candidly about death, the same guy who constantly thought he was being hunted by "men with strange appetites, men whose minds were twisted". And the same guy who, upon learning an acquaintance was gay, was "angry at being victimized by his duplicity." Oh, and the same guy who thought it was better for a gay man to commit suicide than act upon his unrealized gay desires. It'd be very interesting to read a good article on victimization from someone who isn't so horrible, though: it is an important topic, and there are many interesting things, which are frequently left unsaid, to be said about it.

dkural 9y ago
He lost me when he lumped every non-Jewish group in the Middle East as "200 million Arabs" and equated it with the Palestinians; and tried to justify the mistreatment of Palestinian children. The organization Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence), founded by veterans from the Israeli Defense Forces, have also corroborated these accounts - not just western academics, international observers, and journalists.
CydeWeys 9y ago
Forget all of that even, there's plenty of places where the opinion piece collapses under simple faulty logic. Here's one example: > Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed victims, whereas the Jews and the Chinese in America, though clearly minorities (and vastly less numerous than blacks or Hispanic people), are not usually counted as victims and thus rarely get included in affirmative action or other quota favoritism programs. A victim, then, is someone who insistently declares himself a victim. There have been times and places in the history of the world where the majority of the people in certain places were outright slaves, including in the United States and especially in the Caribbean. And yet are we to believe that these powerless, enslaved people weren't victims simply because slavery was such a vast institution that there were more people suffering under if than committing it?
- WalterBright 9y ago
  > including in the United States "In the Confederacy, the population was listed as 5.5 million free and 3.5 million enslaved." https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm
  - lsc 9y ago
    http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html It varied dramatically by state; according to that census, Mississippi and South Carolina were both majority slave. Certainly, the CSA was majority free, but I think that 'places'... 'including in the united states' is most correctly construed to mean that there were identifiable regions of the US that had more slaves than free people; I think states fit into the previous poster's use of "places"
    - CydeWeys 9y ago
      You are correct in interpreting the use of the word "places" in my comment to refer to areas/regions that were smaller than "the entire Confederacy". It's also worth pointing out that most slaves didn't venture rather than some small number of miles from where they were born, so what was happening 1,000 miles away two states over wasn't relevant to their life in the slightest. What was happening in their county was relevant. And outside of the cities in the South, where the plantations were, most counties were majority enslaved.
  - nl 9y ago
    This is true, but the numbers of people who owned slaves were vastly smaller. Using Census data to research his book, Glatthaar calculated that 4.9 percent of people in the slaveholding states owned slaves, that 19.9 percent of family units in those states owned slaves, and that 24.9 percent of households owned slaves. (Households are a broader category than families.) http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/aug/24/viral-image/viral-post-gets-it-wrong-extent-slavery-1860/ http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/aug/24/...
  - deleted 9y ago
averagewall 9y ago
It was more acceptable to be homophobic back then so you have to cut him a little slack. They wouldn't publish a new article like that today. There isn't some fundamental truth about good and bad things to write - it depends on how people judge you, which depends on the arbitrary changes in culture.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  > It was more acceptable to be homophobic back then so you have to cut him a little slack. No, I don't. This guy was not writing from an era where homosexuality was hidden and secret and accurate information was impossible to find. By '89, the gay rights movement was in full swing. Any intelligent adult who was still ignorant about what it meant to be gay chose to be ignorant.
- krrrh 9y ago
  The same author in a 2015 article I linked to elsewhere in this discussion: “In 1970, some 45 years ago, I wrote an essay in -Harper’s on the subject of homosexuality. The chief points of my essay were that no one had a true understanding of the origins of human homosexuality, that there was much false tolerance on the part of some people toward homosexuals; that for many reasons homosexuality could be a tough card to have drawn in life; and that given a choice, owing to the complications of homosexual life, most people would prefer their children to be heterosexual. Quotations from that essay today occupy the center of my Wikipedia entry. In every history of gay life in America the essay has a prominent place. When I write something controversial, this essay is brought up, usually by the same professional gay liberationists, to be used against me. That I am pleased the tolerance for homosexuality has widened in America and elsewhere, that in some respects my own aesthetic sensibility favors much homosexual artistic production (Cavafy, Proust, Auden), cuts neither ice nor slack. My only hope now is that, on my gravestone, the words Noted Homophobe aren’t carved.”

dkural 9y ago

He lost me when he lumped every non-Jewish group in the Middle East as "200 million Arabs" and equated it with the Palestinians; and tried to justify the mistreatment of Palestinian children. The organization Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence), founded by veterans from the Israeli Defense Forces, have also corroborated these accounts - not just western academics, international observers, and journalists.

CydeWeys 9y ago

Forget all of that even, there's plenty of places where the opinion piece collapses under simple faulty logic. Here's one example: > Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed victims, whereas the Jews and the Chinese in America, though clearly minorities (and vastly less numerous than blacks or Hispanic people), are not usually counted as victims and thus rarely get included in affirmative action or other quota favoritism programs. A victim, then, is someone who insistently declares himself a victim. There have been times and places in the history of the world where the majority of the people in certain places were outright slaves, including in the United States and especially in the Caribbean. And yet are we to believe that these powerless, enslaved people weren't victims simply because slavery was such a vast institution that there were more people suffering under if than committing it?

WalterBright 9y ago
> including in the United States "In the Confederacy, the population was listed as 5.5 million free and 3.5 million enslaved." https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm
- lsc 9y ago
  http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html It varied dramatically by state; according to that census, Mississippi and South Carolina were both majority slave. Certainly, the CSA was majority free, but I think that 'places'... 'including in the united states' is most correctly construed to mean that there were identifiable regions of the US that had more slaves than free people; I think states fit into the previous poster's use of "places"
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    You are correct in interpreting the use of the word "places" in my comment to refer to areas/regions that were smaller than "the entire Confederacy". It's also worth pointing out that most slaves didn't venture rather than some small number of miles from where they were born, so what was happening 1,000 miles away two states over wasn't relevant to their life in the slightest. What was happening in their county was relevant. And outside of the cities in the South, where the plantations were, most counties were majority enslaved.
- nl 9y ago
  This is true, but the numbers of people who owned slaves were vastly smaller. Using Census data to research his book, Glatthaar calculated that 4.9 percent of people in the slaveholding states owned slaves, that 19.9 percent of family units in those states owned slaves, and that 24.9 percent of households owned slaves. (Households are a broader category than families.) http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/aug/24/viral-image/viral-post-gets-it-wrong-extent-slavery-1860/ http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/aug/24/...
- deleted 9y ago

averagewall 9y ago

It was more acceptable to be homophobic back then so you have to cut him a little slack. They wouldn't publish a new article like that today. There isn't some fundamental truth about good and bad things to write - it depends on how people judge you, which depends on the arbitrary changes in culture.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
> It was more acceptable to be homophobic back then so you have to cut him a little slack. No, I don't. This guy was not writing from an era where homosexuality was hidden and secret and accurate information was impossible to find. By '89, the gay rights movement was in full swing. Any intelligent adult who was still ignorant about what it meant to be gay chose to be ignorant.
krrrh 9y ago
The same author in a 2015 article I linked to elsewhere in this discussion: “In 1970, some 45 years ago, I wrote an essay in -Harper’s on the subject of homosexuality. The chief points of my essay were that no one had a true understanding of the origins of human homosexuality, that there was much false tolerance on the part of some people toward homosexuals; that for many reasons homosexuality could be a tough card to have drawn in life; and that given a choice, owing to the complications of homosexual life, most people would prefer their children to be heterosexual. Quotations from that essay today occupy the center of my Wikipedia entry. In every history of gay life in America the essay has a prominent place. When I write something controversial, this essay is brought up, usually by the same professional gay liberationists, to be used against me. That I am pleased the tolerance for homosexuality has widened in America and elsewhere, that in some respects my own aesthetic sensibility favors much homosexual artistic production (Cavafy, Proust, Auden), cuts neither ice nor slack. My only hope now is that, on my gravestone, the words Noted Homophobe aren’t carved.”