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?

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?

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.

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.

Because of the Safe Third Country agreement, it would be complicated at the very least.

I doubt the government would even be interested right now, when the whole nation hangs in the balance and it’s just one dude.

Wow, Jared Diamond and a tabloid.

This seems no more or less likely than before.

This was before that - Avodah Zarah is the one I actually read through.

Like, you can’t leave a barrel of mashed grapes too long, because it’s then assumed a pagan broke in, danced on it and left, turning it into pagan wine which is the same as doing idolatry yourself, somehow. And it goes on.

There’s other examples as well, of course. Puritans got worked up about Catholic-seeming practices within the Church of England, although I don’t remember which ones, off the top of my head.

That seems likely, zealots love a good dividing line. I’m reminded of all the weird obsessing in the Mishnah about wine because the non-Jews of the period used it in sacrifices.