So let me just try to clear the table a bit and assure you that I'm not too concerned about people marrying their dogs, daughters, or what have you. To the the extent I would draw a connection between gay marriage and our current tensions, it's more in the possibility space that was left in the wake of its victory. For a variety of reasons I find it to be extremely unlikely and just too plain viscerally disgusting for legalized pedophelia or beastiality to ever be digested by society at large. But whereas previously I would have reflexively scoffed at the suggestion, I've lately been reduced to a more meek-sounding "well, that just seems so unlikely" and that shift low-key disturbs me.
I'll accept that your trans friends are much happier now than they were before. The tension is if this has come at the expense of those not convinced of the efficacy of activist talking points applied broadly, those erroneously misdiagnosed at an early age, and social stability on the whole (deleterious as opposed to ruinous). There are always a small number of people that would have their lives radically improved if society rearranged towards their preferences. That still leaves everybody else. Prescribing puberty blockers (or any 'affirmation plan') to minors who show an inkling of gender dysphoria is quite unreasonable to me. Ditto for any reprimands or punishments meted out to people who misgender trans or NB people. Whatever merit the the current gender framework has, I would throw it all in the bin if those are baked-in unavoidable consequences of it. That's before we even get into scenarios like 'penised individuals' raping women in shelters, which - I am not really sure how to totally quantify as a loss on net. Feels like a pretty big loss of something to me! Like a reasonable expectation that nobody would allow such a scenario to be possible?
You say there's no path towards normalization of pedophilia or beastiality because there's a lack of basic impulse for it. While I agree on the general nature of man's sexual proclivites being at headwinds with such a development, I find it hard to reconcile this with the growing body of work that suggests people really can be influenced by their media (read: porn) consumptions, and the rabbit hole of extreme acts hardcore porn addicts find themselves watching, unable to cum to anything less. Clearly our minds are highly susceptible to suggestion, and we now live with a cornucopia of suggestions available at a whim. While I still don't think that's likely to breed a generation of 'pedos and furries' as some doomsayers get on about, I do think you can get some big swings on those margins, and that leaves the question of how we should regard them.
But even deeper than this - and the thing I'm struggling to communicate - is that the language games the Left has played on this terf has nuked a lot of patience, charity, and goodwill that can be generalized to anything else they say. If they are willing to demolish the classic and useful definitions of words like 'man' and 'woman', whilst replacing them with bloated concepts and jargon that are meaningless to the average person, then the sky is the limit. We can do the same thing with words like 'victim', or 'consent', or 'sexual desire', and I have noticed this is already in the water supply. If you want an extension of this principle, see the same dynamic play out with 'protest', 'riot', and 'insurrection'. I am worried that when my opponent says he wants 'peace' as I would understand it, and I reach out for a handshake, he may stab me because "Well, duh. Of course he meant 'peace at your expense' in his local parlance! You can't even say he lied!". When a trans activist or sympathetic ally makes me second-guess what it means to be a woman, it's natural to second-guess any other term they employ that's loaded with ambiguity you didn't realize was even possible a second ago.
It's been a slow trek here, and it's informed by personal experiences as well as the public/political sphere, but the last 15 years or so have gradually cemented for me that humans are a strange species, capable of a lot I had thought was unfathomable, at least in the west. There were a lot of metaphorical guardrails I had taken for granted that were totally banking on people being constrained by 'reasonable' but unspecified assumptions about the human condition. I think those boundaries have already been crossed several times in my mind, which then in turns leads me to believe those boundaries didn't actually exist outside of social conformity and enforcement. Rewind back to 2004 and I'm betting very low odds on people marrying pets by 2024. What odds would I have placed on gender transitioning for minors, had I even known that was going to end up on the table? Assurances that nobody's gonna fuck the dogs doesn't carry the same smackdown it used to.
DTulpa
8mo ago
You're correct that the specific predictions didn't pan out as stated in the 90s and 00s. To cut them a little slack, nobody really anticipated a hot debate about the definition of 'man' vs 'woman' or the 'gender spectrum' to enter the fray.
However, that the Left enabled that kind of blindsiding has shown me that they can't be trusted to not flip the board and mealmouth things that I find rather horrid, like puberty blockers. I have to say that my trust for the Left to stay within reasonable lines has done a complete 180 on this topic, and I wonder if the 'kink wing' of the party is just waiting for more favorable conditions to finally push through. And they could very well do so even if the vast majority of their compatriots don't like it. We have not slid to the specific point that moral conservativism predicted, but I don't want to be distracted from the fact that a slide did occur, even if indirectly.
My suspicion is you will ultimately be found correct. There won't be a mass normalization of beastiality and pedophilia. But that's predicated on my faith that surely people don't change that quickly, and I don't know how I justify that. So personally, I'm going to extend the deadline to 2040 and see where we stand after swimming in AI futa cocks for a decade or two.
DTulpa
8mo ago
I don't undertsand why the 'tiny minority' argument still gets play on here of all places.
The issue is not Lizardman's Constant. The issue is society needlessly and uncomfortably contorting itself to accommodate Lizardmen. I've said it elsewhere here, but trans activism has reached into my world on several fronts over the last decade, twisting up everything from hobby groups, to corporate politics, to the software I install prompting for pronouns. This is all possible even without even so much as sharing room air with trans person.
I may be a simpleton, but - there is something infuriating about the follow-up 'What consequences are you so worried about?'. And I'm really not sure in the specifics! Call it a hunch, but I think the officiated dissolution of the man/woman binary will manifest in a thousand indirect and different ways down to the level of how one socializes with other people. And the amount of confusion and irritation it produces will never abate. They're building a house without a ground floor, because they think floor boards are just ugh trivial.
So boom shoot is out, and you're ideally looking for something more current. So we'll skip the usual list of 96-08 'classics' I'm sure you're aware of to one degree or another.
Have you checked out the Metro series? I've yet to play the third entry, but I quite enjoyed my time with the Redux versions of the first two. They don't lean into the pure shooty aspect of games like Halo or Destiny quite as much, although they are still shooters first and foremost. There's a lot of quiet exploration, sneaking around, and even a few linear mini-tours through underground Moscow. I'd describe it as STALKER without the jank and sandbox elements, if you're interested in that kind of tone and atmosphere.
And I'm saying it's a futile game to play at this point - to 'produce evidence' that would be inevitably rejected by arbitrary standards that align with political convenience. I agree that evidence for fraud is lacking, and I'm also of the opinion that no quality or quantity of evidence would matter, either. I could no more produce evidence for election shenanigans than I could for whatever Hillary Clinton may have been up to after she Bleachbit her files, yet I find it perfectly reasonable to assume she's a crook because of the nature of her transgression, regardless if I can't find the evidence that was deliberately destroyed or withheld.
My issues with the election have more to do with last-minute changes to rules and procedures, specifically with regards to mail-in voting. But I recognize that because these changes were officially approved by local governments and are therefore 'legitimate', I have no standing to complain. I also know it has a plausible defense in COVID safetyism, so I really can't push against it without seeming like a callous asshole. But at the same time, said safetyism was also of their own making, and it increasingly looks like they had no idea what they were doing or its potential consequences while they forced their decisions through anyway. And while US political media has always been a circus, their conduct during Trump's presidency rose to the level of mentally poisoning the electorate IMO - to the point where I seriously question the legitimacy of democracy when in its inputs are perverted in such a fashion. I don't think it works (at least to my satisfaction) when the media engineers half the country into believing the president is a Nazi and Putin's puppet.
Some people seem to think all of that is just kind of a backdrop for the real meat and potatoes discussion of election legitimacy; like vote counts. To me, it is the primary thing. The background is the foreground. Whatever process is borne from it is tainted with it. Whatever procedural fuckery may or may not have happened in the aftermath, I can't really asses because I am reliant on institutions I can trust in order to parse them. They revealed themselves untrustworthy, and now all I can do is shrug in suspicion. And that's what it is: a suspicion, that I will probably have for all my life, but won't actually do much with. It's certainly not a high-ranking factor in my 2024 decision making.
I feel like people are trying suss out legitimacy with data tables, tabulations, rulers and metrics. Those aren't worthless, but I think what seals the deal is a magic trick: doing a good job and not deeply alienating your political opposition. In a world where Biden is addressing the border crisis, not mindlessly going along with LGBTQ politics, not selecting an idiot for VP, and speaking more like he did in 2008 than he does now, nobody is harping about his vote counts. People broadly would have moved on. Counterintuitively, the obsession with proving MAGA dummies wrong on this topic reveals how little else is on offer from that platform, and deepens the suspicion. "Any man who must say 'I am the king' is is no king at all" and all that.
I'm not sure if this is clarifying or frustrating to read. I'm self-aware enough to recognize that I sound like I'm intentionally closing myself off from evidence, but I don't think I am. It's just that nothing really turns on this, and I'm fine if it's never conclusively settled because I have plenty of other reasons to doubt Biden's 'legitimacy' any way.
I also accept that this dynamic was also true for Trump. For his antics and speech, he was deemed illegitimate by half the electorate despite winning fairly according to the rules.
DTulpa
9mo ago
There was a bit of cheating and wonkiness, but trust us - no more than usual.
It's not that I can't believe Trump lost fair and square. It's that I have no reason to trust that claim from people who regularly lied (or insinuated falsehoods) to me repeatedly in the run-up to his ousting. I can't expect then be honest about praising Nazis, I can't expect them to be honest about Russian collusion, I can't even expect them to be honest about feedish fish in Japan. But I'm supposed to buy the narrative that everything wasn't just above-board for the 2020 election, but even so much better than historical standards, no ifs or buts. That is until these conversations play out, and that S-ranked election integrity gets downgraded - but don't worry, not downgraded enough to suggest anything was questionable.
FWIW I think you're being super reasonable in your demands for evidence. And it's highly probable that that the general Right's refusal to concede this matter is a product of their pattern recognitions producing an error. Just because they were lied to about 10 other things doesn't mean media and political organs aren't telling the truth about lack of evidence for fraud and shenanigans. Unfortunately, when they all decided to sacrifice their integrity and honesty, they took my charity with it. I don't think this is a reactionary position, but an informed one.
Who cares any more, any way. As if anybody at this stage is going to change their mind based on the verdict of some tribunal or investigative body. The ship of legitimacy sunk well before all of this, and I can't believe anybody thinks it can be restored with some official paperwork. What awful stewards our leaders are, for putting us in this position
I don't think so. If Coil is anything like me, he's had some experience fighting the Christian Right in his heyday before The Turning. We have a rough familiarity with what the average US Christian tends to value and believe because we spent years sparring with it. As outsiders, our understanding may have been necessarily imperfect, and our arguments motivated. But we could detect the general shape of the thing, and it did not include 'love poor migrants', 'the kids are totally fine', and 'kiss black people's feet'.
That may be a generalization (it is), and I may not be a Christian (I'm not), but it's not impossible for me compare where Christian status and power stood in my youth versus today. I can't NOT notice how that ad panders to so many modern lefty sensibilities, meanwhile actual churchgoers I know are decidedly on the Right, regardless of what their religious leadership decrees towards the purpose of modernizing the faith. Is there any cultural bone they could have thrown to social conservatives (y'know, the foremost representative group in US Christianity), or would that have been too icky?
Like... don't show me an ad full of lefty tokens with every group that's been earning side-eye getting their feet smooched and pretend my criticism is some sort of gatekeeping. It's disrespectful to my old foe, and I just feel bad for them.
DTulpa
9mo ago
I'd love to see this falsified one way or the other.
IRL I've never met a male sports fan that is plussed by antiracism slogans and pink ribbons. Not nonexistent, but I would have assumed I'd come across one at some point. I'm not 'in the mix' as much as I was ten years ago, but they either had no comment on such things or were lightly mocking. Women could be effusive despite not really following the sport closeley.
Personally, I question if the "normies are surprisingly OK with all of this" is really true or a product of astroturfing. It's a popular sentiment online that I don't ever see materialize in the world, with the exception of 'normie women' who are more progressive at baseline than I ever see men being vis a vis conservatism. Like many other things, my sense is men have learned to keep their opinions to themselves.
I'd also be curious if any recent polling data would indicate a turn for or against pink ribbons. I could tolerate it as a minor cringe thing up to a point, but maybe I feel very different about it now after seeing what else the NFL picked up afterwards.
I can't believe I'm asking this years after the fact - but did Trump actually say "They are rapists"? Because in that sequence of words, it's obvious to me it's possessive 'their'. As in 'their drugs, their crime, their rapists'. But everybody up to a VP candidate in the debates just so conveniently interprets it as him calling Mexicans rapists or whatever. And now it's one of those things that "Everbody knows he said" like the fine people smear job, the koi fish smear, and 'Tim Apple'.
I hope you understand that this is one of the many reasons people who aren't already persuaded by this hackery place low value in your assessment of what constitutes moderate or far-right.
DTulpa
9mo ago
In addition, given how gay people (who I have effectively zero problems with) have been perpetually used as a wedge to justify the normalization and protection of the trans phenomenon, I would be terribly close-minded to not consider expelling them from course books if I thought it ultimately wasn't worth the tradeoff, at least under these conditions.
If Dems keep up the taunts of "So now what, you're gonna deny that gay people exist?", they may end up having a real Fucked-Around-Found-Out moment. There's a lot of things I might be tempted to sacrifice if they're going to be cynically propped up as shields against me.
I'm a Signal user, and definitely one of those people who are too mundane to be noticed most of the time. While I do use regular SMS for most convos, there are particularly spicy chats with trusted friends and family that I use Signal for because I don't trust the alternatives. Perhaps this is paranoid of me, but a few things triggered its adoption:
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A blast from my edgy teenage past (about 15 years old at the time of the incident) popped up out of the blue with potential professional consequences for not only me, but an old friend as well. I was shocked that a JPG uploaded to the middle of nowhere on a webzone stuck in early 00s design and infrastructure managed to turn up in a company's background check for him. I was lucky to get a response and takedown from the current owner after spamming his email for a week.
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There's this phenomenon where people caught in freak, chaotic situations who make a bad move have their text histories pored over. This is to be expected, I imagine. But... Did you express violent displeasure at the 2019 protestors to a confidant? Maybe use some colorful language? Were you so bold and colorful to suggest that maybe a certain kind of protestor should have the ambulances they're obstructing drive right through them? Hope you didn't write that down. If you end up in a situation where somebody gets hurt or killed, you're a premeditated murderer! Let's say that I would be fucked beyond measure if one of MY antisocial morning-before-coffee shitposts got dug up after a protestor died after attacking my dad, for instance.
And during these moments, I'm noticing that the open, mind-your-own-business, permissive tech culture of old has been largely inverted by men and women who sound like you. I don't trust that change, and I don't trust you or your fellow travelers to never take it too far. Sure, I'm too boring today - unless an aggrieved party forces my publicity. But I can certainly imagine an evolved, V2 future wokescold developing the interest once they've exhausted every other one of Al Capone's vaults in their quest to find racism and intolerance as an explanation for why the world sucks. When you can no longer find any mechanism for systemic racism in the processes or the data, but you don't yet have mindeaders, why not go for the next best thing like their lifelong chat history? And who wouldn't be tempted to ctrl-f the word 'nigger' to see what comes up in a paper trail of that size?
Part of the concern is that today's mundane can quickly become tomorrow's problematic. That transgressing popular orthodoxies is not as ruinous or catastrophic as it could be by historical standards doesn't assuage my fears, because I honestly don't know if and when such curiosity regarding wrongthink and badspeak will be sated. I think I need to cement here that I did not have 'privacy concerns' as a foremost thing in my mind until I felt like the culture and people I'm surrounded by got bizarrely tilted and bloodthirsty.
I recognize that my small, amateurish attempts to guard against this are probably futile and incomplete, and possibly laughable by your vantage. But the impulse to escape your sight lines will continue to be very real. Dangling a hypothetical pedo bunker over the scale doesn't move me. A world without privacy and encryption looks more like the Trump investigations stretching into infinite than a parade of young girls rescued from Joseph Fritzl. Even the latter would require real work and resources, so I expect more resume-padding and activity among DEI hires in the Department of Bad Texts than anything else.
If I have to submit to your preferred apparatus, it would only be in the 'nice until meanness is coordinated' sense. Secretly I'll keep hoping it's destroyed by implosion or external force.
I'll admit to not seeing it outside the occasional clip, so maybe you'd like to put an asterisk there! But it's not my cup of tea from the outset. I liked it at the time, but I'm over Rick & Morty zaniness and yelling and have been for a while. I've also become very picky about animation in general, and the 'popular default' look of the show kills my interest.
I think there was also a cartoon/live-action crossover with SNW? Ehh... It has this obsession with winking self-reference that undercuts the whole thing for me.
I think a lot of these attempts to course-correct after DIS and PIC are just doing the obvious "make it more positive and fun!" pivot, but still not understanding that the appeal is more than that? That's all well and good, but what I miss the most is the professionalism and maturity. This is one of my favorite scenes from TNG, because I think it encapsulates the thoughtfulness and quiet dignity that Trek embodies to me when at its best. Two fully grown adults have a legitimate disagreement, they talk through it diplomatically, when it's resolved you know they're both fully back on the same team, and it's over within 3 minutes instead of dragged out for the whole episode (or a season, god forbid). I try to think how a modern writer would play this out and all the excessive drama or sentimentality they'd load it with.
S'all opinions, but nearly all the new Trek stuff is awful to varying degrees. Strange New Worlds may the best of the bunch (not saying much) by virtue of not being a nihilistic, mean-spirited mess, but you get the impression the writers would rather be penning Buffy. I'm not dead set against a musical Trek episode, but when you have your Klingons mimicing KPop instead of Klingon Opera - without even the presence of Q to justify the absurdities - it's just a lollygag.
If you have any fondness for TNG, S3 of Picard is surprisingly decent, and probably the best sendoff for the cast under these current conditions. But even so, it feels more noteworthy as an impressive salvage operation given what came before. It's also bittersweet seeing the flame flickering on the candle again, knowing it's soon to be buried in turds as if to apologize for being decent for one single season.
Also, spoiler for the ending dilemma if you'd like a little thematic titillation: The youth of the Federation has been infiltrated and brainwashed by an alien enemy to destroy it from within. Space Boomers need to save the day.
Gotta say I found this pretty bold in today's age where media goes great lengths to kiss younger generations' asses, and I'm surprised I've barely even seen it discussed! There's no moment where the plucky young cadet winkingly upstages the Enterprise crew, thank fucking God.
Something about 'Ron's book ban'.
This morning I read an article about a Florida school district removing some dictionaries because they included definitions on the word 'gay'. Wether you think this is a sincere attempt to avoid litigation or an insincere stunt, I leave to the audience.
DTulpa
10mo ago
You landed on the angle that resonates most with me. By AshLael's layout, this could very well all be above board and I have to grudgingly accept it. But then I think it's also completely consistent with the kind of 'play' a three-letter agency would make to maximize impact while still maintaining plausible innocence. Make sure 'your guy' intentionally does some scripted rabble-rousing, but let him know there's a threshold he can't cross without burning himself, then wash him through the system with a symbolic punishment with no real consequences.
Yes, I am being conspiratorial. But I'm not wedded to the belief. I'm more curious as to why Ray was treated so sympathetically by media and politicians and spared the 'traitorous insurrectionist' narrative. Why was Ray - singled out from everybody else - allowed to be some dumb guy with a good conscience who's being picked on by Fox News? One of the things I watch for in real life is how long it takes a popular online/mainstream take to funnel down to a friend's mouth, and even some of them readily took this position (despite insisting they don't really follow politics much any more). Im supposed to believe this complete lack of moral judgment is because he didn't touch a gate?
There are things about this story that have all the hallmarks of intentional manufacturing (I care little if it's directed from the Illuminati or mundane uncoordinated political tribalism) - if not the facts themselves, then certainly how to the public is supposed to be viewing them. As long as that exists, I will assume Ray was fed-affiliated.
DTulpa
10mo ago
Fair, and I should have known better.
I never know what the etiquette is for editing out sections of prior posts. Obviously, I said what I said and I meant it. And even though I shouldn't have, deleting it afterwards feels like a cover-up.
I'll take it out since it's not like it was entwined with any brilliant insights.
It took decades for Left Inc to finally 'police its own' and issue denunciations when some of them unapologetically stated they had no issue with the externination of Jews - despite this strain of antisemitism being loud and obvious to anybody paying attention and who wasn't wrapped up in the coalition. And this just so happens to coincide with wealthy donors shutting their purses. Sure.
Ditto for the insistence that elite higher education was essentually unassailable, had no duty to accountability or obligation to explain itself to the plebs, and only caved when the extent of Ms Gay's fraudulence became too much to ignore - after bravely standing to her defense with a super-serious official Harvard letter and several weeks of articles accusing her critics of being anti-black.
Compared to the reflexive denunciation ritual every Republican or conservative has to partake in when somebody points to a Nazi and accusingly asks "DO YOU HAVE A COMMENT ON THIS?". Nope. You don't get to casually claim superiority on that front. Perhaps you are saddened that you see less of those denunciations 'over the last 8 years' than before, but it's obvious to me that this fruit doesn't have much juice left to squeeze, and that is entirely your fault.
EDIT: I don't know how I could have written that bit on Claudine Gay and completely whiff on the most odious part of her case: that her fraudulence went uninvestigated, unpunished, and was generally rewarded due to political interests in an institution that is supposed to value academic excellence (ha ha, I know, at least 'on paper'). Gay isnt a bad actor operating all on her own. She gets to her position with the aid of a corrupt system that will crow about their prestige and integrity every day of the year, right before they pivot to "actually, this is pretty normal, and uhh... we don't really need that kind of pedigree for something as boring and unserious as college president". And you consider her an 'extremist'? She's very normal to me, and my only surprise (which isn't, really) is that some Dems are belatedly unhappy with or embarrassed by a creature that is their own making.
Do you have a right-wing closet Nazi analogue you'd like me to condemn? Somebody who isn't a Substack writer, or a third-rate grifter on a platform thats probably throttled to hell and back if it hasn't been outright banned from the Play/Apple store?
I was in that trench, too. I don't share your view of that period. Plenty of Christians condemned WBC, and this was casually disregarded as inauthentic or meaningless because we perceived very little daylight between WBC's stance on homosexuality versus Christianity on the whole. "WBC is disgusting, but at least they're honest" was the kind of thing you'd read (or write yourself) in a lot of those spaces.
Worth remembering that WBC was paid attention to primarily for its protesting of soldiers' funerals - an act that I'm sure you can easily imagine pisses off people of with all sorts of different politics and faiths, including Christians who were against gay marriage! The image of some Jesus-loving Good Ol' Boy passively accepting Phelps and co picketing his dead son's funeral is a bit hard to swallow.
And since we're comparing notes on history - I don't know why anybody should go hunting for the unicorns of consensus-bucking trans spaces when a lot of us here have spent the last 10 years watching their political movement steamroll nearly every forum and platform we used to be part of, and got to see first-hand how these spaces got captured, converted, and degraded. I am not lacking examples of what I see as the default MO of trans and trans-supportive spaces. If somebody wants to show me a trans space that goes against a lot of the current progressive orthodoxies, I'll happily peek at it. But then we will be clear that the thing making their lives harder isn't right-wing bigotry, but a prog-aligned media that doesn't consider them worthy of attention. I think you have a good point that perhaps they are reluctant to criticize their messengers out of fear that it may result in wave of Red Traditionalism crashing over them after tampering with the barricades. But I think if you're already subscribing to that dynamic on anything, it's too late. You're practically a foot soldier, whether you're enthusiastic about it or not.
DTulpa
11mo ago
Broadband was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now. Pornographic content was not as extreme or 'hardcore' as it often can be today. There's also a portaling effect where any one of the major video platforms (in a whole sea of them) can keep serving you up not just the one video you sought, but a dozen others loaded up to go on the sidebar or right beneath the player. I don't know how frequent the "Finish, close 30 tabs" meme came up back then, but it's surely more common now? Don't even need to get into video streaming quality, or quality in general. Live shows were a joke, in retrospect.
I dunno, man. I remember what it was like downloading porn as a teenager in the late 90s and early 00s. A lot of grainy 30-second clips, a lot of slow download speeds, a lot of waiting for Kazaa to finish up (sometimes days). Give me this evening and I could probably hoard and/or access more porn than I ever could during my entire adolescence. Maybe it was a gradual phenomenon that sloped real hard with the advent of 'hub sites. But that's still good enough as a marker IMO.
DTulpa
11mo ago
Fair point, but it's worth noting that issue is under the larger umbrella of concern regarding mistreatment and misadvisement of children. Are more girls seeking treatments and surgeries than boys? That could be enough to justify the intensity of the spotlight. And critics of the medical and educational institutions are clearly against the whole program. It's not like 'indoctrination and mutilation of boys' is expempted from judgment and ire.
Outside of that - and excepting a can or worms like Audrey Hale - when's the last time there was any kind of national furor or argument over a trans man taking a 'real' man's spot? The only time I see trans men given any kind of attention lately is in regards to how tough being a man is, apparently. Whenever these debates come up, they're given a kind of perfunctory acknowledgement before people go back to arguing about what's truly on people's minds: an uninterrupted parade of MtF Dylan Mulvaneys.
I think there's obvious reasons why this is so, but I'm guessing we're all somewhat aware of the talking points.
It's been remarked on here before, but it seems nobody particularly cares about FtM trans people. They blend in easier and - more importantly - don't seem to threaten anybody either in physicality or status. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable sharing a dressing room with one, but I wouldn't be eyeing an immediate exit either. The 'disgust' phenomenon seems mostly localized to MtF.
I think Silverdawn's question is assy. But as somebody who is more anti than pro on most trans questions, I don't think increased exposure to trans people will resolve my problems with the movement. My feelings are less 'Enemy Mine' and more 'TNG: Chain of Command' in that people are trying to make me digest and parrot what I regard as an obvious untruth. No amount of positive experiences with trans people will change that I do not see them as their declared sex or gender, and whatever positive experiences I accrue could be suddenly outweighed by negative ones should my stance be revealed and unmoved.
DTulpa
11mo ago
I used to be a big Harris acolyte, so my read on him over multiple podcasts, interviews, and books was something like:
"Pound for pound, the Old Testament may have more content we'd find objectionable than that in the Quran. Despite that, there are wrinkles in Islam such as the Hadith that are difficult (if not impossible) to detangle from the religion - a necessary component for its defanging and modernization. WWJD and WWMD entail very different behaviors, and the horrific negative consequences of the latter make Islam inherently and uniquely more problematic to deal with than any other world religion. Even if the others were 'worse' by several other metrics, none pose the challenges that Islam does, both historical and modern."
He had a long-running dialogue with Maajid Nawaz over this specific issue, trying to find a path forward for Islam and modernity. A decent effort, but I got the impression he was never particularly hopeful about its prospects. Essentially, there are features of Islam that preclude it from ever becoming sufficiently progressive in the way Christianity did - at least on a timescale or with the population numbers he'd be comfortable with.
DTulpa
1yr ago
Those arguments were what, again? GG is a force for evil on the internet and we all have an obligation to 'do better'?
I'm not sure exposing this person's dirty laundry qualifies as an ad hominem. Anti-GG mouthpieces made a big deal out of their moral superiority to their reactive, basement-dwelling, chuddish foes. Tearing off their robes and exposing them as mere creatures - and all the weirdness that entails - was practically a public good. But then I would think that given the level of disdain for them I carry, so take that FWIW. And if they wanted to circle the wagons for Nyberg because 'ad hominem' - to be understood as spotlighting a warped moral zealot as a problematic fraud - then double dumbass on them too.
Inseparable from the issue of medical care for trans children is the entire 'gender ideology' that some worry threatens to permeate every aspect of public life in a way school shootings don't, by definition. Obesity probably inches closer to that, what with the fat acceptance movement and the glamorization of unhealthy celebrities. But it's hard for anybody to take the fat man seriously for complaining he's being charged two tickets for filling two seats on a flight. Gender affirming care and the ideological umbrella it operates under is one of the few things where criticising or doubting it from any angle, in any context, to any degree can risk severe professional and often personal disadvantage in a way other political or social topics don't despite their polarization. The only other subject matter I can think of that prompts this 'zero-tolerance' treatment is race. By contrast, I don't think my employer really cares that much about how I feel about climate change, even if it annoys them. I'm not risking a lawsuit if I think the science is 'fake and gay'.
Given that, I don't think it's too surprising that trans issues will get more fuel because it's something we've found will raise its head anywhere and everywhere in due course. I haven't been to a high school or been a teenager for decades. Meanwhile, 'gender crap' is something I have to endure on multiple fronts both public, personal, and professional. And it can be this way even if a trans person only physically enters my orbit once a year.
I really wish we could have these conversations without somebody dropping the "Have you considered that society changes?" chestnut as if this had never occured to their interlocutor. I don't believe in a moral arc of the universe, that this world owes me or anybody anything, or that I will be anything more than insignificant dust and long-forgotten memories long before our universe blinks out. The world is nakedly and unashamedly unfair, and good guys don't always win. I am fully aware of the consequences for participating or abstaining from the social games society expects people to play. I understand that my future position in this new world ranges between softly smiling while keeping my thoughts to myself or the Principal Skinner meme should this state of affairs be permanent. I know that it requires organization and coordination to fight against. Half of the problem with the 'woke resistance' is getting coordinated at all before they buckle under their own ridiculousness or get sabotaged by a hostile media!
Just assume I have thought about this, and that I realize my own predicament. I'm sure you can appreciate that your appeal means nothing to somebody who believes they have legitimate concerns with this forced, artificially imposed consensus while they have years left on this rock. It's certainly not going to stop them from sharing those thoughts on a pebble-sized forum dedicated to that very purpose.
I appreciate that formal and informal 'trans support' manifests through different mechanics and pathways vis a vis public and private actors, but your distinctions just illustrate to me the messy, tangled wholeness of the issue. That a company is just forced to comply with the 'bare minimum' of federal laws imposed by activists - or the increasing set of secondary yet nonetheless important rules alternatingly concocted by and imposed upon every major corporate and media entity that functionally comprise a second government - does not soothe my ire, but speaks to the totality of the whole problem. You recall what Father Merrin said.
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