KingOfTheBailey
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User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
Is there a youth backlash brewing against LGBT?
I came up out of the subway the other day, and nearly my entire field of view was filled by a massive glowing screen full of flapping pride flags, wall-to-wall and six feet tall. It was a project by some charity or other claiming that "hate crimes" (or victimization, or incidents, or whatever they measure) jump by 60% during pride month. I've been so burned out by the sight of that flag everywhere that the only reaction I can muster is "maybe stop being so obnoxious about it then?" From the POSIWID perspective, one could consider the purpose of pride month to be to spike hostility against LGBT people, so why do it?
A long tweet from sci-fi author Devon Eriksen claims that pride month is downstream of the "toaster fucker" problem, in reference to an ancient greentext. Condensed: the internet brings together people with bizarre niche interests (what he calls "toaster fuckers" — he claims it's meant to be a general term but he's clearly writing about the LGBT theater of the CW). A supportive online community stops these people from leaving the toaster in the kitchen and adjusting to the normal world around them, and instead these online groups metastasize, eventually spilling over into the wider world: intra-group status competitions start with "who can fuck the most toasters", lead to "'toaster-fucker pride' bumper stickers" and then "bragging about how they sneak into other people's kitchens and fuck their toasters, too" and "swapping tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking."
I think I agree with some of that description but not all of it, and may write it up in another thread if I get time, but it's not so important for this post. I need it as context for the bit that I think is more accurate: the normies getting fed up with all the toaster-fucking, the backlash, and the response (lightly edited to concatenate multiple small tweets, but no words changed):
Pretty soon normal people, who ten years before would shrugged and said "that's weird", are now sick of toaster-fucker flags everywhere and their kids being told to fuck toasters by sickos, and now they're going to burn every toaster-fucker flag they see, and Florida just passed a law requiring you to be 21 years old with proof of ID to buy a toaster. And Utah has banned toasters altogether and the Mormons have stopped even eating toast, bagels, waffles, or any other heated bread product.
But it doesn't stop there, either. Because a few toaster-fuckers get beaten with fence posts by people sick of hearing about toaster-fucking, and other people, who didn't see or hear the toaster-fuckers' prior behavior, say "holy shit, toaster fuckers really are oppressed". And they decide to become "toaster-fucker allies", despite the fact that they haven't the slightest real interest in fucking any toasters themselves.
I think this explains the split in normie opinion pretty well: red states have had more than enough and that's led into the various legal battles that Devon alludes to, school choice advocacy, campaigns to replace progressive school boards, etc. I don't think I've seen "beaten with fenceposts"-level backlash (I figure it would pop up here if it was an issue), but even the memory of such events in the semi-recent past could explain normie "I want to be a good person so I'll call myself an ally"-ism. Compare the number of "racist hate crime" hoaxes over the past few years, to the point where "the demand for racism exceeds its supply" has become a dark joke among cynical online commentators. I don't think I've seen LGBT activists fabricate incidents (certainly none as badly as Jussie Smollett did), but it seems useful for a group to have opposition to keep its supporters energized ("our work is not yet done!") and I could definitely see obnoxious pride month displays as accidentally serving this function.
Onto youth. A recent tweet by a newish Twitter account, America_2100, claims a drop in support for LGBT over the past few years (2022–2023: US-wide: -7 points; Republicans: -15 points, to a 10-year low of 41%; Democrats: -6 points; "young people": -8 points). In particular, they claim Gen Z's support for gay marriage dropped by 11 points between 2021 and 2023, which is double the time span of the other stats but could indicate an ongoing decline in support. Unfortunately the tweet doesn't source the surveys it refers to beyond saying that it came from PRRI and I don't have hard data beyond a couple of anecdotes. Lime, a scooter rental company, made a pride-flag crosswalk in Washington a 'walk-the-scooter' zone after several teenagers were arrested for leaving skid marks on it. I saw a recent comment on a gaming subreddit (sorry, I can't find it), in response to yet another pride-month-themed mod, saying something like "don't be discouraged! 50% upvotes for a pride mod is pretty good these days". But when I interact with university students, the discourse is still very pro-LGBT: they talking about being excited for pride events, etc.
So, questions for the floor:
- Do you see a "vibe shift" around attitudes towards LGBT, and if so, is it generational?
- Have you seen any discussion on the progressive side around changing strategy?
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
The theory is that undesirables don't enjoy listening to it, so it's a cheap way to "move them on" without having security or police actually have to interact with them and risk a confrontation.
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
It might be stronger in recent years, where pushing "the message" became much more of a thing in entertainment, but the anti-mutant Senator Kelly was created in 1980 and appeared in the 1990s X-Men animated series. (Because you've listed X-Men alongside BvS, Marvel, etc., I'm guessing you're thinking more of the 2000s Fox movies, or possibly the recent X-Men '97.)
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
Why is Cap on the side of the libertarians? Because you'd expect Cap to be on the "trust the government" side so we have to invert that to make it more "interesting". It's just expectation subversion, Rian-style, with no thought about whether it's consistent for the characters.
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
Can you link the speech?
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
Can you do "leverage" as well? It also now seems to mean "use a thing and it's super duper serious".
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
Great post. I think many LWers and HPMOR readers were probably so starved for a single decent teacher in their entire schooling that they latched onto themselves as Harry and yearned for someone with Quirrel's attitude to BS.
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
That's the one.
I read the remarks about
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
It took a couple of read-throughs of HPMOR for me to get that a) Harry was not being held up by EY as a role model, and b) the main moral of the story is that (spoilers all)
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
Is everyone on this board handsome?
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
Yes. Hence my interest in hardening a community when new projects struggle to attract any contributors at all, and it's hard to be choosy or exclude the people who are going to wreck it.
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
What is the best way to harden a free software community against the sort of drama which recently engulfed the Nix community? Preemptive bans seem like a recipe for getting called an x-phobe, but letting these people stay and build up numbers results in takeovers. Has anyone seen a free software project's community successfully resist the tactics of the woke left?
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
I remember online chatter about the possibility of a new R President being the Worst Thing Ever being near-constant, all the way back to Bush Jr.'s second round.
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
How does a project stop these people from getting a toehold and leveraging that into a takeover?
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
I've heard this called a "preference cascade", and I think I first heard it on the Timur Kuran episode of The Portal podcast.
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
Does anyone here know is going on with NixOS? There seems to be a new round of explosions and fresh community drama of some kind.
KingOfTheBailey
7mo ago
Once you realize that most people lack intellectual standards or believe in the principles they claim each week, you can go looking for the people who actually do.
KingOfTheBailey
7mo ago
Don't listen to the feminists. You are not a monster for being attracted to women, It is okay for men to like women, it's okay to court women you're interested in, sex is not something men take from women but rather something men and women can share. Don't have such a stick up your ass about proper behavior. Instead, enjoy flirting with the cute girl at the supermarket, or at college, or...
Maybe then I wouldn't have missed the signals. Maybe then I wouldn't have been too scared to say something. Maybe then I wouldn't have waited for an imagined thing with the girl back home who wasn't that interested. Maybe then I wouldn't be the last one left as all my friends paired off and started families.
KingOfTheBailey
7mo ago
There's a lot more "tokens" involved in modern cards, wtf? Do most people use post-it notes?
One of the reasons I don't like the modern game, but anyway. Most people will buy one of those little Chessex boxes of like 24 D6s, then put them on the cards to represent whatever the "obvious" token is, or even use them just on the table as "number of 1/1 White Human Soldier Tokens in play".
KingOfTheBailey
7mo ago
Have you considered the Alaskan wilderness?
Obviously it's not the most appealing place, but as @George_E_Hale says, you shouldn't just be thinking about yourself.
Choosing where your children grow up is a big influence on their development, so it's worth considering all options.
Kids are resilient, and if they make it to adulthood, the hardship will make them infinitely attractive and set them up for a good life.
KingOfTheBailey
8mo ago
The Time Magazine Piece about the coordination after the 2020 election makes me think this is false, and that there is a lot of coordination.
KingOfTheBailey
8mo ago
Fantastic post.
DRM is "Digital Restrictions Management": it grants no extra rights, and manages restrictions by which consumers may use the software or content.
It would be great if you could expand on CRT, as expanding the initialism doesn't say what it actually means.
KingOfTheBailey
8mo ago
Clearpill is a reference to https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-clear-pill-part-1-of-5-the-four-stroke-regime/ but damned if I'm reading a five-parter of Yarvin's to remember what it actually means.
Purple pill is also important, I think.
Funny, I just asked a similar thing. I think there is a vibe shift in progress but I hadn't considered the Twitter angle. I think you're right, it's important. There seems to be three main factors: it's (maybe) a Too Big To Fail platform, so a lot of people stayed on there due to network effects, Community Notes make it easy for dissenters to counter The Narrative right where normies can see it, and even pre-Elon there was a subculture of poasters who enjoyed messing with the establishment. So I can totally buy that it was highly effective for Elon to take and that it might have started a preference cascade, and I suspect that's why there's much news trying to make him look bad.
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