LiberalRetvrn
they don't understand the things i say on twitter.
User ID: 1892
LiberalRetvrn
1d ago
We can go after the doctor Mengeles that pushed the practice on unsuspecting parents of vulnerable children
We can always just counter by pointing out how many of the same people opposing trans kids have also defended circumcision. Personally I think chopping off a baby's genitals with a meat cleaver is a little worse than letting them dress in opposite-sex clothes. An unwoke democratic party would be able to take the gloves off and make arguments like this without worrying about being called anti-semitic.
LiberalRetvrn
2d ago
The country was founded on religious freedom and separation of church and state. The founders were significantly less Christian than any powerful politicians after their time. Even a democrat nowadays couldn't get away with blaspheming the way Jefferson did. After "under God" was added to the pledge of allegiance and the currency, everyone has had to pay the Jesus tax.
LiberalRetvrn
2d ago
I think focusing on transgenderism was good for their electoral prospects in 2024. But if republicans make it their main culture war wedge issue in 2028, I think it could wear out its welcome. It's a safe-edgy position that everyone on the right can sort of get behind - it unites evangelicals, fundamentalist Jews, wignats, groypers, IDW debate bros, and even some feminists. But most people haven't met a trans person in real life, I think there is a limit to the amount of vitriol that can be stirred up. The constant drumbeat of trans bad will just sound like bullying the longer it goes on, especially when it takes the form of the same old misandry that young white males have been dealing with their whole lives. If the right doesn't embrace white identity, I think there's a good chance they won't be able to unite behind anything after Trump is gone.
LiberalRetvrn
2d ago
But if you were the left, why the hell would you declare an armistice
Because the 2028 election will probably be determined by which side acts less obnoxiously hysterical in the next 3 years. If the republicans spend that time shrieking about transgenderism and canceling people, the democrats have a good chance at recapturing the normie vote. The 2024 election proved to anyone paying attention that any flavor of smug wokeness is not good politics. So we can either have a continual orgy of vengeance in which each side takes power, alienates the normies and then loses in 4 years, or both sides can decide to actually try winning.
LiberalRetvrn
2d ago
That seems fair as long as it's actually tracked in a public database. It would also be a lot more palatable if the people being cancelled had previously supported cancel culture when it was happening to the other side.
LiberalRetvrn
2d ago
Didn't they already do that by getting that Home Depot cashier fired after the Trump shooting? How many pounds of flesh will it take before we're back to even and can start behaving in a civilized way?
LiberalRetvrn
2d ago
The right established a norm that every single politician must be a christian, even though many are clearly faking it. Up until the 2010s it was right-wingers demanding censorship of media. Illiberal leftist cancel culture is a recent development, puritanical cancel culture has been going on for thousands of years. Which doesn't mean illiberal leftist cancel culture was justified as "revenge" for puritanical cancel culture, they are both bad and often for the same reasons. I switched on a dime from complaining about conservatives to complaining about SJW feminazis in 2012. I expect the same from conservatives who supposedly believe in free speech. It's incredibly annoying when the side currently in power pretends that they have no power and refuses to even attempt to wield it responsibly.
LiberalRetvrn
2d ago
It's absolutely cancel culture, and the worst kind. Many of the people being cancelled didn't even "celebrate" his murder, they just said negative things about him. So they are being cancelled for failing to show sufficient reverence for a podcast host. I think it was fair to give the excuse about avenging leftist cancel culture for a few months after Trump was elected. But that time has long passed, and it's time for these people to either stand up for free speech or admit they don't believe in it. I say the same thing to feminists who continue justifying misandry because society used to be really sexist in the 70s.
LiberalRetvrn
3d ago
in the current year it is more memetically badass than shooting up a school
Crooks, Luigi and Robinson don't really fit the profile of school shooters very well. School shooters are usually extremely narcissistic, blame everyone around them for keeping them down, have a long history of lashing out and anti-social behavior, and either high IQ (Adam Lanza, James Holmes) or borderline rarted (Nikolas Cruz, Elliot Rodger). They usually aren't hooked in to meme culture since they despise their peers and think of themselves as outsiders. Crooks, Luigi and Robinson all seemed fairly normal and capable of getting along in society. Maybe they all have an extreme and rigid understanding of right and wrong, and are more susceptible to taking propaganda literally. But I suspect these assassin shooters are being drawn from a different pool and would never have been tempted to become spree killers.
LiberalRetvrn
6d ago
Is it really bad for malignant narcissists to target politicians rather than schools? At least politicians know what they're getting into. If school shootings were genuinely replaced with single assassination attempts on random political figures, I would see that as a big improvement.
LiberalRetvrn
6d ago
Not a leftist but I don't see this as a particularly big issue either. Obviously in a country with 300 million people and 300 million guns, things like this will happen. It's the price we pay for freedom, and Charlie said so himself. He was right. We can't do anything about extremists with guns any more than we can change the weather. I think the main takeaway from this is that polemicists should take much better precautions when speaking in public. But I'm really not seeing how this means the "country is over."
LiberalRetvrn
7d ago
On a more basic level, there is no such thing as "tradition" in general. Something that is non-traditional now might have been traditional 500 years ago, then non-traditional 1000 years ago, and then traditional 2000 years ago. If you want to retvrn to the traditions of 1000 years ago, but you think 2000 years ago we were just too barbaric and unenlightened, that makes you a progressive to some extent. That's why even though I am a retvrn advocate, I try to clarify that I want to retvrn to 1990s liberalism, not earlier and not later.
Well I certainly would never claim that "men can be women" or other such rhetorical nonsense. What I mean by "transgenderism" is the right of individuals to alter their sex characteristics with hormones, without government interference. Whether that makes someone a "real woman' is a meaningless question. Obviously it doesn't change one's chromosomal sex. But it does change things in superficial ways that do matter to some extent.
But it's not real. "Trans-Men" aren't men and "Trans-Women" aren't women.
Okay, I'll stipulate to this meaningless tautology. I don't know what it means or why it's important to you, but sure.
It's so very obviously a social contagion, a fashion, a delusion.
This is the only statement you've made that is testable and has real-world implications. but you've also not made an argument for it. I don't have strong evidence that transgenderism isn't a social contagion, but the burden of proof would be on you. To me, it is obvious that some people would be unhappy with the biological sex they ended up with at birth. Gender is an intrinsically important part of the human experience, and our bodies all have the potential to express different secondary sex characteristics to the ones that are activated during our development.
I think transgenderism is certainly a social development that has resulted from the technological development of hormones and surgeries, as well as the relaxation of puritanical values. It certainly can spread from one person to another in that people can learn that hormones exist, or that other people are going by different pronouns, and decide they want that for themselves. But to me that doesn't seem like it meets the definition of a social contagion.
If 5% of the population likes the idea of changing genders, and then the knowledge that changing genders is possible gradually diffuses through society, I would expect the growth rate of transgenderism to follow a logistic curve. At the beginning it could look like exponential growth, but not everyone can be infected with transgenderism, only those 5%. To me that is not a social contagion, that is a pre-existing demand being satisfied by a new product.
I've previously argued here that Christianity is a social contagion, and in my opinion it is the most infectious social contagion of all time. In a matter of a few hundred years, it went from an obscure middle eastern religion to a global phenomenon that has reached even remote uncontacted tribes in the amazon. And it's no surprise, given that Christianity has built-in mechanisms for perpetuating itself. Once someone is converted to Christianity, they attempt to convert everyone they interact with. Does transgenderism have a mechanism like that? In my opinion, no.
LiberalRetvrn
17d ago
Obviously people can't be protected from all harm. When I said that Christianity hurts people I meant more in the sense that viruses or natural disasters hut people. It's nobody's fault in particular that Christianity exists, it's a mental parasite whose purpose is to perpetuate itself. It's inevitable that such mental parasites will exist.
When I said that people shouldn't be allowed to hurt other people under liberalism, I meant in a literal sense. You shouldn't be able to use force to coerce other people, or restrict their freedom of speech or bodily autonomy.
Why your criteria and not mine?
Because I said so. At the end of the day morality is subjective, and it's about who has the most power to enforce their beliefs. I hope that liberalism can build up that power, and then use it benignly. Of course there is no objective reason why freedom, bodily autonomy, and free speech are correct.
LiberalRetvrn
17d ago
Classical liberalism is larval wokeness
Strongly disagree, classical liberalism and wokeness are opposites. Wokeness imposes a universal moral value system, it tells you how you must act and think. Liberalism is about freedom to act and think however you want as long as nobody else is being hurt by it.
by liberalism we mean something that doesn't exist anymore and has been supplanted by wokeness
Well I think it's fair to say that the illiberal side of the spectrum is winning. Currently the culture war in the west is dominated by two puritanical ideologies, wokeness and conservatism, competing with each other. But that doesn't mean liberalism doesn't exist anymore as a concept. We can always go back to it.
LiberalRetvrn
18d ago
People should conform to the wisdom of their elders
And what about all the elders saying to trust The Science on gender identity? I don't understand the idea of blindly accepting authority when you have so many different authorities saying different things. You have to decide which authority and which traditions to trust, so you're still forming your own opinions, just with extra steps.
Your sex, your age, your class- these all say what you're supposed to be doing
I could see an argument for this back when physical labor was critical. You could make an argument that females are more suited to domestic labor, and males more suited to hunting and fighting. But now domestic labor is done by dishwashers and vacuum cleaners and fighting is done by drones. Soon even intellectual labor will be automated. Trying to fill the traditional housewife and breadwinning husband roles will be a cartoonish larp, even more than it already is. Those roles existed for practical reasons, but the situation has changed.
LiberalRetvrn
18d ago
That would be blatantly biased if true. People are allowed to post zero effort anti-trans posts where they assume consensus. I've never heard anyone here make an actual argument against transgenderism.
What if you actually believe that the options are Christianity or Hell?
And that's why religion is so dangerous, you can justify anything with that. If I sincerely believed that I might burn in hell for eternity if I didn't do something, that would be a very strong motivation. A much stronger motivation than any human should ever have. That's what makes people strap on bomb vests.
Why should a kid believe that you really think pornography is bad
Well maybe they would be convinced if you had a rational argument for it. If people need external consequences to know that something is bad, maybe it's not actually a big deal.
LiberalRetvrn
18d ago
No that wasn't deliberate. Christianity is obviously less bad than Islam. Christianity converts people through relentless propagandizing, guilt-tripping, cultural subversion, and indoctrination from a young age, whereas Islam still converts people with physical violence.
LiberalRetvrn
18d ago
That's wokeness, not liberalism. Wokeness is highly illiberal.
LiberalRetvrn
19d ago
No, I'm working under the assumption that these two shootings by trans alumni of christian schools are significant. If that's not true, I'm not sure what the whole point of this thread is. I'm just pointing out that it fits perfectly with my worldview. I believe that transgenderism is probably biologically innate, so a person with transgenderism who is raised in an oppressive fundamentalist religious environment could end up harboring resentment toward the people who forced those values on them.
LiberalRetvrn
19d ago
There is no value neutrality
There may not be complete value neutrality, but telling kids you've figured out exactly how the world works and that they have to obey a specific list of rules otherwise they'll burn in hell is very far from neutral. Closer to neutral would be having conversations with them and telling them what you personally believe, but not forcing your values on them.
LiberalRetvrn
19d ago
Trolling? Are you implying that I don't sincerely believe this? I believe that raising kids under Christianity is harmful, just as raising them in radical Islam is harmful. In my liberal bubble this is not a controversial belief, at all.
LiberalRetvrn
19d ago
Christian children
Are they really "Christian children" just because they're going to a christian school? I doubt many of them were given a choice in which school they were sent to.
It seems like the disproportionate number of shooters at these schools should also raise some questions. To me it seems obvious that subjecting kids to religious values is a bad idea.
Whoever built the computers that are running the simulation we're in. The founders called him the "clock maker" but that's how I interpret it now.
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