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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28721 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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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?

From the POSIWID perspective, one could consider the purpose of pride month to be to spike hostility against LGBT people, so why do it?

They aren't trying to spike hostility, they are trying to make their opponents feel ruled. Spiking hostility is meant to show them how impotent and powerless they are.

Devon's tweets are terrible. Even for a conclusion his audience already believes, the arguments appear to just be made up. And unfortunately he's very talented at making things up, as the popularity of his book shows. Take this lovely tweet:

"Fascism is when boring normie dullards make it illegal to be weird, then kill all the bright, creative, and interesting people out of knee-jerk tribalism and fear."

That is bad! It's not fascism, though. Fascism was not normie. It was very weird. It attracted some of the best artists and intellectuals. You write sentences like this when your motivation is "I want to OWN my twitter enemies", and not "I want to understand fascism, the political ideology".

The same thing applies to this thread. There just nothing there beneath a series of insults. Reading it literally, the toaster-fucker problem's blamed on the internet. So the internet existing is a necessary condition for today's LGBT weirdness, because it's necessary for social status games to cycle into irrationality. But irrational social fads are not at all new, and the LGBT thing is less intense and insane than some past ones, such as disputes between or within religious sects over abstruse religious doctrine. Even the LGBT movement was as weird in the past, with many activists also pushing to remove the age of consent. And since excessive competition over status signals has always been a human tendency, does this theory actually explain anything? There are clearly patterns to 'wokeness' - historically oppressed minority sexualities, minority races, etc - and this theory doesn't tell us why the bureaucratic caste would become obsessed with those instead of another of the ten thousand niche internet communities.

And in the toaster-fucking group, the axis of prestige aligns with fucking toasters. So first they compete to see who can fuck the most toasters. Then, when that is saturated, they one up each other by being most open with the general public about their toaster fucking ways.

Sure, this has happened in the online gay community, like it has in the online fishing community and online retro video game community. This is part of why the online gay community is so weird. We wanted to explain why the 'bureaucratic caste' is so pro-gay, though.

Then they move on to bragging about how they sneak into other people's kitchens and fuck their toasters, too, and swap tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking.

This is a well written snipe, but if we unpack the analogy it's not really true, we're ignoring the differences between different "they"s. The person from the previous quote, say a gay dude who competes to get the most likes on photos of him tied up while getting fucked by two other guys, is not actually 'swapping tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking'. He's referencing trans kids there, but trans evangelism to trans kids happens because of (probably false) beliefs like - trans kids are being repressed by society - introducing them to the idea will help them be their true selves and prevent suicide - etc. This memeplex, and the fact that it perpetuates itself, isn't explained by 'toaster-fucking'.

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.

This is clearly implying a general anti-gay backlash, but as other comments point out this isn't happening! The minor decreases in LGBT-support for gen z are within the margins of error.

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.

... And then the premise here isn't true, so the conclusion isn't either. There's no huge anti-gay backlash, hate crimes are decreasing, and yet allyship goes way up! If the number of people who are strongly anti-gay is much smaller than it was before the internet existed, it doesn't make sense to attribute causation to "toaster-fucking" for this. There are real explanations here, ones that depend on the particulars of LGBT ideas and "oppression", but this isn't it.

This is what "go outside and touch grass" really means. It doesn't mean that plants magically cure insanity, it means go encounter randomly selected people who have nothing to do with you other than geographic proximity. The purpose of this is to remember what normal people are like, and what normalcy is.

And then, atop this collapsing foundation, the solution: "be normal". But we can trivially observe this doesn't work - the whole phenomena to be explained is that many people, otherwise normal people, are strangely enthused about being LGBT allies, and this happened despite being in contact with many other normal people. Or does he mean that it's the "toaster-fuckers" who need to be normal - that they need to stop posting about their sex lives online, and then a few years later suburban moms will stop putting up LGBT flags? Really?

The whole thing doesn't work. The picture it's painting is a disconnected series of vibes.

Have you contemplated the idea he is speaking to normies in normie speak because normies have been conditioned to reflexively bristle when hearing 'fascism' ?

the person from the previous quote, say a gay dude who competes to get the most likes on photos of him tied up while getting fucked by two other guys, is not actually 'swapping tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking'.

Yeah, sure, some of that's true. However..

Remember San Francisco gay choir scandal?

Or does he mean that it's the "toaster-fuckers" who need to be normal - that they need to stop posting about their sex lives online, and then a few years later suburban moms will stop putting up LGBT flags? Really?

Sex interest based online communites .. are kinda getting a little out of control. There are certain things that probably shouldn't be promoted because they're not good for individuals or society. I mean, how do you feel about 'stupid sluts club' ? Cool ? Maybe, if you're not into monogamy. What about a place that sexualizes smoking? Or drug use..

Have you contemplated the idea he is speaking to normies in normie speak because normies have been conditioned to reflexively bristle when hearing 'fascism' ?

... I guess but this fully collapses all moral distinctions about 'lying' or 'being factually correct' into a friend/enemy binary, which one could do, but I prefer higher standards than that? And anyway the people who RT his tweets so that I see them are definitely not normies, they are smart enough to know better. Same for this place. Like you do have a point, but Devon's tweet was posted here, we're smarter than this, it's not like it's a republican tv ad

Gay Men's Choir That Sang 'We're Coming for Your Children'

This was a joke. They were explicitly and intentionally mocking the concept of conservatives saying that. It is simply unreasonable to attribute that to genuine desire to brainwash your children. I and many others here have said worse on the site we copied the code for this one from or in private.

Sex interest based online communites .. are kinda getting a little out of control. There are certain things that probably shouldn't be promoted because they're not good for individuals or society. I mean, how do you feel about 'stupid sluts club' ? Cool ? Maybe, if you're not into monogamy. What about a place that sexualizes smoking? Or drug use..

No I think it's reasonable to find cnc vacuum bed hypno piss play concerning. But the point of the post was to explain the general obsession with being a pride moth LGBT ally. That's just a different thing, it has different causes, they can't be explained with a gesture at some other somewhat related bad thing.

This was a joke. They were explicitly and intentionally mocking the concept of conservatives saying that.

I remember all the “conservatives pounce” headlines from the Gray Lady and her friends making this argument, but I’ve never bought it. Consider a world where, say, the chair of the Texas RNC or whatever puts out a pro-Trump campaign video where they say “When we win the election, we’ll go stage a little putsch, / Suspend your sad democracy and voting rights and such”. You know, to make fun of liberals’ overblown fears of a Trumpian self-coup. Do you really think that progressives like the San Franciscan choir and their defenders would accept this as just a wee bit of humor poking fun at their neuroses, rather than a serious Threat to Our Democracy?

EDIT: I realize that I forgot to clearly make my point: if you’re in a position to do things that other people think are bad, and you state “hey, we’re gonna do those things that you think are bad”, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people take you seriously. And those people would be right to wonder whether you’re just joking or going “haha, only serious”.

EDIT: I realize that I forgot to clearly make my point: if you’re in a position to do things that other people think are bad, and you state “hey, we’re gonna do those things that you think are bad”, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people take you seriously. And those people would be right to wonder whether you’re just joking or going “haha, only serious”.

You'd have a point if the chair of the texas DNC put out this video. But it's a choir. It's a bunch of random people singing. The Texas Lutheran Choir singing a song about how kids should go to christian schools isn't a threat to democracy either.

Isn't this just a classic Poe's Law case? To me, for example, the original choir line reads as clearly self-aware, but things like Trump's comment about suspending the constitution does not... but it's also quite possible that Trump's comment was self-aware, but the choir line was not. It's an internet communication problem endemic to the medium. Unfortunately, there's not a good solution, because "humor" can encompass many things, and sometimes people find the same statement humorous in different ways, and sometimes it's not even humor to start with!

Issues like this have led to my dad forgoing sarcasm altogether, though he loved it; and also, in theory, this forum doing the same, though sadly we can't help it too much if Twitter leaks in as "evidence".

This was a joke. They were explicitly and intentionally mocking the concept of conservatives saying that.

Yeah, a joke. A joke's supposed to be funny. We're also not supposed to be reminded by the many, many prominent gay men who have said they had sex as children and that it was just fine.

genuine desire to brainwash your children

Ok, granted, maybe specifically SF gay men's choir had no desire to brainwash their children. But seeing as children are stupid and impressionable, what then are we to think of 'sex education' aimed at preteens ? For example.

No I think it's reasonable to find cnc vacuum bed hypno piss play concerning.

That's pretty esoteric. What about more .. mundane stuff that's not the greatest, seeing the medical problems.

One of the weirder things out there I found while looking into body positivity-I was incredulous- is that there's is a seemingly huge website that rewards pretty women for being fat and showing it off or getting even fatter. You see, fat women who want to be body-positive also somehow resent there are men who like especially that.

Site doesn't even allow full nudity, nevertheless, by the comments it's pretty clear people are getting off on that. That's.. pretty messed up. And it seems to benefit from network effects to a huge degree.

A joke's supposed to be funny

Okay to be more clear I have made jokes like that and worse hundreds of times, as far as offensive jokes go it's one of the mainstays. Homosexuals reproduce by... I can understand not having that taste in humor, but it's simply a joke.

But seeing as children are stupid and impressionable, what then are we to think of 'sex education' aimed at preteens

Retread of past discussions, but, like, have you used the internet and interacted with teenagers? They watch a lot of porn. A few years ago I was organizing some video game thing and we banned several minors because they just kept posting porn, and screenshots of them dming each other weird porn. I do not think sex ed is a notable place where kids learn about weird sex stuff, I think they basically all learn it on the internet and from their friends. This may be bad, but it doesn't have much to do with sex ed, which in turn isn't directly connected to the original thesis about LGBT online communities and toaster intercourse

One of the weirder things out there I found while looking into body positivity-I was incredulous- is that there's is a seemingly huge website that rewards pretty women for being fat and showing it off or getting even fatter

Yeah, feeders, it's terrifying. There's a lot of ridiculous things. People who cut their penises off as a fetish, nullos. Self-harm fetishes. Anal prolapse!

I recently listened to podcast of Jordan Peterson with Eric Kaufmann and Kaufmann explained the phenomenon of woke as coming in waves. With first being in the 60ies in old Days of Rage where the left radicals first pushed this stuff and actually managed to carve out huge cultural concessions especially for blacks in form of Black Studies departments and such. Then there were eighties where people thought it was all behind them, it was age of Regan and neoliberalism and winning the Cold War - but at the tail end of 80ies and 90ies came the second woke wave in academia with intersectionality and and queer stuff. It also subsided a bit after 9/11 and Bush era of War on Terror only for woke to reemerge in 2010s.

I think he is right, saying that the woke is subsiding to me feels like previous times of pause. Kaufmann is especially skeptical as the millennials and zoomers are strongly in favor of woke ideas in various researches - especially women. If there will be some pushback next few years we may expect 4th wave maybe in the 2030s where the phenomenon may be rekindled with some new additions.

It does seem incredible but either the search is broken, totally broken, but no one has posted a review of Christopher Rufo's book "America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything" which pretty much explains woke as a result of a carefully planned campaign by a few prominent neo-marxist thinkers to shape the nation's memes by altering language so favorable politics result and the glorious revolution and liberation from oppression can be achieved. Namely Herbert Marcuse and Paolo Freire. If you've never heard about either, that's pretty curious. Freire's book 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' is a classic in the field of American educational studies, that is, teacher training.. And has been, for the last 50 years. 100k hits on Google Scholar, e.g.. For comparison, Foucault's famous scribblings have 100k too..

You might think the title is a bit hyperbolic. It's really not. But aren't you at least a little curious why a book written by a Brazilian Marxist, later neo-marxist, concerned with how to use education to promote conditions for the Revolution is a mainstay of US teacher training? It's pretty odd, you know, US having been an ostensibly anti-communist country.

Anyway, here's Kaufman's review of it (1st part is .

Key paragraphs:

Rufo’s account begins with Marcuse, who, despairing of the Western working class, turned to the energy of Third World Socialism, Black Panther radicalism, and the 1968 student revolts for inspiration. Instead of the orthodox “dictatorship of the proletariat,” Marcuse dreamt of a “dictatorship of the intellectuals” who could join hands with “outcasts and outsiders” to make a revolution. In effect, he invited Marx’s lumpenproletariat into history. His One-Dimensional Man (1964) became a bible of the counterculture, and while his Frankfurt School colleague Theodor Adorno reacted against the anti-intellectualism of young protestors, Marcuse embraced them as a harbinger of the new utopia.

Dubbed the “ideological leader of the New Left” by Weather Underground terrorist Bernadine Dohrn, Marcuse rubbed shoulders with their leadership and that of Black Panther radicals like H. Rap Brown. The rioting and vandalism in America’s inner cities in the late 1960s blighted neighborhoods and sent crime soaring, hindering black progress. Together, the Weathermen and black militants conducted some 4,330 bombings, resulting in 43 deaths. The Weather leadership gushed that it would have to kill 25 million people to achieve its aims. The organization styled itself the “white revolutionaries inside the oppressor nation” and their manifesto, Prairie Fire, spoke of the United States as founded on white supremacy and “white-skin privilege.”

Marcuse envisioned the university as the “first revolutionary institution,” the nerve centre from which the revolution would spread. As if on cue, many comrades settled into cozy academic sinecures. Dohrn landed at Northwestern, Bill Ayers, who bombed the Pentagon and the Capitol, wound up at Columbia, and Angela Davis, who participated in a courtroom siege that left the judge and three others dead, was handed a position at UCLA. Davis, a Black Panther, successfully recast herself as a latter-day runaway slave resisting a system of white supremacy.

Rufo convincingly draws a line between violent Panther radicalism and the Black Lives Matter movement. For instance, Panther leader Stokely Carmichael coined the concept of “institutional racism.” The Panthers’ Ten-Point program called for affirmative action, the release of “all Black and oppressed people” from jail, and the teaching of its revisionist racial ideology in schools. The Black Lives Matter movement of the 2010s merely reiterated these slogans, seeking to abolish the police and prisons while demanding “culturally relevant education.” BLM leader Patricia Cullors, meanwhile, studied with the Weather Underground’s Eric Mann and lauded the influence of Davis and the Panthers.

Still reading the book, I've been very online so aware of the woke and even the abortive laughable revolutionary attempts in early 1970s - but I had no idea there was a direct line, same phrases used, same concepts, even personal continuity.

Sure, I love my boy James Lindsay including his extensive deep dive into Paulo Freire - with Pedagogy of Oppressed being the 3rd most cited work in humanities. Kaufmann himself gives a lot of praise to Lindsay and he by no means denies these influences.

But that is not the whole story, Kaufmann argues that it is moderates and "bleeding-heart liberals" who enable free reign of these ideas. The way he put it is that after defeat of economic socialism at least in its most radical form of planned economy, liberals still do not understand where the borders on social issues are. This is what enables woke to rampage through our society. It is a little bit depressing but also encouraging - most people do not actively believe these revolutionary thoughts such as Critical Race Theory or Queer Theory - they just want to be and sound as if they are kind and moral. On one hand they can be easily duped into various extremes, but on the other hand it means that potential pushback may not be as tough as many people think.

I fully agree. It's the consequence of our being not anxious enough. Prosperity has insulated us from the consequences of bad decisions,we can afford to be sloppy and sentimental.

they just want to be and sound kind and moral. Which is precisely what the critical theory deconstructors are using. If you redefine $your radical demand as compassion, just being nice etc..

As the mad prophet said: "Never get so racist that your forget that white leftists are the worst people in the world."

I'm trying to imagine what pushback looks like. Perhaps it starts with language reform. Those pushing forward call it "gender affirming care". Perhaps those pushing back need to insist on calling it "gender bending care".

Race and crime get easier to discuss if you expand your vocabulary through anthropomorphism.

  • Black criminals are foxes
  • Working blacks are chickens
  • White criminals are wolves
  • Working whites are sheep

Now we have encoded the real-world racial segregation of crime into the language of parable: foxes eat chickens, while wolves eat lambs or sheep. Racial discourse, pitting black against white, implicitly says that one team is team fox+chicken, while the other team is team wolf+sheep. But most of us see sheep and chickens as a team that must work together against foxes and work together against wolves.

With this framing, abolishing prison and defunding the police is a movement of sheep working to let the foxes into the chicken coop. Notice that this language punches hard. It is nearly as strong as "transwomen are women".

But I'm still stuck on imagining what pushback looks like. I'm not seeing catchy reframings coming from the right, and I don't know why. The right was traditionally on the side of law-and-order. But that depends on what the law actually says. If a persons experience of the law is with red-light cameras with wonky timings being used to raise revenue, they will find "law and order" slogans repulsive. What about saying that the teams are chicken allied with sheep, not chicken allied with foxes? That emphasizes real harms. Maybe it leads to a crack down on red-light cameras rather than a focus on foxes? That would be good; a small amount of progress but in the right direction.

Maybe my fox-chicken-wolf-sheep language doesn't work. I spend the words on it to make my comment concrete. Abstractly, I'm noticing that the left are the masters of word magic, and the right seems bewitched by it, and unable to cast spells of their own. But why? What is going on?

Thanks, I've been meaning to check out the research he and Lindsay(?) did, because it's so anthropologically fascinating.
Like the question of who first used "folx" and Y/X-ing words generally, where did "abolish the family" come from? Who came up with all the awful rhetorical tactics to paralyze victims like a spider's venom?

I said in another convo that there's still a lot of value in discussion here. Its an Area 51 bunker where we can carefully dissect this stuff while flying saucers obliterate cities outside.
Who knows, maybe someone will make a virus for Will Smith to upload to the mothership or something. But at least it would be more interesting than another round of "it's not happening and it's good."

Abolish the family is a 19th century concept. Loyalty to family above state and class, all that. Complicates the revolution.

Rhetorical tactics are mostly new. A big chunk of it is due to:

In 1977, a group of black lesbian activists working together as the Combahee River Collective followed Davis’s lead and published the landmark Combahee River Collective Statement, which gave birth to the term “identity politics” and operationalized Davis’s unified theory of oppressio

And why was Davis who bought guns for the criminals who used them attack a trial walking free, writing?

Davis and her attorneys had beguiled the all-white jury, persuading them that the Marin courthouse revolt was a “slave insurrection” and that Angela was a “symbol of resistance.”56 They turned the tables, identifying the state as the victimizer and Davis as the victim. During thirteen hours of jury deliberation, the facts of the case seemed to melt away and the political narrative took hold.

Then her ideas were elaborated into a system by that 'lesbian collective'.

But this cage of oppression also contained the key. The program of revolution could begin with an excavation of personal complexes, pathologies, and traumas, which can be transformed into emotional weapons, using the status of the oppressed as a means of establishing credibility and a method of organizing resistance. “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics,” they wrote, coining the phrase that would devour American politics for the next half century. “We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity.” The Combahee River Collective’s goals were unoriginal: they proposed the old tripartite solution of anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-patriarchy. But their means were revolutionary. The activists eschewed the masculine inclinations toward violence, system-building, physical power, and the seizure of the means of production, and created a uniquely feminine program that marshalled identity, emotion, trauma, and psychological manipulation in service of their political objectives. The Combahee Statement recast left-wing politics as an identity-based, therapeutic pursuit. The language of the document is strikingly modern: the reconceptualization of the activist organization as “an emotional support group”; sentences that legitimize themselves with “as Black women” or “as Black feminists”; gratuitous capitalization of identity markers such as Black and Lesbian; embarrassing neologisms such as “herstory” instead of “history”; emotional references to “pain,” “joy,” and “sisterhood”; venomous hostility toward white women in particular.7 Despite its shortcomings,8 the Combahee Statement is a triumphant document: a declaration of independence from “white male rule,” using a vocabulary and a method of argumentation that would become commonplace in every corner of American society.9

Do you see a "vibe shift" around attitudes towards LGBT, and if so, is it generational?

A few days ago I read a Reductress article (now apparently memory holed) mocking a man who had identified as a straight man, followed by a gay woman, followed by something else. I was pretty surprised to see a women's magazine (albeit a satirical one) be willing to mock a member of the rainbow flag crowd, given how on board young women usually are. It definitely felt like evidence of a vibe shift to me.

Of course, the fact that the article ended up being removed anyway suggests that either management or outraged readers decided it needed to be taken down, so I guess these things take time.

Was it this one?

Yes! Bizarrely I searched for it using the TRANS tag but only one article came up. It may have just been a bug in the website.

My read of that article is not that it's poking fun at trans men for being posers, but describing a phenomenon wherein trans men "push the boat out". Rather than going to bed as Liam, then waking up and demanding to be addressed as Lilith (as many trans women have been known to do), some trans men will ease into their identity by first coming out as a lesbian, then coming out as a trans man. It's a phenomenon I've personally witnessed at least once, and I could imagine a trans man sharing this article like "omg too real haha!"

Yeah, I'd second that read. The Reductress framing is a little obnoxious in the gossip magazine summary of things (that Lady Gaga aside?!), but it's pretty common, and I could name three or four people who've taken variants of it each direction.

I don't think I've seen LGBT activists fabricate incidents

"Fabricate" is the wrong word, but the Obama administration passed a law against anti-LGBT hate crimes which was widely referred to as the Matthew Shepard Act. Matthew Shepard was a drug dealer who was murdered by a couple of rival dealers, and there is zero evidence that homophobia played any role in his death (he'd had sex with one of the men who murdered him).

I don't have a good source for this offhand, but I'd heard that the deal is, the rival dealers' defense lawyer convinced them to argue that the attack was a homophobic hate crime because he thought it would get them a lesser sentence than a drug deal gone wrong. Not sure if that was a good idea then, but apparently the story got legs and next thing you know, it's the Standard Accepted Truth.

Both the standard and Jimenez's counterstandard histories seem... more than a little fuzzy, if you start digging into them.

((The trial court blocked the 'gay panic' defense before it was presented; a lot of the assumptions of anti-gay animus derive from it being presented at all, as well as some pretty pathetic sequences from Aaron McKinney during questioning.))

McKinney claimed years after the trial that he did not know Shepard, and was just looking to rob someone, and that the gay panic defense was partly something he came up with and partly his defense attorney, but at best that's the jailhouse word of a self-admitted meth-raging liar. Most of the claims that Shepard and either attacker had previously had sex come from 'Doc' O'Connor, the operator of a 'limo' service (coughcough: with a lot of sex work ties), but Jimenez's actual quote is that "Matt may have been one of the guys in back with Aaron... I can't say for sure", where the same man previously claimed to have only met Shepard once only days before the attack (and longer after the supposed car hookup), and if you start digging into other media coverage for O'Connor he alternates between knowing nothing and having been deeply involved in the personal lives of not just Shepard but also McKinney and his wife, and many of the stories are contradictory.

There's pretty strong evidence (if second-hand) that Shepard used drugs, including pretty hard drugs like meth, and some evidence that he was at least in a few degrees of contact with people who moved the drug through Colorado, but it's not clear where he fell on the lines for selling or reselling. A lot of people game-of-telephone Jimenez's account into certainty that Shepard was moving ten thousands of dollars in meth (cfe Reason here), but the actual claim in the book is a little different.

"I was therefore surprised when he [Aaron McKinney] confided that his “real plan” on the night of the crime had been something altogether different. He claimed that a roofing co-worker had tipped him off about “another dealer” in town who had six ounces of methamphetamine, worth more than ten thousand dollars on the street. Aaron said he had planned to steal all the meth, believing it would not only solve his money problems but also provide him with an ample personal supply of the drug. It was only when he couldn’t pull that robbery off that he decided to rob Matthew “instead.”"

The implication is that Shepard actually had or could get access to that much meth, but Jimenez never really ties it down further than one of McKinney's methhead friends boasting on the matter, and said friend, while never naming who that "another dealer" was, later points to a married man, ie not Shepard. Instead there's just insinuations about some regularly scheduled run from Denver, where someone would move ten thousand bucks of meth and be paid a few hundred dollars in meth, and it could have been Shepard. The quotes claiming genuine knowledge of Shepard selling anything, rather than mere belief, instead point to stuff that could be courier, small-scale resale, or even (heavy) personal use, not of knowing or long-term control.

On the flip side, investigators didn't test either attacker for recent drug use, so the alternative story of a meth-rage is pretty hard to prove or disprove, either. The official story conveniently places McKinney's last binge just long enough ago to remove even withdrawal as a motivator, and it seems to be based on little more than whatever an investigator could pull out of their ass. And there was little contemporaneous attention paid to how deep shit McKinney seemed to be in with his own suppliers, or even investigation of those suppliers. Jimenez points regularly to the possibility of either intentional ignorance or even outright assistance by police in the drug trade, and there's enough gaps in the official investigation that it doesn't look wrong, either, and that's knowing the extent that vice tends to be compartmentalized. Shepard seems to have gotten set on a bit of a pedestal, post-mortem, and while part of that's trying to avoid blaming-the-victim, part of it does seem focused around presenting a nearly perfect innocent for the story.

My gutcheck points more to something messier in the mix.

A lot named people in Jimenez's book claim McKinney was at least gay4pay, and that's a lot of other quotes that point to him as also self-closeted or genuinely doing it out of addiction. And there's pretty strong evidence that McKinney and co were looking for cash or drugs in anyway or form, not least of all that they did steal Shepard's wallet. McKinney was almost certainly desperate enough to fuck or fight someone for a hit, probably expected people at the particular bars he scoped out to be more likely have cash or drugs, and might (if we're trusting O'Connor) have suspected Shepard to have some cash or drugs, and targeted him specifically because of that, though in turn we have little reason to believe he had good reason to believe Shepard had drug-dealer amounts of cash.

But someone who's gay4pay isn't exactly immune for homophobia, especially if they genuinely were doing it for the cash (or drugs) or self-closeted, including violent homophobia -- especially at the time, there were a lot of hangups over what 'really' makes someone queer, many esoteric even within the gay world. But even were a methhead to turn a plan for a seduction or a 'simple' robbery or into a fatal beating because the methhead didn't bottom, it's hard to separate that from a methhead being a methhead who might have gotten set off for any of a thousand other things.

But that is just me pulling it from my gut.

(he'd had sex with one of the men who murdered him).

What a world we live in.

Isn't this normal? Violence in relationships is certainly not just a gay thing.

Sometimes I find it darkly amusing to contrast the idealised conception of gay men in Western popular culture (sassy, impossibly stylish and fashion-conscious, bitchy but essentially decent and kind-hearted) and the reality that gay men can be just as violent, unscrupulous and remorseless as anyone else.

Of course, I was just reacting to the comical juxtaposition of what seems to have actually happened and the attempt to paint the whole event as some sort watershed revelation of levels of homophobia in western society.

Out-and-out homophobia/sexually-motivated violence tends to not get too much coverage in specific incidents since it's perpetrated by certain cultures that are otherwise lionized by progressive actions. 'There were 50 Trans murders this year' looks shocking and something to be addressed, whilst '95% of those were ladyboy prostitutes running afoul of pimps and gay-panic Johns' is something that'll keep individual incidents off the headlines

Aren't Trans- of both kinds- murdered at lower rates than the general population, nevermind the severely mentally ill streetwalker whose underclass clients think themselves the victim of false advertising population(which is statistically what most of these murders are- and having been around underclass males, they a) are willing to frequent prostitutes and b) would react with violence to the revelation of a prostitute they'd picked up having male parts).

Aren't Trans- of both kinds- murdered at lower rates than the general population

In the west, trans people are murdered at a lower rate than cis males.

In 2022 from a population of 1.6 million trans people in the US, there were 41 murders, broken down into 37 trans women and 4 trans men - 2.56 murders/100k of population.

In 2022 (the last year for which data on the victims' sex are known), there were 12,747 male murder victims in the US, from a population of 166.6 million. If we assume that that figure includes the 37 murders in the paragraph above, that comes down to 12,710. That works out at 7.63 murders/100k of population.

Anyone who tells you there's an epidemic of violence against trans people in the US is misinformed or lying.

What about compared to cis women?

3,653 female murder victims in 2022, from a population of 168 million. If we assume that figure includes the four trans men mentioned in comment above, there were 3,649 cis female murder victims in 2022, working out at 2.17 murders/100k of population.

To summarize:

  • An American cis man is just under three times more likely to be murdered than an American trans person.
  • An American trans person is about 20% more likely to be murdered than an American cis woman.
  • An American trans woman (5.39 murders/100k) is nearly nine times more likely to be murdered than an American trans man (0.61 murders/100k).*

Or in the form of ranking in descending order of risk of murder:

  1. Cis man (7.63/100k)
  2. Trans woman (5.39/100k)
  3. Cis woman (2.17/100k)
  4. Trans man (0.61/100k)

I have little reason to doubt that the hysterical caterwauling about how trans people of colour** are more likely to be murdered than white trans people is empirically true. I assume that in the trans community, murder rates by race/ethnicity follow the same trends as in the general population, for much the same reasons.

*The report from the Williams Institute says that "Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming." - annoying that they can't just list sex somewhere to make my job easier. I assumed that the GNC people were fifty-fifty male and female (which is obviously an assumption on my part) and calculated the murder rates accordingly, under the assumption that the population of "trans women" includes all males who identify as trans or GNC. Thus, 37 murders from a population of 686,100 adult trans/GNC males = 5.39/100k.

**Excluding Asians, as these activists tend to do

Haven't checked recently, but I've seen different figures - either similar, or less.

I suspect reports that it's substantially less than the average are underreporting, while reports that it's around the average are probably more accurate. I'd wager it's 2x the baseline or less. I don't believe the reports of a "trans genocide" in terms of literal murders. Arguing that prohibition of medical services constitutes a major psychological risk factor would be the more fruitful line of inquiry if someone were trying to put together a case.

This is the motte-and-bailey that is "trans genocide". They want us to think that the genocide is transphobes murdering trans people, and are able to point to a non-zero number of murders which fit that pattern. But the actual motte is that failing to give trans people everything they want is genociding them by driving them to suicide.

But the actual motte is that failing to give trans people everything they want is genociding them by driving them to suicide.

My impression was that the genocide claim is mostly based on the argument that not affirming trans people's gender is supposedly denying their existence, which in some way is equivalent to wanting them dead, or whatever.

Last I checked these things counted as killing trans, kids or otherwise:

  • anything making kids sad because it made them think about suicide
  • no access to puberty blockers from 10 onwards, because growing into an adolescent natal body kills the trans kid within
  • denying trannies access to protected spaces, because it serves as a visible reminder of their existence being invalidated
  • any language/literature saying natal women/men are in any way different from their trans equivalent, like actual measurements of muscle output post estrogen/test
  • any language implying the existence of female/male coded biology, like cervix or breastfeeding or prostate cancer.

I am 100% sure I missed more examples of this absurdity, but there is no need to belabor the point.

Honestly after a certain point I get the sense that the trannies just want to turn the screws on the cis to put cis in their place. Trannies don't actually want to be weightlifters or cyclists save for the ego stokers, trannies just want to fuck women who can't say no. The visible threat is obviously AGP transwomen acting disingenuously, but the expansive language has captured a shitload of confused angry teen girls convinced their lives would be better if they were boys. Normie PMC bullied into supporting an extensive definition of trans mental health causes for the benefit of degenerate transwomen end up generating a corpus of stupid teenagers getting permanent damage to their bodies and psyches. More and more kids seem to be aware of this discrepancy and revealed preferences point to where the kids really are going - everyone is fucking instathots or smoothskinned gymchads, and no amount of stunning and brave laudatory praise on ugly fatties or short butches is actually giving egotistical fetishists the validation they demand.

It was briefly mentioned in the 2020 democratic primaries that most trans murders are sex workers, then I believe it got memory holed when it was revealed the murderers were largely homophobic black clients. It was useful to highlight trans black sex workers being murdered, then the murderers turned out to not be white men and the news was buried.

I would gently posit that the murder rate for trans is somewhat obscured by the number of trans people being absolutely impossible to discern. Self ID and no accountability means this is a mutable category with depressed tomboys and cross dressing AGPs in the same category.

There are a statistically significant number of rap songs from the eighties and nineties which talk about hooking up with a girl who turns out to be a guy. This phenomenon was mentioned on Cracked back in the day.

Probably most famously in DMX's "Where the Hood at" which straight up talks about murdering gay and trans black men:

Last I heard, y'all niggas was havin' sex (uh) with the same sex (woo) I show no love (yeah) to homo thugs (nah) Empty out, reload, and throw more slugs (boom) How you gonna explain fuckin' a man? Even if we squash the beef, I ain't touchin' your hand (aight?) I don't fuck with chumps (yeah) For those that been to jail, that's the cat with the Kool-Aid on his lips and pumps (uh)

I would gently posit that the murder rate for trans is somewhat obscured by the number of trans people being absolutely impossible to discern.

Sure, but even if the trans murder rate was double what we currently believe it to be (i.e. for every trans person who got murdered and who was correctly identified as such by the police, there was one additional murder victim who was inaccurately characterised as cisgender), the trans murder rate would still be lower than the cis male murder rate. Check my maths.

Also, if a male person gets murdered and that person dressed in a conventionally male fashion, never sought treatment for gender dysphoria, never requested that anyone address them using a female name or pronouns, and gave no outward indication of being anything other than a cis man - I find it hard to understand how one could posit that such a murder was motivated by transphobia on the part of the perpetrator.

It was useful to highlight trans black sex workers being murdered, then the murderers turned out to not be white men and the news was buried.

Common Coulter’s Law W.

See also #StopAsianHate in the US or supposed disappearing indigenous women in Canada.

An occasional but recurring source of seethe and controversy in spaces like Reddit is to what extent Persons of Sex Work are in the right to deny their services to black men.

#StopAsianHate

That was particularly farcical. It's a shame that most satirists in the US are left-wing:

He said he wanted the Asian American community to know it had the support of African Americans. The two groups should be united against white supremacy, he said.

“The major problem in this country is white supremacy, and their culture,” he said.

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/national-international/black-and-asian-americans-stand-together-against-hate-crimes/2780762/

"We should be struggling against the common enemy!"

"... The Judean People's Front?!"

Most sex workers are actually somewhat racist and unpleasant because they tend to be bad with money and keep trying to squeeze regulars. Its quite common for escorts to state preferences openly, and it is unacceptable to normies that said preferences tend to be no blacks/arabs/indians, for varying reasons stemming largely from fraud and stealthing. European freelancers on backpage used to complain about those clients constantly, and then I think it got memory holed.

In the end normies really wish their chosen pets would all get along with each other, and can't be bothered to actually talk to blacks or muslims to see what they think of lgbt or women. Maintaining the fiction is the responsibility of reality, and denying the lived experience of sex workers is more acceptable than any notion of skin color being indicative of threat. We still don't see any liberal reckoning about Pulse nightclub or Rotherham, and at this point the aggressors know they have a ripe and defenseless population rich for the taking.

In the end normies really wish their chosen pets would all get along with each other, and can't be bothered to actually talk to blacks or muslims to see what they think of lgbt or women.

So there was this time a long time ago when I was sort of interested in Sam Harris’ podcast and kept checking it out. One time he had Bill Maher on as a guest rather predictably, who, to his credit, wasn’t holding back. One argument he made about liberal/centrist normies is that one reason why talking points on the threat of Islamism and other negative consequences of Muslim immigration don’t resonate with them at all is that usually the only Muslims the typical suburban middle-class liberal White woman ever interacts with are those two funny and exotic Arab guys at the office that she’s sympathetic to already. That’s the only point of reference she has. Needless to say, those two swarthy guys know the score and will make sure never to offend her pro-gay/trans sensibilities. (Also, we know that ‘multiculturalism’ to this White demographic doesn’t usually mean more than funny clothes, exotic restaurants and that one coffee shop your female coworkers will tell you about.)

Cultural confusion can also be a factor. Remember a case in Australia where a Transwoman was assaulted by a Tinder hookup, but it turned out the Tinder hookup had only been in the country from his native Pakistan for a couple weeks and seemingly had no cultural awareness of Trans being a thing/how to pick up on it from the profile.

I don’t recall it off the top of my head, but such a case could also be described as lack of cultural antibodies or lack of genre savviness.

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.

Probably on its face true, because vandalism is considered in the same category of "hate crime" as assault, and during pride month the amount of publicly displayed gay stuff increases by vastly more than 60%. If the modal hate crime is something like "FAG" graffiti on a pro-Gay poster or tearing down a pride flag, the number of pro-gay posters and pride flags has to increase by 500% or better during Pride. So really, the hate criminals are restraining themselves more during pride month. It's the same way that AIPAC and the ADL have long played with the numbers to make Jews the primary victim of hate crimes, because swastika graffiti anywhere within five miles of a Synagogue is counted as a hate crime in their numbers.

Anecdotally, as Pride is becoming something you get taught about in middle school, the backlash is inevitable among the youth as a basic form of teen rebellion. Kids are always going to find whatever their 7th grade health teacher teaches them lame. I remember in health class they showed us a Lifetime movie about Date Rape called She Cried No. As a gang of virgins in the Boy Scouts, we spent multiple camping trips making up alternate titles when the scoutmasters weren't looking. "She cried maybe later" "She cried not you" "she cried and then kept crying." And it wasn't like we were pro-rape, just that health class was lame and we were going to make fun of it.

I've had the argument with many well-meaning progressive friends who tell me they are teaching their kids that classic profanity is no big deal, but slurs are the really bad words. I tell them that is the opposite of how to teach their kids not to use slurs: every kid turns twelve or thirteen and wants to use the no-no words, from Romeo's buddies in Verona swearing by Christ's Wounds to kids buying Eminem CDs in 2001. If you tell them that Nigger and Faggot are the only really bad words, those are the only words they can use to get the thrill of using profanity for the first time. The old Reddit joke about Dr. Kikey McNiggerFaggot will hit all the harder for them. Unless your kid is some Ned Flanders-ass dork, they're gonna cuss. You better teach them cuss words that are no big deal, or they'll use the ones that are. #ReadAnotherBook and all, but liberalism has fallen a long way from 1997 when Fictional Liberal Hero Dumbledore confidently intoned that "fear of a [word] increases fear of the thing itself;" and you knew the really good guys because they weren't afraid to use the no-no words, they said what they meant and meant what they said. Now the left-wingers would be in support of not using the "V-word" because it "re-traumatizes" the victims and their families.

#ReadAnotherBook and all, but liberalism has fallen a long way from 1997 when Fictional Liberal Hero Dumbledore confidently intoned that "fear of a [word] increases fear of the thing itself;" and you knew the really good guys because they weren't afraid to use the no-no words, they said what they meant and meant what they said. Now the left-wingers would be in support of not using the "V-word" because it "re-traumatizes" the victims and their families.

I'd never considered this take on 'You Know Who' before, and I find it utterly fascinating, especially in light of how Rowling backtracked in Book 7 and made Voldemort a literal Taboo where saying the name would summon a small army of 'Snatchers' to attack you and imprison you.

(For the life of me, I have no idea what Rowling was thinking with this plot point. It seems obvious that the Taboo was intentionally foreshadowed in earlier books -- Voldemort is identified as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, after all -- but it's more a little brain-bending to realize that Rowling wrote Dumbledore as absolutely insistent that Harry should always always used Voldemort's name and that there is never any reason to fear a name and that other wizards are funny and weird at their fear of even hearing Voldemort's name. My pet theory is that this was part of 'Dumbledore wants to set Harry and Voldemort on a collision course so the prophecy could be fulfilled ASAP', like the Philosopher's Stone obstacle course in Book 1, but that just opens a whole new set of questions.)

And it wasn't like we were pro-rape, just that health class was lame and we were going to make fun of it.

This is a GOAT out of context quote.

Here’s the thing. The original pride flag had a very important role and actually did do its job very well! The current flag, as well as the old rainbow flag in current year, no longer has such a specific purpose and thus is rudderless and even harmful.

The original goal was about gay marriage and gay and lesbian recognition. A significant portion of the population have these orientations, and the broad public didn’t realize how widespread it was. Furthermore, the winning strategy in the gay marriage fight was fighting an abstract opposition to homosexuality with real-people stories. If you became aware of someone you personally knew being gay, you were much more likely to listen to the “love is love” stuff and be sympathetic, as these people were in many cases supremely “normal”. Pride flags then had a legitimate case for visibility leading directly to opinion change.

This is no longer the case. The forefront of the LGBTQIA++ movement resides primarily in a small population segment, a very tiny one. Awareness campaigns are this no longer productive, because if only 1-2% (being generous) of the population fits in the TQIA++ category, compared to say 15% in the LGB category, you no longer have the same benefits of “oh I know someone personally like that”. Thus the presence and prominence of the flag serves no practical purpose.

The original goal was about gay marriage and gay and lesbian recognition.

Are you sure about the former? Because I've read multiple arguments from gay-supporting liberals that this was specifically not the case. Their narrative is that the talking point that homosexual men are just normal, average people like anyone else who want nothing else but to live as average people in faithful marriages and be accepted as such was manufactured by gay rights activists in the '90s for normie consumption and as a pure PR move. It's not something most homosexual men even agree on.

Well, regardless of what the wider movement thought and thinks, I personally think that the normie approach worked. I don’t really think flamboyant attention-seeking style (so to speak) changed any minds. Whereas the “we are just people too” approach seemed to win over a lot of people both secular and even religious. The flag was an attempt to avoid being memory holed and overlooked, and got people used to seeing gay rights as something normal and not something fringe. So not exactly the same as the pure PR approach sure, but the efforts I think were complementary.

Related: Douglas Murray (a gay conservative) once pointed out, when criticising the concept of an "LGBT community", that there is no more unnatural an alliance than between gay men and asexuals.

Presumably the alliance there is not being societally forced into heterosexual relationships. But, lol.

That is very near to the issue. The LGBTQAYCFRIO7CGAEIROFHTAGN+ community is defined by their common enemy.

There exists, existed, or is believed to exist, an ideology devoted to the proposition that the only correct way to live is one person-born-with-penis-presenting-as-male, one person-born-with-vulva-presenting-as-female, in an exclusive relationship, having standard coitus.

Hence gays, lesbians, bisexuals/pansexuals, asexuals, the transgender, the gender non-conforming, the polyamorous, and those who engage in unorthodox carnal practises, form a natural alliance (The enemy of my enemy....).

A significant portion of the population have these orientations, and the broad public didn’t realize how widespread it was.

Well, no.

It's pretty much always been 3-5%. The recent uptick has been because people get social status for calling themselves bi while never, ever actually engaging in bisexual behavior.

But the propaganda has worked

And this is exactly why the PMC is so insidious - it takes its preferred hyperminority positions, signal amplifies them to the moon, and then targets as immoral "literal hitlers!" anyone who doesn't pledge histrionic fealty to the issue.

Oops! I wonder what other number I was thinking of. I think the point still stands though. If we say .5% trans and 4% gay that’s an order of magnitude difference. Numbers seem to vary a good amount based on survey though.

Don't forget questioning and queer as allowing weirdos with innocent fetishes to be considered members instead of allies.

Sapiosexuals and demisexuals and aromantics all consider themselves within the LGBT+ umbrella, so they get easy entry.

The lack of internal accountability means sexual abuses in the community that are happening face disincentives to report out of concerns that the community will be discredited means the abused just retreat instead of holding the abusers accountable.

The most obvious are trannies preying on children, especially girls. Most of the community is pretty ugly so perverts focus their attention on young girls seeking an identity, and since these girls don't speak up, the ++ continue unrestricted. I have unfortunately observed a steady supply of young boys eager to pimp themselves out for rich sugar daddies flush with money and drugs, and none of my male friends who were active on grindr as teens show any regrets in their adult life.

With the lack of whistleblowers and a nebulous definition of the community, the entire circus is likely to continue growing, even if public disapproval from rebellious teens grows.

I have unfortunately observed a steady supply of young boys eager to pimp themselves out for rich sugar daddies flush with money and drugs, and none of my male friends who were active on grindr as teens show any regrets in their adult life.

AFAIK, this was common among gay men back in the days when it was illegal. John Maynard Keynes, for example, had a thing for very young men/older boys. I think the hope was that this would go away if homosexuality was normalised.

hope was that this would go away if homosexuality was normalised

What was the mechanism to accomplish this?

It's like hoping for less crime if we stop arresting and prosecuting criminals.

What was the mechanism to accomplish this?

The substitution effect (for drugs), but in reverse: you're giving up your ability to have gayness be illegal so that gay children aren't instantly arrested for that crime should they blow the whistle.

Of course, you could always pass laws to avoid that (i.e. "gay sex isn't illegal so long as you're under AoC, as after that you're expected to know it's wrong")- and we already do this for lots of crimes. But if you're starting from 'legalizing gayness as end goal' you're obviously not going to take that approach.

There were five commonly proposed mechanisms :

  • Normalization of homosexuality could make it possible to discuss abusive homosexual relationships without admitting to illegal or taboo interests as part of the complaint. The extreme case is something like Dahmer, where police literally handed an underage victim to a serial killer (though Dahmer lived in Wisconsin, where adult homosexuality was legal at the time, he'd been booted from bathhouses for drugging people and the police in question had largely been driven to a policy of not asking questions). But a lot of stuff well below that level should have gone through the courts, and was instead handled through whisper networks that were plainly not up to the task, because the victims or witnesses could have faced liability or stigma.
  • The separation from Actual Abuser and just homosexual would have made the stigma on the former more significant. Most of the documented stuff from Keynes involved people over the age of consent or who were plain adults and just younger than him, with the more serious allegations looking to be misunderstandings by more recent readers of the common terms of the time. Contrast Gajdusek or Breen's clear and known abuse of young children. But in the lingo of the day and even into the early 1990s, most public discussion (even in gay spheres!) would not distinguish the two fields, leaving far less pressure on the marginal bad actor to behave better.
  • There was a common failure mode where an outed (or afraid-of-being-outed) teenager would flee or be kicked out from their normal community, and find that a combination of personal interests and business discrimination and native contacts would lead them to crash with various unrelated gay adults, often for pretty lengthy periods of time. Sometimes these were full-blown group houses, more often they were just rooming with friends-of-friends-of-friends, whatever. Sexual relationships in these conditions would be prone to abuse even without the age disparity, but it also meant they were people who had perfectly healthy (and above-age-of-consent-the-entire-time) relationships that looked really skuzzy from Traditional Perspectives. Cleaning this process out would both reduce temptation for marginal bad actors, and more critically also remove an avenue of normalization.
  • Demographics are (and were) a bitch. For a heterosexual person, there's about one het member of the opposite sex in a five-block age range of your age for every thirty people. For a gay person before the Internet, that number was probably closer to 1:600 or 1:2400, depending on who's numbers you trust. And given the covert nature of efforts, gay men were limited in how they could go looking. While some approaches were able to concentrate all possible sexual partners, sometimes even into one room, in practice the real answer required looking very wide in one way or another, and opening that age bracket was often the only available choice. Young adults in particular have particular problems with complying with the standard rule for hets, both because of the more narrow slices and because those present were far less likely to be able to be out, be mobile, and be trying to match publicly. ((And the AIDs crisis blew up a large slice, too.))
  • For... mechanical reasons that straight people aren't going to want to hear about, there's a lot of more awkward stuff that can happen between two gay virgins than two heterosexual ones, barring pregnancy. And while that's a very big 'except', it at least involves months before the emergency room visit. Various downstream knowledge and pragmatic matters made 'gay mentor' a thing, and while a majority were genuinely in the 'leave a pamphlet and pretend the question never came up' side, it left a massive space for abuse among people who by definition would not be able to readily recognize abuses. Increased information availability in public spaces, the growth of sex toys as an available industry, and more one-to-many discussions of gay sex mechanics, all did genuinely reduce that.

A lot of this was predicated on most abusers selecting their victims by opportunity or mild preference, rather than strong preference or as obligate parts of their sexuality, and that wasn't always true. And there remain awkward edge cases that neither the gay community (nor society as a whole thinking about the het versions!) really want to handle as rules rather than on a case-by-case basis.

But it wasn't wrong, either, nor clearly wrong at the time.

A lot of that still sounds like hope.

I think the idea was that pederastic men REALLY wanted to have egalitarian relationships with men their own age, but couldn't under the conditions prior to legalisation, and would switch if these egalitarian relationships were possible.

I guess some have, sort of. Pairs of pederastic and pedophilic men can now abuse their victims together. Sometimes they even adopt their victims.

Asserting that homosexuals = pedophiles really requires evidence, not just asserting it because you really super believe it.

On the one hand, it's been months since your last ban. On the other hand, you now have a lot of warnings and bans stacked up and you've already been told that you're running out of warnings, and low effort shitting like this is pretty much all you do.

I'm giving you a 3-day ban and telling you knock it off with the naked culture warring.

More comments

The lack of internal accountability means sexual abuses in the community that are happening face disincentives to report out of concerns that the community will be discredited means the abused just retreat instead of holding the abusers accountable.

A tactical assessment that is unimpeachably correct. Everyone knows what happened to the Scouts and the Church, and because sexual abuse allegations are a superweapon, it's not going to save the LGBT if the culture shifts.

especially girls

All child gay/trans icons are biologically male, and the "straight male sexuality should be stamped out" is all coming from straight women, not "trannies" (there are so few of them that it wouldn't matter if none of them were sex pests, they're just useful examples). As such, until some internal or external circumstance forces moderation of that tendency, the entire circus will continue growing.

because sexual abuse allegations are a superweapon, it's not going to save the LGBT if the culture shifts.

Sexual abuse allegations are a superweapon in the same way that racism accusations are a superweapon. You can't actually use them against anyone; you can use them against people lower on the oppression scale.

I think "If the culture shifts" means in that world that gays, trannies, or whoever we are talking about, are no longer on the oppression scale

the oppression scale

Mean Girls 101: the more popular you are, the further beyond accountability you are, and vice versa.

Mean Girls 102: popularity is a zero-sum game.

Mean Girls 103: because you'll die by that sword regardless of whether or not you live by it, taking it up is the only rational option.

I am actually thinking of Jessica Yaniv and all the other pedophiles that claimed to be trans all while trying to gain access or actually perving on little girls. Its not straight male sexuality, its trans preferences and bigots should be ashamed of questioning the intention of trannies.

For me the fairly obvious point is that most modern trannies don't fucking bother to pass. They shotgun some clown makeup on and wear a dress, but put zero effort into waxing, dieting or otherwise trying to be women. If they actually looked like submissive and breedable femboys they'd get more acceptance, but modern western trannies are just ugly fatties claiming unverifiable special privilege.

Okay, you’ve got 3 posts in the mod queue about how much your outgroup sucks. Progressives this, trannies that.

I’m going to ask you to back off a bit. You can make your points without signaling disgust quite so hard.

but modern western trannies are just ugly fatties claiming unverifiable special privilege

Something they have in common with their enablers.

its trans preferences and bigots should be ashamed of questioning the intention of trannies

In the same way, it's female preferences and bigots should be ashamed of questioning the intention of women (room temperature for the last 40 years).
They're the same picture, it's just a lot more in your face because that's what it looks like when that privilege is extended to cover specific types of biological men. They're fargroup to straight women because they've torn their manhood off (literally or symbolically), so they don't have to worry about them trying anything (which is occasionally, per your examples, not entirely how it works in practice) and doing things like destroying women's sports and introducing men into women's prisons is not an issue to them because the consequences of doing so will only be borne by "lesser" women.

If they actually looked like submissive and breedable femboys they'd get more acceptance

Which is why the femboys that actually do this (and pass as a consequence) tend to be inherently opposed to the womanly way of asserting transgender status (i.e. by claiming it and doing nothing else).

I don't think I've seen LGBT activists fabricate incidents

I mean, I’m not sure, man

There is no anti-gay backlash, because it was never about the gays. It was always about social status.

As was written in the scriptures, Right is the New Left.

Gay flags everywhere did not originate with the gays, it originated with PMC young adults using the gay flag as a way to gain status over their older rivals. A young PMC woman would ostentatiously support gays, showing she was more empathetic, and thus higher status, than her mom or her boss. This was a costly signal to send, as gays gave older people the ick.

By the early 2000s, as gays were unquestioningly accepted in PMC culture, the signaling moved to the lumpen-PMC. They aped the mannerisms of the upper-PMC, as a way to show they were PMC. A gay flag and a degree from a third tier school was their way of signalling they had transcended their suburb. The upper-PMC, meanwhile, moved to trans, as a way to signal they weren't backwards, behind-the-times lumpen-PMC

Now the lumpen-PMC is all into trans, and the young and well-off PMC I know are sheepishly and ironically supportive of trans. Being too loudly into inclusion is now a marker of being that worst of all things, a social climber.

We're now at a moment where loudly supporting LGBT causes isn't a way to thumb your nose at your fat middle-aged lumpen-PMC teacher - it's the ideology of your fat middle-aged lumpen-PMC teacher. Gen Z Believes Wokeism Is Only For Ugly People. Young women don't want to be seen as frumpy, and young men are inherently oppositional.

I'm guilty of this myself. I'm about as supportive of LGBT people as you can get without actually sucking a dick, but I'm very quiet about it, because I just don't want to be, or be associated with "those people" - the fat, half-head-shaved, mask-wearing, purple-haired screechers.

I'm sorry, gays.

Gay flags everywhere did not originate with the gays, it originated with PMC young adults using the gay flag as a way to gain status over their older rivals. A young PMC woman would ostentatiously support gays, showing she was more empathetic, and thus higher status, than her mom or her boss. This was a costly signal to send, as gays gave older people the ick.

That might be some of it. But part of it was a lot simpler than that- it was just a way for gay men to easily meet so they could hook up. This was especially important in the pre-grindr days, but even now they seem to like having a summer-long outdoor sex party.

Unfortunately, that means the rest of us having to endure all outdoor public places turning into a summer-long gay sex party, but whatdya gonna do.

outdoor public places turning into a summer-long gay sex party, but whatdya gonna do

https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2024/06/19/three-gay-men-hunted-in-phoenix-park-by-six-men-with-knives-in-shocking-incident/

It's possible that in this incident from last week the purported 'victims' were just walking at night in an area known for public sex between men, when they encounterd an armed homophobic gang. There are other scenarios that seem more likely.

well, that does sound horrific. I am sorry that it happened, and I hope that my stupid comment was not read as encouraging that sort of menacing behaviour.

No I didn't read your comment as promoting menacing.

Our societies used to have solutions to the outdoor gay sex party problem. Buggery was illegal in many jurisdictions. Even after it was decriminalized public sex in parks or toilets was still criminal and there was a stigma still to participating in homosexual activities.

Now that buggery isn't a crime in the west. The stigma on homosex is largely gone, in the west. Policing and prosecuting public sex acts is virtually non-existent in the west, people are left to solve their own problems. In some areas I suspect this would look like armed neighborhood watch groups rousting those they suspect are up to public buggery.

I'm not sure this encounter rises to horrific.

How do you limit or reduce undesirable behavior by a determined cohort if it's not prosecuted or stigmatized? Vigilante groups have been a traditional answer.

fat

Hey, some of us fatties have reasonable opinions about things and a civilized demeanor!

(said with tongue firmly in cheek)

and young men are inherently oppositional.

I don't think this is true. Young men want to establish themselves as full grown men(tm), and in our culture that means having a badass attitude, or so they think. But IME convincing young men to listen to their authority figures and they'll grow up is not actually that hard- you have to listen to them and convincingly walk the talk you give.

You also need to have convincingly masculine authority figures for them to emulate. In post-Boomer western culture, the institutions that should be pointing to exemplars of pro-social masculinity as authority figures for young men to emulate are instead pointing to outlaws and women.

masculinity as authority figures for young men

Isn't this why Andrew Tate and Daniel Bilzerian experience the popularity they have? They fill the vacuum of non-converged masculine authority figures, despite their apparent low quality.

Were you thinking of Audie Murphy types as pro-social masculinity? Do you have any examples?

I was more thinking of Average Centrist Dad as an achievable example of pro-social masculinity - if you think that you need to be Audie Murphy to be a real man then you may have been huffing too much feminist propaganda about how husbands and fathers aren't masculine because women can do that to.

Average Centrist Dad as an achievable example of pro-social masculinity

Shouldn't this be the minimum standard? I was thinking of something more aspirational.

Being too loudly into inclusion is now a marker of being that worst of all things, a social climber.

Or in other words, we can see that conspicuous consumption applies to social capital as well.

because I just don't want to be, or be associated with "those people"

The thing that bothers me the most is that it's no longer possible to talk intelligently about it. The Newspeak perpetrated by "those people" has damaged the discourse and prevented progress in ways that are as trivially true as DR3, which is why I don't get along with them.

What is DR3 ?

Urban dictionary doesn't know nor does wikipedia.

"Dems R (the) Real Racists." It can mean a few different things, but usually making fun of conservatives who take liberal arguments at face value and smugly call out perceived hypocrisy, accomplishing nothing except legitimizing the liberal frame.
You know "ha, dumb libs banned high school algebra for Racial Equity, guess they're the real racists for thinking blacks can't do math! Vote Republican for true Racial Equity Praxis!"

I agree for the most part, though I think an under-considered part of this is that LGBT and other Woke phenomena are now official dogma meaning that not only is it useless as a signifier of status, but that it’s something that everyone is more or less required to believe in public. There’s no place where one can really be openly and explicitly anti-LGBT in polite society. If you’re not pro LGBT everything, and you tell people this in the workplace, you’re going to have to clean out your desk. If you say it in school, you’re going to have a chat with the school counselor trying to get to the bottom of your bigotry. If you say it online, you’re getting reported to either your workplace or your school.

But the thing is, that all of this performative behavior the requirement to not only not be against it, but be for it makes the opposite an act of rebellion against The Man. The model isn’t anything politically motivated, it’s the same thing that drove kids to liking weird bands, or take up smoking, or dress funny or get piercings. In the 1990s, liking rap was not because white suburban kids discovered spoken word poetry set to music was cool. It was cool because it got a huge and often negative reaction from the adults. They liked rap precisely because Mom and Dad and all the adults hated it and would yell at them about it. Kids took up smoking and vaping less because they like it and more because it would annoy and frighten the adults. One of the great draws of this is of course that such reactions prove that you’re independent and not controlled by the adults. A kid like that, one that rebelliously refuses to bend the knee to what the adults think of them especially in the teenage world (although somewhat in college as well) is one that everyone else thinks is cool.

I think that youth rebellion is somewhat astroturfed.

Most kids are conformist. Maybe some small percentage will truly rebel, but the overwhelming majority will only rebel in allowed ways. That's why LGBT among teenagers took off in the 2010s and not the 1990s. By that time, LGBT had become an allowed method of rebellion, much like gangster rap was in the 1990s.

We're not about to see a kids rebel by being performatively right-wing. It's not allowed. Teenagers find other harmless ways to annoy their elders, like brain rot memes.

Which isn't to say that LGBT will remain cool now that it is official state dogma. It won't. But rebellion against it will not be tolerated either.

We're not about to see a kids rebel by being performatively right-wing

Aren't most of the 'Active Clubs' young men? I don't think I'd describe them as performative.

You appear to have cut off my quote to invert what I said which was this:

We're not about to see a kids rebel by being performatively right-wing.

I was not my intention to invert your meaning but to rebutt it by providing a counter example. I've updated the quoted text to avoid confusion.

I'd say the idea of teenage rebellion as a social reality originates from the era of capitalism when teenagers appeared on the consumer market as a separate target audience. It was no coincidence that the thing all outlets of teenage rebellion had in common was and is their profitability.

"The revolutionaries are on CBS [Records]" - 1968

I agree that direct rebellion to LGBT won't be tolerate. You won't suddenly see a resurgence in kids calling the dork loser in class a faggot.

But I think ostentatious differentiation will always be there. The original punk rock aesthetic was all about LOUD self-distinction. Unnatural hair dye, spikes and other metal ... thingys ... on clothes, dramatic makeup. You couldn't not be seen because everything was arranged to catch the eye.

So how do you loudly self-differentiate when the PanGenderDemiQuarks have taken over the library?

Retro inspired hyper-normie gender roles. It's not the weird TradWife meme, it's a kind of Volume-Up-To-11 1980s masculinity. To me, it kind of complements a lot of the Instragram Face, cosmetic conscious women online who, despite their large followings on a silicon valley platform, probably have pretty right-coded beliefs about gender and gender roles.

I think that youth rebellion is somewhat astroturfed.

In other words, culture wars, like regular wars, are fought by the old with the young as merely collateral damage.

I'll caveat at the start that I'm really not convinced on the underlying question. Not just in the obvious way that I (and a lot of other people) became furries at a time where you had to go pretty far out of your way to get exposed to the furry fandom, and where "cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow [x]" was impossible and discouraged even inside the fandom.

That "in the [x]-fucking group, the axis of prestige aligns with fucking [x]" is pretty wrong. Furries know of people with a ton of art commissions, or who had the most 'fun' at a conventions (though even there, no one's going out of their way to claim partial responsibility for putting 'ranch' on a certain pizza, you don't want to know). But you can be a High Profile Furry by organizing, by creating media, hell just by having a decent voice when playing weird online games; many big-name furs aren't convention-room-party goers, some don't even do adult stuff in media format (or only began doing so long after their rise in popularity).

Status derives from status and its games, for better or worse.

Okay, on the more immediate question of a vibe shift:

  • I think a lot of the poll variances in the recent short term (to the extent they actually exist), largely reflect changes in what people perceive as the question being asked. Just as poll questions in the 1980s weren't really about gay marriage, even if some people were starting to think about it, polls in 2010 were overwhelmingly perceived as about gay marriage even if other matters were starting to percolate. And while I think social conservatives overstate some of the matters -- kids just don't care about Drag Queen Story Hour, unless they're stuck listening to it -- there's both a ton of reversion to mean and a lot of more controversial topics at easy grasp, today.

  • This is a place where there's obvious an Official Correct Answer, and there has been for the better part of a decade (eg, most teenagers' lifespans as political animals), and that impacts answers and views in a variety of complex ways. While social conservatives focus, not unreasonably, on how this encourages agreement with that Official Correct Answer, it also results in matters where respondents presume questions from authorities are either tests or presumed within the window of that Official Correct Answer, or where people will show what looks like resistance where 'resistance' is only incidentally touching on these matters.

  • It's... difficult to get a real grip on ground level politics for students, especially if you're someone who does play by the 'keep it at home' rules. I deal with more students than most adults, and I'd still be really hesistent to extrapolate from the few times students have brought this topic up in public.

  • There's some awareness that something's going wonky among the progressive parts of the world, but most of that's perceived as a 'Last Gasp Of <Insert Today's Demographic Boogey Man>', or perhaps young leftists not knowing 'What We're All Fighting'. Even the true versions of this stuff aren't really things the progressive movement is willing to actually handle rather than confront, and they're not that often true, so I'm not sure how much to take from it.

Furry fandom is benign. If your children get involved in furry fandom, the worst that can happen is that they get mixed up in inverting Laplace Transforms. Yes, there is Yiff, and Bad Dragon, but humans are obsessed with sex; human social life is equally obsessed with sex outside of furry fandom. Keeping them out of the fandom provides zero protection.

One example of the fandom keeping it sane is Fox Dad with its gentle self-mockery reminding everyfur not to take it too far. And notice that fursuits are removable. What frightens parents about transgenderism is that it encourages changes that are permanent. Or take a moment (or an hour and a half) to enjoy the Anthrocon 2023 fursuit parade which is taking place inside the convention center. I'm tempted to argue that there is no backlash because the fursuits are so cute, but I'm missing the point. It is inside the convention center not in the street! The normies are not going to reject something that they never see. Furry fandom doesn't have a toaster fucker problem because it is really just Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit.

That's true, and the seriousness of the policy disagreements are definitely part of the pressures making transgender politics so prominent in public discourse; not just that they are permanent, but that they're permanent in ways likely to be undesirable outside of the axioms and assumptions of the movement.

I think my argument is more that FoxDad can happen even (arguably especially) in communities with a lot or even revolving around 'toaster'-fucking, and this kinda puts a fork into the thesis from the greentext.

That said, I do think that people can and do treat benign communities as dangerous and harmful.

I was there, watching usenet and VCL-era wars over a zebra pool toy inflationist. Furries absolutely were a matter of serious controversy, believed to be self-modifying their sexuality in ways that directed them to same-sex attraction (probably wrong direction of causation) or made real-world 'healthy' sexuality difficult or impossible, in ways that can't be changed back, and in ways that made us a threat to innocents or even animals. There's still social conservatives circles doing that sorta thing, today; there actually been a recent mess in about (nonsexual) furry teenagers in schools. And some of the lesser-known stuff can modify you in even weirder ways -- I've got more respect for therians and therian self-modification than most people here would, but I'm not convinced mirror-dwellers are doing their brains any good.

((It might even literally be the specific target for this greentext: there's a long-standing meme in the fandom about protogen, a fantasy cyborg species, as toasters. Though the timeline is tight enough that it probably isn't, at least not that directly.))

There's a fair argument that they're wrong, for furries, and I'd agree with you. I could point to LGBT spaces that consider themselves self-criticizing, or where they keep the more prurient stuff moderately out-of-sight. ((Or rare places where a furry or furry group insufficiently policed the private behavior rules, or where public behaviors are accepted and should be acceptable: there are absolutely out-of-convention-center-doors fursuit parades. And bowling events.))

I must strenously and vigorously disagree with this assertion and state that this is not true. There is a reason that even a kissless, touchless virgin robot considers a furry to be a lower stratum on the freak totem pole. And have done so, for the past twenty years, and indeed back in the primordial internet where people lingered on Usenet, and before that BBSs.

Furries are everything that conspiracy theorists allege about the illuminati: weirdly connected, absurdly wealthy sexual deviants who have secret societies which have sex parties on the regular.

OTOH it also goes to show what the conspiracy theorists get wrong about it all: furries don't do all this weird stuff to create control networks for nefarious global guidance projects etc. but because it's fun and gets their rocks off.

Por qué no los dos?

Furry fandom is benign.

As a former employee of a convention center adjacent hotel which hosted an annual furry event, I can attest that imo the furries are better-than-average tippers.

Furry fandom is benign.

Midwest FurFest had to shut down their free HIV testing clinic early, because demand was higher than expected.

Furry fandom is benign.

But it is fundamentally a sex (or sex-adjacent) thing, like crossdressing (and its more permanent cousin, transgenderism) is. This is why there is sex stuff for the convention-goers to know of. And sure, things can be both benign and sexual, but that depends on your surroundings (Japan and its relationship with loli works the same way).

but humans are obsessed with sex

And if you accept the above, you run straight into the landmine of "kids shouldn't have a sexual bone in their body until the Approved Age", so discussing the fact that they're related in the open is just giving ammunition to your enemies (and now you know why some countries don't have a truth defense against libel).

Keeping them out of the fandom provides zero protection.

On the contrary, this provides a lot of protection for the fandom (it's not about protecting kids). Which, given that the fandom mostly consists of the male gender [the demand for sex crimes from this demographic far exceeds its supply], is something that it requires (as opposed to the transgenderism fandom, a gender who by contrast has the social license to not only freely and openly support, but actively force, child participation).

As with a lot of situations where people talk about "LGBT" these days, I think 99% of this is about the T and maybe 1% about the LGB.

The shift towards acceptance of gay people is very broad across society. It's not just young people, not just progressives, not just the nonreligious, but just about everybody. Yes there are evangelicals and online weirdos who still freak out about gay people but they're the minority. I don't think there is going to be a substantial backlash to gays and lesbians. Maybe with respect to some of the more gauche and outwardly freakish gay men, but that's the 1%.

I think what it boils down to, and similar to what you're getting at, is people just don't like freaks. They don't care much about labels; they don't understand them anyways. But freaks make them uncomfortable. They don't want to be around freaks. They don't want their kids seeing freaks. They don't want to turn on the television and watch freaks. And the freaks are overwhelmingly concentrated in the T part of LGBT.

is people just don't like freaks.

Even when it comes to this lots of people don't care that much. What shifts a lot of people from "whatever" to "fuck off" is being told they're awful and/or stupid for not agreeing with trans people's conception of "gender", the accompanying entitlement to women's-only spaces, their kids being encouraged to change their identities etc.

This was one difference between gay rights (sans gay marriage) and transgenderism. You didn't have to assert a factual claim as a result of homosexuality being legal, gays being able to adopt, gays being able to serve in the military etc. Gay people weren't insisting that e.g. "You must say that gay sex is identical to heterosexual sex" or "There is no difference between gay people and straight people."

The T seems conceptually revolutionary to a far greater degree than the LGB part, which only aimed at moral and legal changes.

Instead, most people were forced to assert factual claims prior to commenting on legal matters. You had to assert that an 'orientation' is a thing that is objective, on a known, fixed spectrum, that cannot change, because one is born that way, something something genes/brain structure, etc. If you displayed even the faintest of doubts about this bundle of factual claims, you got stared at like you were an alien. It was only after being forced to assert such factual claims that people were then asked, "...and would you really be okay with denying, say, your child, from having these various legal rights, if they happened to be factually born that way?" That's why proponents themselves say that it was critical to make people believe the factual claims in order to win the political victories.

Yeah. "You can think those guys are nuts and everything they think is bs, but just don't say that to them and don't be a dick about it," is what the ask used to be, and I think most people are happy enough to accept that. Now it is, "you must actively affirm our bs and act in all ways as though it were true and having your own opinion will be met with consequences" which is fighting words.

I think the general attitude isn't even necessarily thinking those guys are nuts or weird; people take a laissez-faire approach and are broadly apathetic, with the dominant thought about them being "I don't think about them." You may like carrots, I may hate carrots, but there are plenty of ways we can get along without fighting over carrots; there should be more to us as people than that.

The friction comes when one side starts making demands that everyone talk about their favorite kind of carrot, that social situations have to begin with saying the last carrot dish you cooked was, and that we have a struggle session whenever someone expresses something that can be construed as lachanophobic ("I personally just make parsnips for my family, we don't really do carrots").

Cross-dressing as a full-time lifestyle choice is weird, some might say it's Wrong, but both the people participating in it and the people condemning it could at least agree on what it was.

Transgenderism on the other hand, which is at its base essentially the same thing, makes unjustifiably radical epistemic claims.

People-pretending-to-be-the-other-sex became a live wire when those people wilfully abandoned the pretending part. That's the core perversion that engenders such a hostile reaction; the perversion of meaning itself. That those positions came to be enforced by coercion just makes it that much more objectionable.

perversion of meaning itself

Some objected to gay 'marriage' on substantially similar grounds.

Everyone wants to be special and be more trendy than everyone else. Being truly intellectual or inventing something or being elite at sport is hard. It is easier to follow fashion. Just show how woke you are or buy the latest hype-beast merch to signal how superior you are to the normies. Learning the latest pronouns is easier and lower effort than other ways of showing elite status.

The issue is that the normies catch on and then the trend setters have to move to the next thing. When soccer moms like gay marriage the cool kids have to do trans. When the HR-lady at a saw mill is taking about trans the cool kids have to move on to something else. Eventually the trend goes too far. Big butts are nice on instagram so people get a bigger butt. Eventually the butts get too big so going bigger to beat the normies becomes nonsensical. At that point the cool kids have to find a new trend. Talking about LGBT is not a good way to signal how with it you are these days. Pride was pushed far as a new stripe could be added when the old flag was being used on discount crocks at dollar stores. Eventually there are too many stripes and the flag is no longer useful.

Also young people are struggling with dating. Inceldom is exploding and women are not having an easy time either. The sexual revolution did not benifit the masses. The sexual revolution benefited an elite of men and a handful of deviants. The number of incels and women angry at being pumped and dumped far outstrips the number of trans people and men sleeping with hundreds of women. If an ideology benefits a few but hurts the many its popularity will dwindle.

If an ideology benefits a few but hurts the many its popularity will dwindle.

Would that it were that simple... a lot of ideologies can persist surprisingly long despite being that way. See eg: historical empires and dynasties. The trick is to set up a trap where anyone who fights against the ideology is punished even worse, so the masses support in hopes of getting a little scrap of reward for being a good subject.

I'm increasingly of the "old man yells at the clouds" opinion that all pop culture is the death of human potential. Pop culture is practically the death of culture. It erases the enduring wisdom and collective stories that were told for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and replaces them with increasingly intense novel hyperstimula, that people have little choice but to chase. In my own home, we've been trying to spend a lot less time watching TV or otherwise mindlessly consooming, and more time reading or practicing productive hobbies.

That said, in my choice of novel I'm right back to last year's (or maybe last century's) pop culture! Robert E Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, some Dostoevsky to pretend I'm being cultured. Comic adaptations of Moorcock's works, a giant Calvin & Hobbes complete collection, then some Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire to keep my brow from completely scraping the ground. Maybe that makes my entire complaint completely incoherent.

I'm finding myself repulses by the concept of a franchise. What began as annoyance at how the Star Wars and Star Trek of my youth were hollowed out and now seem to explicitly hate me, grew into a realization of what the fuck was I doing for decades hanging onto the serialized output of this nonsense? Free of the spell of jonsing for what happens next, it made me question all the investment I'd had in those fictional worlds and stories. Sometimes the best part of a story is that it ends. It's not like there is some sexually deranged sultan that will murder you if you don't continually leave him with a cliffhanger so he spares your life.

I saw a tweet, all caveats about taking a tweet seriously aside, about the looks of concern and horror this parent gets when others discover they are just trying to raise their kid like they were raised in the 90's. Which is to say, free range, outside, little to no internet, no tablets, etc. On the one hand, my old man brain goes "The 90's weren't so long ago", but then again, it was 30 years ago. It's akin to if my parents had tried to raise me like they were raised in the 60's. Which involved my dad's father beating the ever loving shit out of them, and everyone growing up hungry all the time. Still, the look of concern and horror we've occasionally received when people find out our 4 year old has never used a tablet makes us wonder if the world has been taken over by pod people.

Our society is deeply, deeply sick, and to go full old man, pop culture is the disease.

and to go full old man

If it makes you feel any better, due to an unprecedented general decline in IQ and the attendant competency crisis, the old man complaining about people being dumber and society getting worse is looking less like a grump and more like a leader these days.

Yeah learning about the pace at which TNG episodes were written and shot was a revelation to me, and it made me question why so much is invested in a show that was, as good as it was, clearly hobbled by not having time to really flesh out ideas and rework bad scripts, and was basically rushing all the way to its end.

Similarly, years ago I was listening to a Phil Ochs song about how terrible "liberals" are and it just hit me, why am I getting my political opinions from music? From rock to rap, why are the pop stars determining what I think over political scientists, essayists etc.

It's feels like even the most deep cuts of pop culture feel shallow as a puddle, it's like it's all expressionism, just surface level reactions to things, no humility, no ability to dig deeper, due to time constraints or just ignorance of the authors. And it almost feels like a psyop where we're told to just stay in the there, don't try to look up the past, it's all problematic and boring. Like they read Great Expectations and Shakespeare in High School just to intimidate and bore you so you stay away from that stuff for good.

And it almost feels like a psyop where we're told to just stay in the there, don't try to look up the past, it's all problematic and boring. Like they read Great Expectations and Shakespeare in High School just to intimidate and bore you so you stay away from that stuff for good.

I feel this in my bones, because I loathed school assigned reading. Except for one singular English class in 10th grade where we read Brave New World, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, it was my most hated subject. Good god, I remember slogging through Mill on the Floss one year. It was quite possibly the most boring thing I was ever forced to read. And I remember when they added the diversity requirement to summer reading, where you had to read X many books from the standard list, and then X many books from the diversity list. Because god damnit, you will appreciate poorly written polemics.

I have a model (not, I think, original) of three ideal types:

(1) People interested in things. Their ideal book would be a hard sci-fi book that explains how the time machine/interstellar space craft actually works. I have known a few people who embody this almost perfectly and they are either about as autistic as you can be while still being functional OR successful salt-of-the-earth tradesmen.

(2) People interested in abstract ideas. I think that people who gravitate towards classic dystopian fiction, as well as Big Theory sci-fi like Dune or some of Asimov's work, tend to be this way, as well as mathematicians, philosophers, theologians, theoretical physicists etc.

(3) People interested in people. They like books about people. This is almost all books regarded as "classic" literature, as well as a lot of any genre of books, as well as a lot of entertainment in general.

My classic image of (3) is a high school English teacher, who are also at least partly responsible for putting many of type (1) and (2) people off reading fiction. Works like the Dune novels and Asimov's books/stories were literally banned as dissertation topics at my high school due to "insufficient literary merit"; I was just about able to convince them to let me write about Dostoevsky, but I was strongly encouraged to write about the characters rather than the ideas. I know another person who had the same experience with Brave New World and Nineteen-Eighty Four, which were too respected to be banned as topics. You were supposed to write about Jane Austen, Shakespeare (as long as you focused on style and characters), George Elliott (or F. Scott Fitzgerald if you weren't bright) and the like: character-focused, with minimal action, and certainly no in-depth discussions of how a time machine worked.

I think ideas are very important, but I hope it’s not uncharitable to say that writing a 4,000 word essay on the physics of interstellar travel in a hard sci-fi novel, for a high schooler, is more suited to a science class than an English one, where literary analysis is going to involve discussions of word choice, sentence structure, rhythm, commentary on descriptions and so on. Of course it would be entirely possible to write great literary criticism of passages revolving around specific speculative technology in science fiction, but high school nerds are unlikely to be capable of it, and it will turn into a bad Reddit post full of bad math and numbers that combines the worst of both low quality STEM and literature papers, so one sympathizes with the English teachers.

Plus, geeky teenage boys are always going to be interested in science fiction; some would say the job of an English teacher is to help develop a wider interest in fiction that might also involve genres they wouldn’t otherwise read.

As you note, there are two separate things here:

(1) Focus on literary technique.

(2) The subject matter.

It's easier to use (2) as a way to lure otherwise uninterested students into talking about (1), IF you are more interested in (1), as English teachers tend to be. But there we agree.

I believe Jussie claimed he was called the “faggot empire nigger.” So it was both a race and LGBT hoax.

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.

I wish the tweet cited its sources because the data I can find does not seem to support this. Here is Gallup in 2021 and 2023. The total US number is up 1 percentage point (71 in 2023 vs 70 in 2021). Republicans are down about 6 percentage points (55 to 49) but Democrats (83 to 84) and independents (73 to 78) are up. The age groups are not quite comparable across these two polls but taking the lowest age group (18-29 in 2023, 18-34 in 2021) support for gay marriage has increased (84 to 89). Just eyeballing the age based changes I think they are more a composition effect of how the ranges have changed but none of them show a decline.

On the other hand a PRRI report from this year does show Gen Z being mildly less supportive of LGBT rights than millennials, though the still the second-most supportive generation.

Around six in ten Gen Z adults (62%) oppose allowing a small business to refuse to provide goods or services to LGBTQ people, if doing so goes against their religious beliefs, compared with 64% of millennials, 58% of Gen Xers, 57% of baby boomers, and 53% of the Silent Generation.

...

More than two-thirds of Gen Zers (68%) support allowing same-sex couples to marry legally, while 28% oppose. Millennials have the highest support for same-sex marriage at 73%, followed by 66% of Gen Xers, 62% of baby boomers, and 57% of the Silent Generation.

Around six in ten Gen Z adults (62%) oppose allowing a small business to refuse to provide goods or services to LGBTQ people, if doing so goes against their religious beliefs

I would be hard pressed to answer this survey, because I believe that the Masterpiece Cakeshop lawsuits were determined correctly, but also that no business has a right to turn away an LGBT person from receiving the same service as everyone else.

I am pretty anti-LGBT, as that goes today. I don't believe that two members of the same sex can be married in the same sense of the word "marriage" as I use when I say my marriage, my parents', grandparents', or great grandparents' marriage. Homosexual marriage is just talking about a completely different thing that can't even accidentally turn into the referent I mean.

If I was a wedding photographer and someone wanted me to photograph a gay wedding, I would want the right to refuse based on I don't believe the two events are even similar. It would be the equivalent of if I were a professional photographer that specialized in Christian First Communions, Confirmations, and Baptisms, then refused to be hired to photograph a Satanic Mass desecrating those things. "But the government says they are both equivalent religious expressions!" I don't care.

I'm pretty pro-LGBT, as far as that would have gone in the 80s or earlier. People deserve healthcare, non-discrimination in the necessities of daily life, security in their homes and jobs. I believe homosexuality is largely due to forces outside people's control. Having those attractions is not a moral failure. All of these would have been radical a hundred years ago, now they are the bare minimum of decency that only the smallest, most fringe groups would deny. The LGBT movement won there. Can they accept that victory and move on?

This is also my point of view, but I add to it that I'm skeptical most of the LGBT-identification among young people is the sort of homosexuality that is largely due to forces outside people's control. It seems pretty clear that social contagion can shift people's sexual orientation or at least move them to decreased revulsion towards sexual activity they once may have found unappealing. My impression is that there's a small subset -- maybe 1, 2% -- that is gay due to developmental or neonatal factors, with maybe some genetic predisposion factors in there that we just don't understand. But that's wildly different from the much higher rates not only of LGBT identification but LGBT activity among younger people. And it absolutely changes the state of the debate over things like gay marriage if only a very small part of the population is gay than if a much larger proportion is.

don't think I've seen "beaten with fenceposts"-level backlash (I figure it would pop up here if it was an issue),

I think he’s referring to the Matthew shepherd case, where a meth dealer who was known to be homosexual was murdered in a drug deal gone wrong and the whole thing got proclaimed an anti-gay hate crime.

First I imagined a world where hardened criminals pretend to be gay, or trans, or whatever, to up the ante of anyone taking them out if caught.

Second, I wondered if we already live in that world.

Knowing what I know of the underclass, to whom hardened criminals overwhelmingly belong- no, they don’t. They don’t expect legal consequences for harming them and think relying on such things is for battered women. They’ll pretend to be gay or trans for temporary advantage(eg nicer prison), but not to take advantage of legal protections.

This attitude that legal protections don’t apply to them is a big part of why they’re so violent; for people living under state protection it’s best to let stuff go most of the time, but without it, to do so is suicide. Add in pervasive impulse control and IQ problems(trans inmates just keep getting their cell mates pregnant) and the fact that big chunks of them hate each other for whatever reason, and underclass violence is just a fact of life to people immersed in it. The idea that it’s a bigger crime to assault a gay man doesn’t occur to them because in their world assault isn’t wrong, it’s just impolite without a good reason.

I feel like the big vibe shift has been the change from pride being about advancing gay rights issues to becoming a marketing term for mega corps to push product.

My cities pride festival had corp sponsorship on the level of the NFL. It also wasn’t clear there was a push for any political stances, just a generic “pride” branding and “love is love” messaging.

My cynical stance is American white women are generally more progressive and also one of the most important consumer demographics. By attaching themselves to “Pride” companies can market themselves to this demographic and virtue signal.

I was telling my girlfriend about Scott's post "Gay Rites are Civil Rites" the other day, an article I thought was very insightful but also very parochial. In San Francisco, the Pride parade has been fully "assimillated" such that it's nothing more than a generic expression of civic pride, wholly divorced from its roots as a celebration of aberrant sexuality, fulfilling precisely the same social function that a 4th of July march fulfils in a Red city (or fulfilled 20 years ago). But obviously that description isn't true everywhere, and there are plenty of places in the world where organising or attending a Pride parade would result in funny looks, or even a visit from the police.

Exactly. Feels similar to Christmas where the general celebration has nothing to do with Christianity (aside from church specific events).

At this point it feels like "Pride" never ends. I know I'm getting old, but every time June rolls around the wife and I have this feeling of "Didn't they just do pride?" Because businesses keep Pride stuff up 365 days a year. Pride shit comes out shoe-horned into Christmas and Easter. It just never fucking ends, it's just especially obnoxious in June when the public kink displays begin.

I used to be annoyed that Christmas "begins" in November. I fought the good fight that the tree doesn't go up until at least after Thanksgiving. But that's got nothing on Pride.

it feels like "Pride" never ends.

"I want to get off Mr Bones Wild Pride!"

In my hometown, which is by no means a conservative place, there was Pride stuff out and about for a week, it was really visible for the day of the march, (the Pride week here was already at the start of June), and after that it's only the same individual restaurants and bars that always have rainbow flags on window that have them. Much more understated than in, say, 2019.

Pride in-person feels more subdued, but online feels only slightly less present. There’s still pride banners all over websites. But in person I’ve seen very few rainbow flags.

I dunno, seems more subdued online as well. Orgs that had a pride logo for an entire month now do it for a week, if that.

Sony just announced its partnership with "immigration equality", promoting "justice and equality" for aids-ridden gay immigrants through lawsuits and lobbying.

Every company is still doing the "are you sure this will help us sell more $product?" "$product?" skit.

On the plus side I can feel fully vindicated making fun of my friend for having a Gaystation instead of an N64. Never stopped ribbing him about the time he forgot to say "no homo" after sex.

Sony just announced its partnership with "immigration equality", promoting "justice and equality" for aids-ridden gay immigrants through lawsuits and lobbying.

Huh. 24 hours ago; not a joke.

To be precise, though, Immigration Equality is only "the nation's leading LGBTQ immigrant rights organization", so Sony is currently just focusing on immigration restrictions in the USA (where immigration leads to a mere 750K new naturalized citizens each year, and where Sony has a full 16K employees), and presumably there will be a small delay before efforts expand to less urgent places like Japan (a solid 10K naturalizations per year, but only 55K Sony employees).

Ironically, I'm actually on Sony's side here (the liberal and libertarian in me are happy with most immigration, and the conservative in me still thinks the solution to AIDS is just "hey, remember monogamy?") ... yet I can't help but wonder if any top Sony execs will really be suggesting that this additional kindness and awareness of other people's problems should also be extended to Japan (42 out of 10,493 annual asylum applications approved in Wikipedia's most recent data), or whether such a possibility would have them concerned about their precious fingers.

Gaystation instead of an N64

There'll be 64 stripes on the flag before long.

Well then it's a good thing my uncle works at Nintendo, he gave me a Nintendo 65. No you can't see it, I loaned it to my girlfriend who lives in Canada and is totally real.

The closest "current thing flag" house to me took down their Ukrainian flag to replace it with some black power one in Feb, and have now replaced that with a "stars and rainbow stripes" flag. A positively patriotic rejoinder to the row of intersex-progress-pride+Hamas flags on the opposite side of the road.

The idea that the culture war is cooling down is insane. The gunshots we hear are just getting less frequent right now because the left are running out of their current victims, and haven't picked the next batch to march into the woods yet.

Justifiably paranoid take: the guys saying "it's safe to stop hiding in the bushes, come out now!" are luring out the next victims.

The left has already picked the next batch of sacred cows, it’s just rather muted since the security organs object to the fact that most of the new herd are on international terrorism lists and violently opposed to US interests.

LGBT refers to an activist coalition, not a community (there is a gay community, and a largely separate lesbian community which rather famously does not, in fact, include straight guys who self-identify as lesbians). If said activist coalition has shifted from LGB issues to T issues (and it has) and LGB is more popular than T (which it is) then that would be sufficient to make "LGBT" as a dangling signifier less popular.

That’s my assumption as well, as in the past, even as recently as 15-20 years ago, the T was by far the least important part of that whole equation and the whole thing has completely flip flopped.

If you ask people about the constituent parts of the activist alliance individually I wouldn’t be surprised if support for LGB issues isn’t as strong as ever, but the T has just required a whole set of things that most people find too arduous or absurd.

I’d agree that the G part has lost quite some idpol points in recent years.

In relative terms to the T part, and even in absolute terms.

After all, a large chunk of out-of-the-closet gays are white men. And gay white men are the white men of gay people.

there is a gay community, and a lesbian community which rather famously does not, in fact, include straight guys who self-identify as lesbians.

I can't say I managed to find a way to verify this, but the word on the street is that the lesbian community has been decimated, largely because they failed to not include straight guys who self-identify as lesbians.

failed to include or failed to not include, this is confusing.

The latter. Failed to exclude, to make it clearer.

It's all anecdotal, but there's a demographic bitter lesbians, bemoaning the decline of the lesbian scene, because they couldn't keep trans women out. They could if they wanted to, of course - gay guys had no issues keeping trans men out - but despite all the talk of gender nonconformity, seems like even outliers tend to be closer to the behavioral average of their respective group, than to the other.

As a counterpoint there's also talk of lesbians going trans themselves, I think Katie Herzog had a whole spiel about that.

They could if they wanted to, of course - gay guys had no issues keeping trans men out

To be fair I don't think it's a similar category of problem, in the same way trans men trying to get into male prisons doesn't cause the same concern as trans women in female prisons.

I think being a biological female in, say, a men’s locker room is just unpleasant enough to resolve itself very fast.

From the anecdotes I've heard about it, it seems that the primary problem is other women (or female persons who identify as not-women) who embrace the new trans religion and therefore consider it fundamentally immoral to try to maintain a penis-free lesbian scene.

As a counterpoint there's also talk of lesbians going trans themselves

I mean, it seems to me a butch lesbian could become a transman just by switching which side the buttons on her flannel shirts are on.

In my experience, it tends to be trans women who go down the purely social transition route. I've encountered plenty of male people who put on a dress or makeup and demand that people call them "Lilith", but express no interest in medical transition (hell, I've met a handful of "Liliths" who don't even go to the trouble of swapping out their wardrobe or shaving their beard). For trans men, it tends to be a "go hard or go home" thing, wherein they don't bother to identify as such unless they're (at a minimum) taking testosterone - I don't recall ever encountering a self-identified trans man who was wearing makeup, six-inch heels and a pushup bra. Female people who want to maintain their femininity but still gain oppression points tend to just call themselves non-binary.

This is why I'm relatively convinced that LGB and T belong together, because the most obvious examples are mismatched-brain things. You can see it in some gay men if you see a couple of them; it's very obvious that one of them has a "female" brain and one of them doesn't (the former may or may not have a lisp, but the latter won't).

Of course, this is all hidden by the discourse and the letters, and it also tends to run into being really insulting to tomboys and tomgirls which are only described by "must have received the wrong brain" in action, but not in thought (or perhaps, if privately in thought, they're reasonable enough to keep it to themselves). But I haven't found a better way to describe this effect.

The anti-racism movement started well before the gay rights movement, so by this reasoning we should be in the middle of a massive backlash among the youth against any sort of anti-racism movements. It's fair to say that we don't have that.

I think a big difference to keep in mind is that you can choose your own gender (according to the very in-group of gender minded folks) but you cannot choose your own race.

I think that part of the backlash - to whatever extent it exists - is that the the internal logic of lgbT activists is so flimsy and self-contradictory that people are essentially pointing out "none of the rules are real and I kind of feel like you're just in this to browbeat me into blind submission to .... whatever the hell you're on about"

Anti-racism at the very least does hold to obvious and immutable attributes as its fundamental categorical function. Is it a fair / reasonable distinction? That's for another debate.

I think a big difference to keep in mind is that you can choose your own gender (according to the very in-group of gender minded folks) but you cannot choose your own race.

This is not my parsing of the dogma the annoying transactivists are trying to push (unsuccessfully in the UK, even in left-wing circles, though by most of what I read on the internet they are succeeding in Blue America). If you take "gender identity" seriously then people don't get to choose their own gender identity - by the time you go through puberty your "gender identity" is an objective fact about you, and is fixed. The claim isn't "you can choose your own gender", it's "we should believe as a matter of course people who claim to have a gender that doesn't match their biological sex". Transactivists are comfortable with the idea that some people are trans (as a matter of objective fact about their "gender identity") and either don't know it yet or are lying about it due to closeting, and a few of them are even willing to admit that in principle a cis man could pretend to be a trans woman for nefarious purposes (Jonathan/Jessica Yaniv is widely suspected to be an example) - they just think that there are so few of them that letting them get away with it causes less harm than gatekeeping actual trans people.

You get to choose your own preferred pronoun. But transactivists who stop to think don't think agree that this isn't claiming a gender identity, it's just a pronoun. The easy case is that not everyone who is nonbinary uses they/them pronouns, and not everyone who uses they/them pronouns has the same non-binary gender identity. The harder case is that closet cases and trolls exist.

In this model, race, like gender identity, is an objective fact about people. The difference is that it is externally observable, so you don't need to trust people who claim to be black. Kicking Rachel Dolezal out of "Black" doesn't put the blackness of actual black-skinned black people into question in they way kicking Yaniv out of "Trans" or "Woman" puts the transwomanness of non-passing transwomen into question.

I agree "there is an objective fact about people that is completely unobservable externally and which ingroup never, ever lie about" is a silly thing to believe. But I think transactivists actually believe this - they don't believe that genders are clothes you can take on and put off. If you get an older transactivist drunk, they may even admit that they find tumblrgendered snowflakes annoying too.

so by this reasoning we should be in the middle of a massive backlash among the youth against any sort of anti-racism movements

Black Trumpists/Republicans seem to skew younger but not enough resolution to say it's "the yutes" specifically.

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