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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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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.