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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Do you think it is deceptive to share exclusively true outrageous anecdotes that might be representative of 1%, 10% or 99% of the total source population, without specifying or even investigating how prevalent (at least to you) they are?

I don't know.

Let me put it like this. Imagine a scale between complete information and zero information, and the morality of sharing anecdotes in either.

In the world of perfect information, where we know for a fact that say, 0.01% of teachers are pushing gender nonsense on kindergarteners, all the material your school uses to talk about sexuality in middle school and highschool are public, and you can count on the administrators and teachers to be honest with you about how your child is doing, any fears you may have over an anecdote you read about crazy shit going on in a school can be easily put to rest. A person sharing crazy anecdotes nonstop might catch a few people in their trap, but most people would probably trust their local school having seen their teaching materials and curriculum first hand. Additionally, the person sharing crazy anecdotes in a nation of 330m people, with full knowledge of the actual statistics, knows full well what they are doing.

Then you have the world of zero information. Where the schools operate in a cloud of secrecy, refuse to disclose anything, there are no statistics, and nobody will talk to you. Suddenly those anecdotes carry a lot more weight. In the absence of any other evidence, the anecdotes are all you have. Additionally, the person spreading those anecdotes has no clue whether they are ginning up fear of a minority of horrible instances that have come to light, or they are exposing the tip of the iceberg!

Right now, especially near me, we operate closer to a world of zero information than perfect information, and it's the schools own damned fault. Things have gone so damned far parents are trying FOIA request the materials schools are using to teach gender to their children, and the schools and the courts deny their request! Locally our own schools get caught lying again, and again, and again, and again. And in this light, if anecdotes are all you have, it's the schools own damned fault for their secrecy and deception.