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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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On the other hand in 2024, the left-leaning person is far more likely to have non-white people, LGBT, or other groups that are effected by conservative policies, so it's not a shock that now they have a closer relationship with those folks, they're less likely to be seen as just arguments.

Like, why do I want to be personally friendly with people who want to make the lives of my other friends worse?

This flows both ways. Politics was interested in me personally in 2020 in a way that it wasn't before, and also in a way that disproportionately affected nerdy activities like board gaming. Why would I want to be friends with people who want to make the lives of myself and my other friends worse by supporting lockdowns, which were far more egregious than the average social conservative's demands not least because it also involves partially criminalizing homosexuality anyway? Well, it turns out that I don't really have a choice, because 90% of the people around me want to make my life worse, and the option to join a gaming community with a consensus that opposes lockdowns doesn't exist.

Am I'm banging my usual drum again? Yes. But there's a point: You've given no reason why board games should have gone left to protect LGBT friends who suffered from conservative policies, instead of going right to protect the LGBT friends (hello) who suffered from progressive policies. To go even further, the entire nerdy ecosystem depends on capitalism, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly to function. It also has a bit of an obsession with everything military. All things that have (for one reason or another) clustered into Conservatism. If nerdiness is going to have a political slant, why is that slant not for it's natural ally? If anyone's going to get politically purged, then why not the Communists whose political ambitions are mostly incompatible with the continued existence of these nerdy activities?

Is that a rhetorical question, or do you really not understand why a ban on homosexuality qua homosexuality is taken more personally by a leftist than a ban on homosexual sex by way of banning all assembly of non-household-members, regardless of sexuality or indeed the intent to have sex, with a purpose that doesn't stem from decrying them besides?

Yes, the actual problem with the Confederacy was that they didn't enslave enough whites, and the actual problem with Nazis is that they didn't gas enough Germans. If only they did that, they'd have been goodies. Hurrah equality!

Rights can't work from a basis of equality. Was the solution to gay marriage was actually to prohibit all marriage, and sodomy to instead criminalise all sex? No. To be even more flippant, gay people were already legally allowed to have straight marriage, and straight people were already prohibited from gay marriage.

You do realise that I am a LGBT person who was pissed off at the government de facto recriminalizing homosexuality with lockdowns? The bracketed hello might have been too subtle... Leftists are okay with certain forms of bans on homosexuality, but that's because the aesthetics of LGBT rights takes priority over actually giving us any rights, because it turns out that they in fact do want the government to care about what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom. Hence it's okay to violate our rights as long as it "doesn't stem from decrying them", whatever that's supposed to mean (though really it still is decrying us because it's about reducing humans to disease vectors on a spreadsheet in general).

And to get out from the weeds and back to the point: It's trivially incorrect that nerdy political purges are based around some sort of propensity to make the lives of their friends worse, or damage the relevant hobby. The target prioritization is totally wrong for that to be the motive. Lockdowns actively criminalized in-person Boardgaming, Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering (last I checked, lockdowns killed paper Standard), Wargaming, Conventions, and all other nerdy face-to-face activities. And politically, those were supported more by the left than the right. Therefore, if you're going to use attacking friends and their ability to participate in any particular nerdy activity to justify nerdy political purges, there's your actual target. Anything else would be ad-hoc excuses to disguise an ulterior motive for purges.

I'd be way more comfortable playing with a social conservative than a mask addict, even if because of demographics this is very unlikely to actually happen. At least I could trust they'd still be interested in playing when ligma 28 rolls around, and they wouldn't be motivated to call the police on me for suggesting it.

You do realise that I am a LGBT person who was pissed off at the government de facto recriminalizing homosexuality with lockdowns?

Why do lockdowns de facto criminalize homosexuality? By that logic, shouldn't lockdowns have criminalized all sexuality, homosexual or otherwise?

To add onto what Tophattingson said, the logic there is very much of the same vein that the joke "the law forbids the rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges" is skewering.

De facto criminalizing all sexualities also means criminalizing homosexuality. Equal treatment cannot be the basis for LGBT rights, because it offers the opportunity to equally give everyone no rights. The demand of LGBT rights when it comes to homosexuality being legal is that what two consenting adults get up to in the bedroom is none of the state's business. I believe that principle should hold even when a spicy cold exists. Anything less, and we risk specific criminalization of homosexuality in response to a future pandemic.

To be more specific about the restrictions that were actually imposed, they criminalized having sex with people who are not from your household because they criminalized meeting other households indoors, regardless of heterosexual or homosexual. There are reasons this might disproportionately impact LGBT people.

Huh? Last I checked the latter is exactly how systemic isms work, and they're consider bad enough to riot over.

Last I checked systemic isms are isms because they affect the ismed demographic disproportionately highly, and that's the central definition of systemic isms.

Well gay men as a cohort have a lot more sex than anyone else statistically speaking as I recall -- so I guess their sex lives were disproportionately impacted?