This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Sound public policy requires that the movement that pushed such grotesquely unsound policy be vanquished, lest it continue to impose unsound policy on us. As such, the single most important thing that can be done in response to this is what @Folamh3 is doing.
You're trying to convince him to put out a fire while the kid with matches and a can of gasoline is still right there going nyuck nyuck nyuck. I get it, the fire is a problem, but putting it out doesn't help until Mr. Pyromaniac is down for the count.
Sound public policy about prison housing might require trans activism to be vanquished, but sound public policy about crime does not, unless possibly transwomen are actually the source of a lot of crime, which we will never know if we follow Folamh3's path. He is literally prioritizing "owning" his outgroup over understanding the sources of criminal activity. He isn't putting out fires; he is making it harder for firemen to do their jobs.
I think you’re putting words into @Folamh3’s mouth. He is advocating for the recognition that yes, you can put out fires, but until you catch the serial arsonists you’ll still get houses getting torched on the daily, even on the same houses!
A sound public policy that is agnostic to trans activism may be sound policy in the abstract, but 1) it will directly contradict trans activist ideology and 2) it will mobilise a backlash from the progressives who will shit on the “sound policy” even harder than before. He isn’t asking for the firefighters to stop doing their jobs (and I have no clue how you could interpret it as that), but asking for the police and criminal court syste to step up their game.
To try to clear things up, I believe what he is aiming for is the recognition that sound public policy is incompatible with our current strain of trans activism a la:
Proposition. Current trans activism (and local public policy) asserts the primacy of self-ID, such that the individual’s assertion of gender self-identity trumps any other measure, including biological sex and any judgement by other people that determines otherwise.
Proposition. Individuals can be deceitful or mistaken in their declaration of gender identity.
Statement. (1,2) There is no method of clarifying whether any particular self-ID is genuine, mistaken, or malicious within trans activist policy (including that adopted by organisations and governments) and ideology, even when such claims are farcical.
Proposition. There is incentive for criminals to lie about their gender identity (broadly, for better conditions and forms of access to other prisoners while imprisoned).
Statement. (3,4) Criminals will lie about their gender identity in order to gain advantage, and trans activist policy adopted by institutions are ideologically unable to distinguish genuine profession of gender identity and bad faith profession, even in blatantly obvious cases, unless they repudiate (1) and reject trans activist policy (and incur the wrath of trans activists + allies).
Proposition. (2) Sound public policy regarding incarceration requires accurate information regarding gender identity (and/or sex).
Statement. (5,6) Sound public policy regarding incarceration is incompatible with trans activist policy, and trans activism more broadly. Ergo, to care about the crime issue, you have to care about the trans issue.
and that you are, for whatever reason, strenuously trying to avoid any association between sound public policy and trans activism by trying to claim that Folamh3’s statement taken as a whole is actually an endorsement of proposition 1 taken as a statement (???) rather than the entire thing that ends as a criticism of 1, and I am really not sure why you are doing that. You seem to be arguing against the same system Folamh3 is, rather than disagreeing with Folamh3, but for some reason don’t want to admit the same? It just reads so bizarrely.
I explicitly said, in the very post you are responding to, that "Sound public policy about prison housing might require trans activism to be vanquished," so that simply is not true.
Meanwhile, I said that "sound public policy about crime does not. Remember, the original post was about the causes of crime, specifically that transwomen have a high propensity for sex crimes. And I have said about fifty times that I was referring to policy about reducing crime. Yet, in your rather lengthy response, never once do you mention that.
I think I understand now. I think for most others, sound public policy about incarceration is indivisible from sound public policy about crime, because one is the social consequence of the other, and so there is a clear (if indirect) path of causality for how differences in incarceration can potentially lead to differences in crime.
In either case I don’t think you are arguing against @Folamh3’s case as much as you are participating in a different argument, one contained within the OP, that Folamh3 didn’t actually intend to participate in (he was explicitly focused on issues of incarceration, I think, unlike the OP)? In that case I would only take issue with that you involved them in the entire thing, since I don’t think they made any comment on the actual crime bit (and we can talk about issues with incarceration separately, if not entirely divorced from, issues with crime). I don’t really understand why he has to be wrong for you to be right; your claim and his seems orthogonal, and I also don’t really see any great utility difference in trying to address one without the other.
So, to tread some new ground: would it be possible that you might agree “sound public policy about crime” also might require trans activism to be “vanquished”, if on slightly different grounds?
So, according to you: we can acknowledge that there are fake transwomen in female prisons. And more importantly, we can note that the crimes that those people committed were not committed by transwomen. But that is already a denial of self-ID, because those crimes would’ve been committed by women under trans-activist definitions and language! If we want to collect good statistics and formulate good public policy, then, we have to exercise discernment in how we categorise perpetrators and “acknowledge that [those crimes] were not committed by transwomen”.
So, even entirely separate from real transwomen, formulation of public policy requires the rejection of trans activist policy, because to formulate sensible public policy regarding crime, we would need to be able to identify perpetrators in a way that is at odds with self-ID, even if we don’t care about trans activist policy one way or the other. In other words, wouldn’t trans activist ideology and policy regarding self-ID simply be at odds with policy about crime, simply because it hinders sound thinking and legislation about the issue?
In fact, isn’t this exactly what you are accusing Folamh3 of doing?
I am sure there are more arguments along this vein, but I have to run now.
Maybe, but I would be more convinced if a single person had made an argument that doing what Folamh3 advocates would help us to understand and/or fight crime. I might have missed it, but I don't believe there was one.
Well, yes, that was my original point. I said that Folamh3's position only makes sense if you only care about the culture war, not about crime policy.
I really do appreciate your taking the time to engage thoughtfully, but I have to confess that I find this quite frustrating, because this is exactly what I have been arguing all along. You are 100% agreeing with me.
In contrast, it is the opposite of what Folamh3 said in the comment I replied to. He doesn't believe in self-ID, but he nevertheless said: "Now you have to accept the bad actors as members of your own group. You made this bed, now you have to lie in it," which is an endorsement of self-ID (well, not an endorsement of self-ID, but rather an insistence on using it in this instance) even though it hinders "formulat[ing] sensible policy regarding crime." Worse yet, he seems to be motivated solely by a desire to "own" trans activists (because I can't think of an alternative explanation for the "you made your bed" statement, esp given his general hostility to self-ID.
Please note that not once have I endorsed self-ID, certainly not as a general concept. Again, this is rather frustrating. This entire string has been me wanting to talk about the methodology of crime policy (starting with the initial post), and everyone else insisting on talking about trans activist rhetoric, a topic which I find tedious in the extreme, on both sides.
I understand that you don’t endorse self-ID; I interpreted you as saying all along that you thought there wasn’t much of a point in focusing on the trans issue because it doesn’t have an impact on crime policy, whereas it is directly important to incarceration policy, as here:
And
And more, I think.
Whereas I would argue that sound public policy about crime relies on a heuristic that people can lie about gender identity (and thus e.g. inflate statistics re:trans women being sex offenders, for instance) in informing crime rates, and thus rejecting the trans activist idea of self-ID. In particular, yes our ability to get closer to understanding the causes of crimes is compromised if we intentionally miscategorise criminals, but trans activist self-ID policy requires us to miscategorise criminals or violate its precepts.
Which sounds awfully like “sound public policy [regarding crime] does in fact require trans activism to be vanquished”, because under trans activist policy we can’t have a sane conversation about it, even if it isn’t as directly related as the incarceration issue.
Here I think we interpret this differently. I thought it was clear that it meant “Progressive-pushed policy has created predictable and predicted incentives for bad actors. Now progressives should own this and admit that they did an oopsie, and that the bad actors were in fact supported and empowered by them (and that they are conceived to be a progressive in-group), and reap the related societal censure from it.”
Or something to that effect.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not trans activism, leftist activism, and all its tentacles. It must be stopped on every front together.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link