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I did not make sweeping generalizations about a group I dislike. I made a generalization about all Americans. I think it is necessary to talk about society as a whole, and when one talks about society as a whole generalizations are necessary. I made some effort to be as precise as possible.
I am neither engaging in "boo outgroup", or asking "can you believe what Those People did this week", and I think I did, in fact, go to considerable effort to contextualize and steel-man the relevant viewpoint. A major politician attempting, within their sphere of influence, to criminalize the way half the country raises their kids is not someone saying something wacky on twitter.
I appreciate that you do not like the argument I'm making, but I think you should actually attempt to engage with it, at least enough to follow the thread. When I say:
...I am explicitly arguing that Law does not operate the way you assume it does. Why would you respond to a claim that it doesn't matter if the law is passed or not by pointing out that the law probably won't pass?
Rather than hammer out another twenty-k increasingly frustrated characters, can I ask that you do me a favor? Just for the sake of wild speculation, imagine for a moment that I am not actually attempting to radicalize other Reds, incite violence, or generally hate-jacking it over the idea of large-scale death and misery with my fellow rage-monsters. Imagine that I'm actually trying, very imperfectly, to convince you specifically that you're wrong about something really, really important: that some of the core assumptions you and people like you rely on for your political and social reasoning actually have a really big and very hazardous blind spot in them. Assume that I suck to an unbelievable degree at this, and that probably says woeful things about my character, but it's just barely possible that there's some valuable signal buried in the above shit-heap of noise. Then read it again, and if you're up to it, give me a short summary of the argument you think I'm trying to make.
...If it helps, here's a couple short statements to try to highlight some of the thought process.
Politicians propose measures they think will be popular with their base.
What we are voting on is vastly more important than how we vote
What people want has a vast impact on both what laws are proposed, what laws are passed, and how those laws are implemented.
Americans generally are converging on a belief that the biggest political problem they have is that the other Tribe is bad.
Assessments of social badness and punishments for that badness are inevitable and necessary for society to function; they cannot be eliminated.
Politics exists in large part to assess and punish social badness.
Social badness is a values judgement
Americans generally strongly disagree over even very basic values judgements.
Okay. If a law like this actually passes and starts getting enforced, will you reconsider the relevance of the above post?
I am well aware that such people exist. I do not think such people existing actually explains why a state-level politician is proposing the criminalization of non-affirmation. I do not think you can demonstrate that the standard Trans activist line is sufficiently well-evidenced and documented to make a law like this a remotely reasonable proposal. Tribal animosity of exactly the sort that exists and is endemic throughout the culture can in fact explain it quite easily.
Guzman is motivated by some combination of political ambition and desire to be a Good Person. For her, "good person" is defined by her tribe, which is Blue. Blue Tribe holds that Red anti-LGBT bigotry causes vast harm and suffering, and that preventing and/or punishing this bigotry helps make a better world, that the world will be a better place when Red hostility to LGBT culture has been eliminated, and that actively working to achieve that elimination is a good thing. If you are under the impression that this is an exaggeration or somehow unfair, please say so, and I and likely many others will happily bury your concerns under a mountain of probative examples.
She literally believes my community is built on endemic child abuse. The fact that this idea would have been an absurdly uncharitable caricature less than a decade ago demonstrates that she and her community rapidly self-modified to believe this. If you think they did this based on the calm, reasoned assessment of all available evidence, culminating in a cool-headed, dispassionate weighing of the policies available to them, please, by all means say so. I think they did it because of a runaway spiral of tribal signaling, the same spiral that has resulted in a very long list of other absurd and disastrous mistakes. I think I can describe exactly how that spiral has operated, and even show you the specific milestones of its advancement.
But yes, to sum up, I think an overwhelming majority of the current LGBT issues are, in fact, about picking fights with Reds, not about finding a reasonable level of accommodation where we can live together. LGBT activists in this very community have laid out how and why picking such fights is their explicit plan, and how they have no intention of coexisting with Red values at all, ever. If that's not good enough for you, please tell me what level of evidence you're willing to consider sufficient.
You are responding to a comment where a senior state-level politician flat-out states that yes, she is absolutely out to get me, because she thinks saying so will be popular with her base and help her win further offices. Your argument for why this should not be taken seriously is that she probably won't get the law passed, because her party doesn't dominate the particular state in question.
Okay. So what happens when they do dominate? Do you think this is all just posturing, and they'd never really do it because that would be crazy? What happens if they decide that no, actually, they're gonna try it?
You could not possibly be more wrong. I endeavor to behave in a fashion that requires no justification, and to the extent I fail there is no excuse. My hatred is unjustifiable, flatly evil, and something I am actively attempting to get a rein on.
I don't care if you disagree with me. One of us is very badly wrong. I think it's you. One version of the dream is that one of us realizes the error of our ways, and all these arguments resolve in an instant into a joyful, shared communion in the truth, and in this version it genuinely does not matter to me who was wrong and who was right. The other version of the dream is that I scream "I told you so, you stupid motherfuckers" at all of you in the last ten minutes before the lights go out. That last part, admittedly, is not terribly mature, but after much consideration it seems better than a lot of the other options.
Avoid the problem by declining to live in Blue areas or exposing my kids to blue organizations. Coordinate political power along explicitly tribal interests so that we can secure a livable future free of Blue oppression. Attempt to get enough resources to successfully bypass doom if that coordination fails. Hope for a miracle, get on with living life in the meantime.
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I wish you the best, and while it's ludicrous and perhaps a failure of imagination on my part, I fundamentally believe this is the attraction of Conflict Theory.
Unlikely. The world is more complex than "Everything is 100% explainable by conflict theory" and "my country(wo)men are saintly altruists who take no selfish acts," and the truth is likely in the middle. The US isn't headed towards glorious fully automated luxury gay space communism, nor is it headed towards apocalyptic prepper wasteland where we fight over bottlecaps, it'll shamble along a good while longer.
Well, segregation is your right as a private citizen I suppose. This country only works insofar as we put in the work to have hard discussions across the chasm of differing worldviews, and I'd encourage you to not give up on trying to communicate or understand or empathize, but I suppose it's better than most of the alternatives.
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Apologies upfront, but this will probably be my only reply in this thread. Not because I don't care, but because I don't have the time to exchange essays and frankly given the timestamps of your replies it's probably best for the both of us.
Alright, I read it again. I'm still incensed. I'll expand on why in a moment, but we can go piece by piece.
You did.
You don't get to open with an angry rant about a law being proposed by a Virginian democrat, pepper it with mentions about blues hating reds and wanting to harm them, wrap it up with 'actually, these people are groomers and I consider them an immediate and serious threat to my children', stuff the same argument you've been making for as long as I've been around in the middle, and claim that you aren't waging the culture war. Out of all the replies to your post, how many were interested in an academic discussion about the finer points of the law being downstream of cultural values versus people wanting to bitch about Thing Blue Person Did This Week? I'd count one for the former, almost everyone else in the latter. While I'm sure my reading comprehension skills are subpar for the local community, everyone is responding to the 'hatejacking,' not just me. You just don't care because the other contrarian, totally-independent critical thinkers agree with your take.
Your steel-man:
Wow, really? So your half of the country uses pronouns given at birth, which this law would criminalize, and the other half of the country calls their children ze/zir? Literally the entirety of blue tribe has trans children, and the parenting style of >99% of red tribe families with cis children will be criminalized? That's your steel-man?
But whatever. Like I said, the rules don't matter, and even if they did, nobody would care what I think.
My best summary of your argument, parts of which I agree with and have made myself:
Laws are irrelevant, what matters are the upstream values of the people writing them, the people voting for the people writing them, the people enforcing them and the people willing to obey them. A group of people with no shared values who hate each other and defect constantly who adopt the United States constitution and system will not become the United States; conversely, if we memory-holed the constitution and judicial system overnight, people in respectable communities here would still put back their shopping carts, mow their lawns, send their kids to school and so on and so forth. There's plenty of happy little enclaves throughout history who lived your Good Life without our laws, and plenty of shithole countries that imitate our system with poor results.
Our values have diverged so far that we can no longer have productive debates, discussions or peaceful coexistence. Life is now a zero-sum game dictated by how best to harm the outgroup. In short, Conflict Theory.
You've made this argument repeatedly with a different event du jour tacked on, usually a bad thing that you cite as evidence to support your worldview. Usually, if you'll forgive the armchair psychology and repeated assumptions about your state of mind, something you're personally incensed by.
Because literally everyone responding to you is hyperventilating about the government criminalizing the parenting of the entire Red Tribe. Because someone needs to pump the brakes, because someone needs to at least culture war in the opposite direction if we have to be waging the culture war in the first place.
I reject what you're saying both because 1) I disagree, and believe in the decency and character of the vast majority of my fellow citizens, including you and your fellow rage-monsters and 2) even if you were right, I'm not going to accept it, shrug and go back to scrolling on reddit while my country burns. I'm going to rage against the dying of the light even as you laugh and say 'told you so stupid motherfucker' the same way I'm raging at you now, I'm going to enlist in the armed forces, run for office, start a goddamn substack, argue on the internet, have a family of 6 or whatever it takes to make the world a better place because we are not just passive bystanders, we are what makes this country what it is. There's always going to be freeloaders, cynics and rage-monsters. Spreading cynicism and conflict theory begets more cynicism and conflict; regardless of the truth value of your statements I believe that you're making the problem worse.
Do you remember what you said years ago when I asked why you still bother to post around here? Perhaps I'm insufferable, naive, self-righteous and overzealous but I prefer my answer to what I remember yours was, which amounted to 'it helps pass the time.' If only I could find it.
Hardly, and the inverse law already exists in Texas. I can fairly easily mentally model a steel-man where both Texan politicians and Guzman are doing what they think is best for the children. Also, the law doesn't matter, remember?
It would take some truly titanic event to turn me as cynical as you. Like concentration camps, civil war, a real coup or living in Russia.
You flip between Guzman and Blue tribe as a whole depending on which is more convenient, and project the former onto the latter to justify you writing off half the country. You're rehashing this conversation. Again, you ignore the majority of values that we do share and catastrophize over the marginal cases of trans children with deeply conservative children. In a country of over 300 million, I have no doubt there are a few hundred cases of miserable trans children and angry parents that you could make a probative mountain to bury me under. I suspect you're less interested in the mountain 300 million people tall where this isn't the case.
Not to say I don't take your concerns seriously, or minimize the suffering of those people, or argue that they should be charged with a felony and thrown in jail. But I'm not about to lose my faith in western civilization or this nation because we don't have a great solution for this problem.
I think there's a world where trans people face more acceptance than they do now, that surgery and medicine improve their ability to transition more seamlessly, and where people come around not because blue politicians rammed it down their throat but because they don't feel threatened by it anymore. If there are indeed people attracted to being trans for persecution complex reasons, the total number of trans people goes down. And this is congruent with what I think you were saying above; if trans people aren't viewed as a threat anymore values will change organically and a law like this will have broader majority support.
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