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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Let's say I brought up being raped as a child in a discussion about abortion or parents' rights or something. Any individual should be able to have precise intellectual conversations about that, one with strong disagreement, clear claims, and details - in principle, right? But unless you frequent 4chan or WPD, that's just not gonna happen - it's a taboo topic and saying anything other than "that, and 6 degrees of kevin bacon from it, are cursed ground and must be righteously condemned lest we harm the victim" is just not okay.

In order to discuss the topic, we need to consider how the your teacher telling you to wear girls' underwear might, actually, be good. (note the immense cringe it takes to type that out - i'm basically a pedophile for saying it!). Sure, it isn't, but there are multiple ways something can be bad! And not being able to consider that it might be good means, essentially, you can't discriminate between the ways that it's bad - because "realizing it's not bad in one way" and "realizing it's good" are, in the moment, rather hard to tell apart. After all, if the reasons you previously believed it's bad are mostly wrong ... And there isn't any "uh, it's still actually bad though" you can fall back on to ensure you're safe from "dangerous questions", because that's just an empty claim that prevents you from finding the real reasons.

Notably, that teacher doesn't actually want to have sex with you. At all. Which makes it ... not ... grooming. And not pedophilic. At all!

It can still be bad for being sexually degenerate or anti-nature or a simulacra of appearances or something, there's lots of approaches. But it's not pedophilia. And if it's not pedophilia, why is it grooming?

But if you think it's a serious issue worth being emotional about, why can't you come out against teachers doing it?

And this is just a struggle session. You need to personally condemn the outgroup, or you're as bad as them! What? What does this have to do with ... figuring out why something is happening, what its causes are, why it matters? Why does any person need to "come out against" anything? This is a discussion forum, not a cult.

Do you actually think it's bad? Why? Isn't it a good thing to nurture and encourage children's "gender expression"? If we look at all the teachers on Reddit talking about "hatching their little eggs" by doing this kind of thing, they and their supporters obviously don't think it's wrong.

And you are using a much narrower definition of "grooming" than anyone ever used during Me too. Why is that? Why do you constantly manipulate definitions like this? What do you even gain from it?

Do you actually think it's bad?

If I gave you a representative sample of my statements about trans people across all platforms, you'd recoil in horror at how much of a disgusting reactionary I am.

Please stop the personal accusations. It doesn't matter at all if I'm morally disturbing for wanting to groom trans people or anything. Let's just discuss the actual physical events that occur, the people who are transitioning, the circumstances under which they do, motivations, effects, etc.