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 -
No I don't. You're the one making a non-obvious positive claim; the burden of proof is yours. You have to prove relevance, not ask your opponent to prove irrelevance.
Also, I didn't mean 'Ziz's biological sex had no causal influence on her crimes'. I meant 'Ziz's biological sex is not of public interest in and of itself once Ziz's crimes have been established'. If someone picks a person in a crowd at random and asks you to bet on whether they've committed violent assault, sure, you should give slightly higher odds if it's a man. But if he's already holding a bloody knife and trying to hop the border, it's tendentious at best to call everyone's attention to the fact that he's a man as if it's some crucial point of the case.
I am struggling to word a reply to this that doesn't sound like 'right, so you're just a heartless monster, got it'. I guess I could make a desperate appeal to some kind of decency or compassion within you by pointing out that 0.3% of 350 million people is still a staggering amount of people. Or point out that you're discounting the uncountable number of people who would counterfactually have transitioned and led much happier lives if the option had been on the table. Or ask what makes you so sure that the current arrangement ruins more than 0.3% of the population's lives - if hundreds of thousands of oppressed trans people's lives are an acceptable sacrifice, why not hundreds of thousands of cancelled and witch-hunted right-wing curmudgeons? But frankly I don't hold high hopes of getting through to you.
Genuine question - in what way(s) are trans people in the United States (and other Anglophone nations) "oppressed"?
I'm not saying they are now, I was bouncing off of @Fruck talking about the days when things were "fine for everyone except 0.3% of the population". I think going back to those days would be prima facie unacceptable. Fruck disagrees.
Can you define oppression then please? Also for clarification, while I don't think it would be unacceptable to go back to the previous situation, I do think it would be impossible - my point was that you don't need to imagine bizarre dystopian situations to handle something we used to handle fine until trans ideology was used as a wedge issue to tear the country apart.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
IGI has already said most of the things I would say in response to your core argument, and much more eloquently as usual, although I would add that if your idea of heartless monstrosity is opposing compelled speech, societal gaslighting and the forced restructuring of society to mildly benefit a minority who appear to largely want it for a sexual fetish, if my choices are heartless monster and deceitful snake, then watch out Tokyo, I'm a heartless monster.
In reality, I am not a heartless monster, I was just raised by manipulators so I can easily see through emotional blackmail. And I am well aware you would prefer right wing curmudgeons suffer rather than trans people, I lived through the past decade where progressives enacted policies to ensure just that. I feel like I've already used the word ridiculous too much in this conversation, but it is most appropriate for the idea that you can 'get through' to someone and convince them to make their own life miserable on the off chance it benefits strangers who hate them. Which is precisely why the trans ideologues never bothered to win over the public and immediately employed escalating coercion tactics. And when those tactics were called out, they employed more. And more. And more.
And please don't respond asking 'are you really suffering?' or the equivalent. My being forced to say trans person (instead of the quicker, more natural and poetic tranny) in this den of witches seems about equal to the suffering trans people suffer when someone misgenders them. I can threaten to kill myself if it's still not enough though.
More options
Context Copy link
What about the odds that they are MTF? Are those higher? Surely they must be just because of the comorbidities.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, do they not?
People don't seem to have this sort of reaction when the oppressed minority is victims of vaccine injury. Then we're all heartless monsters.
At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself if you're willing to upend social order and cause immense problems in the name of 0.3% of the population. Because there's vastly, vastly more right-wing curmedgeons than there are trans people. However large the overlap may be.
I've said it here before and I'll say it again: the best social arrangement for marginals is to be politely glossed over and politically inconsequential. Because then maybe people can actually try to solve your problems instead of recruiting you for causes. Queering all of society instead is a fool's errand, a reckless fool at that.
In the sense of justfying acceptable sacrifices when there are people tied to the tracks and the train is arriving. In the long term, however, what you want to do is try to untie people, stop whatever supervillain has been kidnapping them, build fences around train tracks, get train drivers with better eyesight, etc.
When we're talking about real human lives being ruined by the thousand, 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few' must never excuse complacency. A status quo in which tens of thousands of people are deeply unhappy with their lot with no hope of betterment is not acceptable in the long term. Until a thousand generations of our brightest, best-intentioned, most open-mined thinkers declare with absolute certainty that there is literally no other way to order a society that would alleviate their suffering, we must not stop searching. Even in the event that other, even more urgent causes must take priority in the active search, we must at least remember what is owed, and keep firmly in mind that the current state of affairs is "the least terrible outrage we could muster", not "fine".
(For what it's worth, I also think the Left's attitude on this point has been scandalous. How they could claim to support bodily autonomy, and have so little regard for it w. regards to vaccine mandates, is beyond me.)
Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with individual tragedy more than you might think, especially in this case.
But the problem is that, as we have been reminded harshly in these past few years, you can't run your society in the service of marginals to the exclusion of everything else. It just doesn't work. Not even for the marginals themselves.
In fact, it is in the service of searching for betterment that I recommend others and myself to discretion. Not complacency, discretion. Indeed nothing has made it more impossible to study Gender Dysphoria and its still mysterious mechanisms and causes than turning transgenderism into a social movement. And I'm immensely frustrated that I now have to in every instance ask myself, reading any study on the topic, whether or not the author is trying to con me, to the service of whichever side.
It didn't used to be like this. And stupid shit like these language games over pronouns made it so.
We're indeed not at "fine", we're at "some people had their kids taken away from them over this". This sort of behavior is not very popular, and even less so when you're a visible but extremely tiny minority.
I'm not hypothesizing that things were better when we didn't care so much about this issue. I'm telling you. Because I cared then, and I care now, and I can see the difference.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link