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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2428 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Why is LGBTQ so important for liberals in terms of foreign policy?

For example, when debating Russia, arguments often amount to Russia is evil because they aren't onboard with pride. Russia isn't putting LGBTQAASASFDSFDSFDSFDSFSD people in concentration camps, they simply seem not to have pride flags while having a don't ask don't tell attitude. Why does that infuriate liberals that much?

Countries in the middle east can engage in all sorts of questionable behaviour but, often it is a lack of LGBTQ flags that infuriates the left. Again, they aren't mass-executing LGBTQ people or having concentrations camps, they simply don't celebrate it or want it rubbed in people's faces.

It seems like existence of pride parades seems to be a key benchmark for judging the moral virtue of a country. Why is this benchmark so central?

So, can you elaborate what "want it rubbed in people's faces" means? Because that's probably where you're going to find the answer to your question, since "not rubbing it in people's faces" includes

  • making it illegal for individuals to "promote homosexuality"
  • making same-sex couples and households headed by same-sex couples ineligible for the legal protections available to opposite-sex couples
  • not allowing transgender adults to change their legal gender and
  • banning all gender-affirming care
  • making it illegal for people suffering from gender dysphoria to adopt children
  • changing the status of marriages by a trans individual with a person who shares the same birth sex as them to nullified
  • defining violent criminal acts carried out against LGBT people as criminal offences under Russian law such that fact that crimes which are motivated by the sexual orientation or gender identity of the victim is not considered an aggravating factor when the court determines the sentence
  • providing no anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people and having no designation for hate crimes based on sexual orientation and gender identity
  • deeming the distribution of "materials promoting LGBTQ relationships" to minors, which was then updated in 2022 to extend to apply to anyone regardless of age, thus making any expression deemed a promotion of non-traditional sexual relationships illegal
  • ruling the international LGBTQ movement to be "extremist", outlawing it in the country, the the proceeding day sending security forces to raid bars, male saunas and nightclubs across Moscow
  • ruling homosexual acts between consenting males were against the law until 1993
  • never approving a request to hold a gay pride rally

Hopefully you can see why that would infuriate anyone, much less liberals, and how it appears a little more than "simply don't celebrate it".

The problem with this is exactly what you've done here- complain about things liberals-as-in-freedom would normally have problems with yet have the intention of smuggling a bunch of progressive idpol stuff in.

In this case, you've conflated standard free speech issues with "and that's why they need special protection" (which in practice is only ever applied in a way that favors Western progressives- we can argue over is-ought, but the best way to avoid abuse of a carve-out is to not have one in the first place) and "actually yes, the government should pretend men are women" (antisocial behaviors have a bimodal distribution).

So denying the frame to the progressives by 'ruling the international LGBTQ movement to be "extremist"' is, trivially, the correct answer- the solution if your nation is looking to make relations between straights and everyone else better is always something homegrown.

I genuinely don’t understand what you’re trying to say because I don’t know what “liberals as in freedom” or “standard free speech issues”. Can you repeat yourself with different vocabulary?

Hopefully you can see why that would infuriate anyone, much less liberals

I wholeheartedly support every single bullet point you have here, and so do a whole lot of people in the US.

I wholeheartedly don't support every single bullet point I have here, and so do a whole lot of other people in the US, too. I suppose we cancel eachother out.

The question is whether those things would 'infuriate anyone' and the answer is clearly not.

That is one answer. I think another answer can be that people think they aren't infuriated by those things but, in fact, are.

Would you say your argument is that there's a consensus on these points, even if a few people disagree?

I think another answer can be that people think they aren't infuriated by those things but, in fact, are.

What's the logic here? Are you arguing that people like @TitaniumButterfly are lying when they claim to not be infuriated? Is it some form of false consciousness that would be dispelled were these bullet points implemented locally?

I don’t understand what you mean by “consensus on these points”.

I don’t think TitaniumButterfly is lying; I think they do believe they’re not outraged. But I believe a dive into the logic behind why they believe so will reveal they, in fact, are.

I don’t understand what you mean by “consensus on these points”.

You listed a bunch of bullet points for specific policies. Your argument seems to be that most people, or possibly everyone, will converge on opposition to these policies were they actually implemented. When TB above argues that actually he supports your list of policies, your answer is that their belief that they support such policies is mistaken, and in fact they would oppose such policies, correct? And this is a general claim that least a supermajority of people actually do not really want these policies implemented, even if they currently mistakenly believe they do, correct?

But I believe a dive into the logic behind why they believe so will reveal they, in fact, are.

Would you care to do such a dive, at least for a hypothetical person if not for TB themselves? I think it would be interesting and useful to lay out the chain of logic as clearly as possible. The claim as I understand it seems pretty implausible, but if you're going to make it wouldn't it be useful to lay out why you believe it?

I think we are working from radically-different premises and should probably not share a government.

At the trivial level, it's something that's immediate, either in firsthand matters or in terms of someone they know. Yes, ostensibly these countries usually focus most enforcement on places where other legal jeopardy turns on less objectionable focuses (and actually avoid getting international tourists involved), but it's somewhat sobering to pack for a trip and put back the sex toy or leave behind a fanfic-in-progress after realizing that you'd be depending on that enforcement 'prioritization' to avoid serious jail time or worse.

And while the various polls about progressives thinking everyone in the political party is gay are kinda hilarious, they're downstream of enough of that one-in-twenty-ish that everyone knows a good few pretty closely.

At the more intermediate level, it's something that ends up with epicycles built around it. Russia doesn't just ban The Gays or pride parades, it bans 'propaganda' about The Gays, has a whole bunch of cultural stuff about stuff that hints of gayishness, and then there's an unofficial brigade of people with a lot of practical support among the police that don't mind if individual gays have Particularly Bad Safety Incidents.

It's a bit like how some rightwingers get really focused on HBD or religious freedom or (in my example) gun rights, even if they're not personally in the pinch point, because the support and actions for these policies end up fractally wrong, too. This usually runs into limitations sooner than liberals expect -- Qatar Airlines isn't cutting scenes out of Mitchels v. The Machines, since even if they cared that much they wouldn't see a lot of the subtext or short-of-bright-flashing-lights text -- but it doesn't stop at don't ask don't tell, either.

The deeper issue is that it's something that a) has basically zero organized internal opposition within the progressive movement, with only a tiny fragment of often-nutty people willing to tolerate disagreement with mainstream progressive pro-LGBT matters, and b) has external domestic opposition, of which the behaviors of external opponents becomes a useful banner. If Uganda has the death penalty for homosexuality (kinda, insert thirty asterisks here), and American social conservatives can be linked to these positions in general (again, asterisks), you don't have to limit your focus on what domestic policies those social conservatives might actually be trying to implement; you can tell everyone What They Really Want To Do To You (asterisk).

Why is LGBTQ so important for liberals in terms of foreign policy?

It's easy.

Fixing an unequal economy is hard. Freeing a lower racial caste means bad things are going to happen and people will be harmed.

Letting two girls kiss or two dudes get married costs nothing.

That’s like asking why conservatives are so angry about electric vehicles. It turns out they have the bandwidth to judge more than one thing at once.

People who hate Russia’s stance on homosexuality probably also distrust it for invading Ukraine, repressing political dissidents, and generally pretending that it’s still the Cold War. Sometimes one or another is in the news. In this case, it appears to be due to updated laws criminalizing the rainbow flag as comparable to al-Qaeda, Aum Shinrikyo, the Azov Battalion, and…Meta.

To be fair, I am baffled by conservatives being mad about electric vehicles. I had a conversation with my dad where we talked about my wife's electric car, and Dad said he would never get one. Which I said makes sense, as he lives on a farm so he has very different car needs than my wife and I do. He replied that even if his car usage was different such that it made sense to get an electric car, he still wouldn't get one.

I didn't get into it with him cause I value family harmony, but I just can't understand that mindset. Why not get an electric car if it makes sense for your needs? Just to own the libs or something? It seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face to me. I get opposing electric car mandates. I get not getting electric if the cost-benefit analysis isn't favorable. But I don't get opposing electric on principle.

Opposing electricity is encouraged in communities that encourage being personally prepared, from my anecdotal experience. The common conception is that in an apocalypse/national emergency/act of war, electricity will be unreliable and so electric cars won't drive.

We discussed flow restrictions on showerheads last week, but I think the conservative view here sees electric car (mandates) coming from the same voices that brought us water-saving showerheads, and expect similar results. Sure, there might be some modest improvement in residential water usage (which is pretty immaterial outside of California, Nevada, and Arizona), but it comes at a cost those writing regulations refuse to admit, and so there is an expectation that we'll all be stuck with terrible cars "for the environment".

See also being forced to ride the bus ("take mass transit!"), or use CFLs back when they had terrible spectra. The conservative view here fears being forced to take quality of life hits "for the greater good" by someone who has drastically different values defining quality of life. On the other hand, I think (good) LED lightbulbs have proven themselves better than incandescent in almost every way short of an Easy-Bake oven, so it isn't always a miss.

The reason electric cars exist, except for Tesla, is due to a mandate to destroy normal cars forever.

Accepting the car means accepting the mandate’s legitimacy. It’s that simple.

Why is Tesla the exception?

Tesla was the first manufacturer to make a non-concept level electric car that was actually better and desirable instead "like regular car but shittier because it's electric".

This doesn't answer the question of what makes it less shitty than the other electric cars. Or is this just about how things were 10-15 years ago?

The question was "the reason electric cars exist", ie. why did manufacturers start building electric cars?

Back when Tesla hit the scene with Roadster and then Model S they were the only electric car manufacturer who tried to make an actually good car with clear benefits (performance, styling, driving experience). Meanwhile every other manufacturer made an electric car that was worse than regular cars where the selling point was just "for the environment!". Of course Tesla's success forced the other manufacturers to react and start building actually decent electric cars.

Does this mandate also exist in China, where EVs make up about half of new car sales?

When you asked this question, did you expect the answer to be "no"? I had my own suspicions, but I spent about 20 seconds googling.

A looming crisis is brewing in China, as hundreds of thousands of unsold, polluting gas-powered vehicles may be rendered unsellable due to incoming emissions rules. The new Chinese emissions rules were announced all the way back in 2016 and are set to go into effect in July.

China plans to phase out conventional gas-burning cars by 2035. This second one is older, so I don't know if they pulled a California since it was published. Apparently individual Chinese provinces are moving faster to ban ICE. They're also subsidized by the state.

In America learning to drive a car is a rather formative experience, and they're crucial for mobility in rural areas. How should we expect rednecks (and those sympathetic towards them!) to react when Washington D.C. or California start fucking with them, their availability, the specs they're allowed to have?

@SubstantialFrivolity

For the record, I strongly oppose a ban on ICE vehicles. Let the market decide if they stay or go. An EV happens to make sense for my wife and me, but I will never ever be ok with mandates.

But since you know the mandates exist, why are you baffled people opposed the project? Shouldn't it make perfect sense to you?

Pollution restrictions are not per se a ban on gas cars. If restricting exactly how many noxious fumes cars may emit counts as "fucking with the specs" then that war was lost in the 70s with the clean air act. Nevertheless, gas cars have prospered since the seventies. I don't think it's reasonable to expect zero restrictions on what are textbook externalities, no matter how great the private benefits of cars are.

The ICE-only phaseout is more like what I was thinking of, so thanks for the link. Although I personally like hybrids a lot, I can understand people being upset about it.

Hybrids are also a straightforwardly superior technology to pure-play ICE for pretty much every use case except long-haul freeway driving. They're not backyard-maintainable, but nor are modern ICEs. (And the backyard-maintainable ICEs of the late C20 were so polluting that in a world where alternatives exist, they really shouldn't be allowed in cities or suburbs).

I still miss those illegal German diesel engines that cheated the emissions tests though. Performance competitive with petrol, and you could get from London to well past Edinburgh on one tank of diesel.

They're not backyard-maintainable, but nor are modern ICEs.

My sense is that the Toyota Dynamic Force engines are still mostly backyard-maintainable (there will always be a question of level of effort as well as some specific sub-systems), and they're pretty darn efficient. Seems they got there with just good old fashioned design optimization and only a couple additional computer-controlled subsystems.

Noah Smith has written about this. Basically, instead of looking at global warming as an engineering problem to be solved, the environmentalist left took it on as a moral crusade, and as a justification for left-wing policies in general.

Then due to negative polarisation, right-wingers moved to opposing it (owning the libs, basically).

Probably the best way to get your dad to buy an electric car would be to talk about how based Elon Musk (and therefore Tesla) is.

I’ve said before that Trump can single-handedly ruin nuclear power for decades, not by opposing it, but by convincing Democrats that those Greens are useful allies.

Toxoplasma is real.

Why is LGBTQ so important for liberals in terms of foreign policy?

Good question.

To steelman it in proper hardcore IR realist style, it is about (Blue)American Empire acquiring permanent class of supporters, collaborators and fifth columnists world wide.

What were German minorities for Third Reich, what were Communist sympathizers for Soviet Union, LGBTQ+ are for Global Rule Based Order. And unlike these, they are permanent presence. You can get rid of ethnic minority, you can get rid even of ideological/religious minority if you are willing to get dirty, but LGBTQ+ are born every day. Even most hard core regimes would balk at gulaging/executing 5% of population in every generation, for forever.

Yes, this sucks if you are LGBTQ+ (or suspected to be one) in unfriendly territory, but it rocks if you are GAE.

How do you distinguish that from the other traditional geopolitical role for minority groups? “No, really, we swear the Ukrainian government is full of Nazis; let us invade already!” It serves Russia’s interests to insist that the U.S. is grooming an LGBT fifth column whether or not that’s true.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think our governments actually run on Bismarckpilled IR theory. Technology crowded out most of the traditional diplomatic options, so we had to come up with ones that wouldn’t cause a land war in Asia. One of those was loudly complaining whenever anyone (other than us) engaged in political repression. Russian law on LGBT advocacy looks pretty bad on that front, so our newspapers make a point of complaining.

Let's call it multivariate.

I think @ThisIsSin is correct downthread when he points out (perhaps I'm editorializing) that a lot of it has to do with cultivating legitimacy. Our national myths are the Civil Rights Movement (protecting the 'oppressed' from the 'privileged') and taking down Nazi Germany because they were killing minorities, whether that had anything to do with our motives at the time or not.

Ergo, to legitimize ongoing and novel interventionism, it helps to slot the matter into such a frame. People are familiar with the concept and trained from birth to see it as morally correct.

It's more a symptom of legitimacy than it is a cultivation thereof.

Accepting American framings on problems means you accept American religion (the foundations of which are "man bad", "white bad", and "straight bad"- 3 Goddesses from the Western perspective named "Safety", "Equality", and "Consent" respectively- and foreign cultures worship them to their detriment) means you accept the power of the priests of those American goddesses to dictate to you what your culture should be.

Pride parades are a symbol of power in the same way military parades are for other nations.

There are specific laws in place that prosecute "propaganda" of "LGBT" with the definitions of those terms being quite vague. Even if a conviction is not reached, as many mottizens have noticed, the process is the punishment. Especially when the process in question is the Russian jail (can't say anything about Middle East, but they're probably not very respectful and luxurious either).

Your flippant "they just don't want parades" comment shows either a lack of basic research, or more likely given your tenure in the community, deliberate downplaying.

I think more about Eastern (typically Asian countries that are too far north or east to be Muslim) cultures when I see this- they have a working system, but American progressives (and the progressives of old, now called traditionalists) don't know how it works/it doesn't play to their biases so they simply see an enemy to be destroyed.

Globohomo (and I mean that in both senses of the word) is just as much born of arrogance as Middle Eastern sexuality laws are.

There has been very limited attempts by American progressives to attack Japanese culture. There were coerced changes to Japanese culture immediately after WW2, but they were bipartisan (MacArthur was profoundly not a progressive - he would be fired by a Dem president for being based in an insubordinate way and would have been McCarthy's running mate if McCarthy had managed to run for president).

But since the end of the US occupation, the only attempt by US progressives to shame Japan for insufficient progressivism was when right-wing Japanese politicians started publicly paying respect to the memory of various controversial WW2-era Japanese leaders.

Despite having been consistently aware of the current thing since the 1990's, I don't know anything about the LGBXYZSNORE situation in Japan without looking it up, indicating that it has not been the current thing in my lifetime.

Interesting question - is this an unprincipled exception or is it just a case of Japanese internal affairs not being on the radar?

I suspect most internal affairs aren't actually on the radar.

Every now and then an issue bubbles up to the level of perception among the voter base. Some fraction of those make it through the social and political filters until "Something Has To Be Done." Then we might or might not spend diplomatic capital on doing that Something.

The temperature is lower for stable, allied nations like Japan. It's higher for suspected rivals. We have a long history of critiquing combloc countries for their freedom of expression, so it doesn't take much to get a Senator or newspaper bemoaning Russia's treatment of their dissidents--including anyone who uses a rainbow flag.

Allegations of American progressives trying and succeeding in pushing progressive/leftist policies in other developed countries are mostly unfounded. Firstly, a lot of the intellectual origins of modern progressivism emerged in Europe, and secondly most European activists who embrace US style racial progressivism do so proactively and because to Europeans (despite a performative disdain for supposed American boorishness) America is more dynamic, more advanced, more exciting, more ‘of the future’ than Europe is (even for those on the left), and everything associated with Americanness, including leftist American gender politics and so on, is cool and interesting and should be adopted by the French / Spanish / German left.

The British / German / Spanish leftists protesting for BLM in 2020 weren’t doing it on orders from the American left, they were doing it proactively because they wanted to.

Agreed as regards Western Europe - we have our own liberal and leftist political traditions which don't grok American progressivism and which American progressives grok even less. We also have our own idiotarian left tradition which has unthinkingly imported American progressivism without applying it to local conditions - but this has a lot less pull than people insist it does, and essentially none at all in France. But American progressives have tried to shame countries for insufficient progressivism - it just doesn't work.

When I pointed out the lack of US progressive bullying of Japan over insufficient progressivism (and there are obvious targets re. the role of women, immigration, outcaste treatment of barakumin) I realise I was implicitly comparing it to the bullying of mostly third-world countries over feminism, LGBFAGMORON, etc.

LGBFAGMORON

Okay, the "XYZSNORE" was one thing, but really?

This isn’t even a top ten free speech issue in a Russian context, though.

I remember reading a report on human rights in Morocco by some organization or other. Obviously, Islamic monarchies generally aren’t up to western snuff. But the report generally glossed over free speech and police corruption(both serious issues) to discuss how barbaric it was that homosexuality was illegal. The attitude towards Russia seems similar- we know it’s a thuggish dictatorship, why are gay rights the top issue over there? The suspicious number of dissidents falling out of windows seems far more serious. The hate speech laws have actual teeth, unlike in much of Europe, and Putin allows the chechens to punish islamophobes.

But the report generally glossed over free speech and police corruption(both serious issues) to discuss how barbaric it was that homosexuality was illegal. The attitude towards Russia seems similar- we know it’s a thuggish dictatorship, why are gay rights the top issue over there?

Because police corruption and suppression of anti-regime speech have motivations that are, if not particularly good, quite understandable to a rational person. A regime wants to keep political power and protect itself against threats almost by definition. A somewhat primitive authoritarian regime clings to power in the only way it knows how to, by throwing dissidents out of windows, duh, more news at 11. Not great all around, but very expected, and they probably won't stop even if the West tells them to – because keeping political power is their primary concern, more so than appeasing external forces.

In contrast, the laws against homosexuality seem like an exercise in pointless sadism for the sake of it. Despite what the original comment implied, countries like Russia don't just practice "don't ask, don't tell", outlawing parades and drag queen story hours at the local kindergarten. It's more like "don't ask, don't tell, don't host or participate in community events (police raids on LGBT parties at night clubs and even on private property have become the norm in Russia), don't run a private business that caters to LGBT customers (a Moscow businessman whose travel agency allegedly specialized in cruises for gay men was recently murder-suicided in jail), don't look like a fag walking down the street to a bored cop, etc". And, at least in the case of Eastern Europe, opposition to homosexuality is a top-down movement rather than a genuinely grassroots one – in the 1990s and 2000s regular Russians watched t.A.T.u girls kiss on live TV, performing alongside flagrantly gay male celebrities like Boris Moiseev and Sergey Zverev, and thought nothing of it. A Ukrainian crossdresser was one of the most popular music artists in the country for a long, long time.

Oppressing LGBT is all very based and trad if we ask the usual suspects (also Not Happening, but is a Good Thing), but serves close to no purpose in upholding these regimes, which is why it's so bizarre that they bother doing it. Coming down hard on those who swing at the king and miss is understandable, somewhat rational and also high-priority for those regimes for maintaining power, but proactively ostracizing and punishing a random group of citizens living their private lives is neither of those things, and demonstratively refusing to stop doing it in when asked nicely speaks of the barbaric nature of their elites, who seemingly delight in engaging in oppression for its own sake. There's a stark contrast with other authoritarian places like China – while the CCP isn't particularly LGBT-friendly either, but its approach is purely technocratic and doesn't demonstrate the same penchant for sadism, which is at least partly why China rarely gets singled out on this matter, at least compared to Russia.

For a regime which is an Islamic monarchy, criminalization of homosexuality- even if only enforced on the poor and unlucky- is quite understandable.

we know it’s a thuggish dictatorship, why are gay rights the top issue over there?

I would like you to quote specific people who claim that gay rights is the top issue in Russia if you want that claim to be defended.

But to propose an answer that sounds plausible to me: the crowd who engages in active dissident politics is not large, and the wiser people are aware that blessed glorious West also has corruption, and perhaps will always have it. There is thus not much demand for being loud in a Putin-bothering way about it. Once Navalny got chased out and later offed, the anti-dictatorship side of dissident Russians has become much more disunited and self-eating.

As for islamic awareness, those of middle class means and above can largely avoid the worst of the Islamic component of Russia. Again, little demand. A lot of anti-Islamism is channeled through the gay rights issues, anyway.

About 5 years ago I was hiking in the Grand Canyon with friends and we met a 20-year-old Russian kid at the beach who asked if he could tag along with us for the hike back up to the rim. He spent a lot of the time telling us how great Russia was, which was fine, but one of the things he pointed to in evidence of its greatness was the fact that they could "beat faggots in the street" with no repercussions. I don't know if this kind of attitude is typical, but the fact that any random tourist would find it appropriate to tell Americans he just met that apropos of nothing in particular is at least an indication that the attitudes over there go beyond simply not celebrating it. Hell, even the rural Trump supporter in our group seemed pretty unnerved by it.

The untranslated word in his mind was almost certainly “pidoraz.” He was picturing child molestors where you pictured consenting homosexuals.

Пидорас (not пидораз), and indeed педерастия, is not "pederast"/"pederasty". The primary meaning is homosexuality and pederasty is the less common meaning. See also lurkmore which, after a quick skim, doesn't even seem to mention the second meaning, if you don't like gramota.ru.

Thanks for the corrections.

This word colloqually means simply homosexual, with the non-mangled "pederast" out of use by anyone but historians.

There are other context clues that suggest the man was most likely speaking about homosexuals. Speaking of "beating faggots on the streets" as a particular boon of Russia suggests you can't do so in other places, which is true for open homosexuals and quite untrue for open child molesters. Furthermore, it is a lot easier to find [alleged] homosexuals on the street for the purposes of beating up, since everyone knows those damn faggots wear long dyed hair and tight jeans, or something to that effect. Pedophiles generally don't advertise themselves so, and if you were going by stereotypes you'd have to face down, like, a quarter of middle-aged male population.

Those who want to beat up pedos on the street generally need some sophisticated preparation, such as setting up a honeypot, perhaps take pointers from Tesak. Note his quote: "Are you a pidoras or a pedofil?"

Today I learned. Thanks for the correction.

He spent a lot of the time telling us how great Russia was, which was fine, but one of the things he pointed to in evidence of its greatness was the fact that they could "beat faggots in the street" with no repercussions. I don't know if this kind of attitude is typical, but the fact that any random tourist would find it appropriate to tell Americans he just met that apropos of nothing in particular is at least an indication that the attitudes over there go beyond simply not celebrating it. Hell, even the rural Trump supporter in our group seemed pretty unnerved by it.

Well yeah, that’s an urban attitude. In America you’re more likely to find it in black ghettos than on a farm.

To the degree that it is likely to be found on a farm, that's because the people working there are latinos.

Sure, you might find it among hired laborers who commute in from a nearby trailer park. Honestly a lot of 'based' Russian social attitudes seem like they're copied from the attitudes of people living in... less-affluent settlements. This isn't a great match for the American right, which is driven by rural and religious attitudes, not shitty neighborhoods.

Last time I checked, the country in Russia was notoriously destitute aside from, as mentioned by others, dachas and cottagecore influencers. Not much trailer culture, either.

which is driven by rural and religious attitudes, not shitty neighborhoods.

This is a distinction without a difference. Rural areas that are not subsidised by commuters/retirees who make money in the city and spend it in the country are poor, have crap amenities other than access to nature because of the high cost of proving them in remote areas, and preferentially retain dumber people. The first two of these points have been true for a long time (since before 1900 in the UK, probably around 1950 in the USA), the third since time immemorial (idiot and pagan are derived from Greek and Latin slurs for country bumpkins respectively).

America has a sufficient number of decent if not particularly nice rural areas that this is not, in fact, a distinction without a difference, and homesteading laws have also tended to spread the rural population a bit more thinly than in other places; there are fewer agglomerations of extreme poverty in rural areas. And it’s the slums which I was referring to, not the rural lower incomes itself.

It's hard to say exactly what the percentage of Russians eager to beat up faggots in the street is. I'd assume it is mostly concentrated in the rural/small town chavs, with the older generations of the same class not as eager to do it themselves, but approving it otherwise.

Tangentially, in USA it seems that the prime thing a regular man fears about prison is ass-rape. In Russia, everybody knows that ass-rape in prisons is reserved for the underclass, such as faggots.

But yes, it really does show that American conservative "don't rub it in our faces" and Russian conservative "don't rub it in our faces" are vastly different levels of tolerance.

I'd assume it is mostly concentrated in the rural/small town chavs

I would associate it, quite strongly, with high crime low income neighborhoods. Eg black ghettos, certain trailer parks. Ditto the use of 'fag'. On the other hand I'd associate 'it should be a crime' 'they're mentally ill' 'its like pedophilia- just unnatural' with the normal American reservoirs of social conservatism- religious and deep rural people.

Tangentially, in USA it seems that the prime thing a regular man fears about prison is ass-rape. In Russia, everybody knows that ass-rape in prisons is reserved for the underclass, such as faggots.

My understanding is that being gay on the outside was merely one of many ways you could become a petukh in Russian prisons. Online accounts agree that the local vor could declare any inmate to be a petukh based on broadly subjective grounds like "not defending his honour" or "behaving dishonorably towards another inmate" and that once you were raped once your status as a petukh was unambiguous across the whole prison system.

Why is LGBTQ so important for liberals in terms of foreign policy?

Why was "society must permit Christian missionary activity" a condition for 18th-19th century European nations when negotiating trade settlements, even though those things had nothing to do with trade?

Notably, euro powers were often flexible about this.

For example, when debating Russia, arguments often amount to Russia is evil because they aren't onboard with pride.

It is one fairly reliable way to judge how ideologically distant a society is from the Western enlightenment tradition. Liberals may not put it in those terms but that's what they actually want.

It seems like existence of pride parades seems to be a key benchmark for judging the moral virtue of a country. Why is this benchmark so central?

It has its limits. Israel has pride parades while Gaza does not and we know what liberals think about this conflict. "Victim of colonialism" is an even more important moral virtue, apparently.

I think you're using the term liberal to talk about two separate groups of people who subscribe to distinct ethical models. The first type judge other societies based on how well they align with tolerant western ideals, as you said, while most of the type of people who simp for Palestine (lets call them progressives) determine the worth of a society based on where they fit in the progressive stack, where being Muslim or black outranks everything else. That Russia is bad because of their lack of civil liberties is a perception held primarily by the first group, not the second, for whom I'd go so far as to say gay rights/women's rights aren't a particularly salient issue outside of their immediate environment. I think if any of them have a negative opinion of Russia, it's likely going to have more to do with associating Russia with Donald Trump than anything lgbt related.

"Victim of colonialism" is an even more important moral virtue, apparently.

Don't think this is quite it. The criterion seems to be more along the lines of "dysfunctional and not white" though I can't put my finger on it exactly. Ethiopia e.g. would get plenty of play despite no colonization, whereas a functional post-colonial country (especially with lots of Hajnal-descended people in it) would be broadly ignored regardless of the magnitude of past abuses.

Again, they aren't mass-executing LGBTQ people or having concentrations camps, they simply don't celebrate it or want it rubbed in people's faces.

Isn't this flatly untrue though? People are imprisoned for homosexuality for many years in many middle eastern countries (Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai, UAE), and executed or whipped in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia and a few other Muslim countries have a death penalty law on their books for homosexuality, sure, but AFAIK they don’t actually execute people for it except in Iran.

This hasn't been that widespread. We are told 5% of the population belong to these minorities yet there aren't 4 million gay prisoners in Iran. The handfull who end up in prison seem to either be agitators, pedofiles or people who are doing their best to provoke the system.

If the only ones imprisoned are agitators, shouldn't we have examples of Iranian men who are undeniably fucking other men, yet weren't imprisoned for it?

Well, I guess this place is called the Motte for a reason! What a massive change of tack. If we accept that the middle east is actually secretly tolerant of homosexuality, but uses its anti-gay laws merely as an instrument of authoritarian rule to arrest agitators, well okay then. But that still sounds just as much like something a liberal should oppose (regardless whether or not the country in question has pride parades).

But that still sounds just as much like something a liberal should oppose

Yes, but now the difference between liberals (who is not fine with using anti-X laws merely as an instrument of authoritarian rule to arrest agitators) and progressives (who do this constantly, that's why they really like anti-X laws) becomes extremely important.

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