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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32402 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Perhaps the exercise where we pretend it's the opposite side doing it would be instructive. Imagine an Islamic council with exactly the same parameters but they're trying to, and succeeding in, pushing Sharia laws in all countries. In a talk about their efforts with 'sexual modesty' they talk about the success of a new law outlawing gay marriage but failure in getting the country to outlaw sodomy. You know because they say so that their ultimate goal is to have open stoning of gay men in every country in the world. They're using every method they have available to reach this aim, including back room deals against the general sentiment of the population. You're in a currently LGBT friendly country that just banned most pride marches for being obscene. As an LGBT person how concerned should you be? Is it a different level of concern than you'd have if this group didn't exist and you believe that the banning of pride marches was not predicated on actual anti-LGBT bigotry so much as general prudishness?

Edit: to explain a bit more why things like this kind of bother me despite supporting most LGBT initiatives(with some major reservations on the T). It takes local politics which should be ground up based on the national sense making and totally swamps that process. It makes the laws I am subject to less dependent on what I and my fellow countrymen see as best and more dependent on whether it's the LGBT group or Islamic group that happens to have more international influence. And I'm note confident at all that the ideas that are able to achieve this kind of international influence are selected particularly for correctness. A couple of historical flukes and the hypothetical Islamist order could literally be in the place of the WEF with the same influence. This seems to just be memetic colonialism.

As an LGBT person how concerned should you be?

Probably pretty concerned.

Is it a different level of concern than you'd have if this group didn't exist and you believe that the banning of pride marches was not predicated on actual anti-LGBT bigotry so much as general prudishness?

The groups existence would make me more concerned than if it didn't exist.

I would think the things the group is advocating for are bad and I would be concerned that society was moving in that direction but I would not want the state to punish people who had done nothing more than convince other people to agree with them.

ETA:

Strikethrough unconnected aside about state power.

Replying to your edit, if the external powers successfully convince the local political players to adopt their positions, how aren't subsequent developments of local policies determined by what your fellow countrymen see as best? It almost seems to me like there's some posited injunction against interfering in a communities moral development by adding arguments they may not have considered.

Replying to your edit, if the external powers successfully convince the local political players to adopt their positions, how aren't subsequent developments of local policies determined by what your fellow countrymen see as best? It almost seems to me like there's some posited injunction against interfering in a communities moral development by adding arguments they may not have considered.

I think that international elite organization are a bit like the proverbial AI in a box trying to get out and you're arguing that if the ai can convince me to let it out it must mean I want to let it out. The AI is going to be very convincing, supernaturally convincing beyond what any local community itself can possibly combat. But what it's optimizing for is not our well being but its own and we should be very skeptical about how those things align.

Even if that's true, how do you think current Saudis or whoever got their homophobic or otherwise fundamentalist views, by thinking about the issues really hard? However 'supernaturally convincing' Western efforts might be, they're certainly less so than simply inheriting an unquestioning acceptance of those views.

I think there is a large difference between learning by example and being actively subjected to propaganda. I don't think I implied local communities should just think really hard about issues/values. I think they should actively experiment and yes, look at what works elsewhere in as objective of a lens as possible. If these communities see western countries relaxing prohibition on gays and it seems like it is harmless and helps people, and I think this is a conclusion they will likely reach, they can choose to adopt those norms. But I don't like the evangelical model here, it doesn't optimize for global truth, it optimizes for repeating whichever pattern is favored by international elites, a tiny tiny subset of people which could just as easily be reprehensible as it could be admirable.

I would not want the state to punish people who had done nothing more than convince other people to agree with them.

I'm not sure where this step came from? I have possibly missed it but what state intervention are you talking about?

I think I got my conversations crossed, my apologies. I was inferring (perhaps incorrectly) from arjin's post that they would support using state power to prevent this kind of outside interference.

I'm not so sure they wouldn't mind you, but I'm also not really sure what state power can do about extra national interference. Here in the US there are actually already laws on the books at the level of election interference but I'm not sure what kind of teeth they have. As someone at least quite sympathetic to libertarianism I am eternally stuck having defined behaviors and groups that I think are poisonous to the commons but can do very little more than be disheartened that others do not care. In my dream world people would take any attempt by extra-national entities to influence their beliefs as memetic hostility and update against whatever they are pushing, but I harbor no illusions that this world reflects our own.

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