The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Why is ridicule an appropriate reaction in this case and not civil discourse? (this is an earnest question, not rhetorical. Would you lay out the case for this approach?)
Edit: clarify earnest-ness
A decade ago, a close friend and his baby mama invited me to their home under the pretense of a cookout, then proceeded to defile the ancient compact of guest right by disingenuously feeding me turkey burgers, and allowing the baby mama two hours to lecture me about how vaccines cause autism. This girl was the sort of person who was totally confident that she could have been a scientific researcher if she hadn't been too busy railing against her mildly right-wing mother. The arguments she made during that lecture were deeply ignorant. Things like "complaining about the wrong type of mercury" or "describing the mechanism in a way that chelation therapy really ought to cure autism and failing to notice that no one was using chelation therapy to cure autism". For the sake of social cohesion, and the tattered dignity of my clearly shameful friend, I held my tongue and politely thanked her for her concern, and she continued threatening his child with her malignant idiocy for a few more years.
You see, back in the Oughts, being anti-vax was a left-wing phenomenon, associated with the hippie, "granola girl" subset of left-wingers. They disliked vaccines for being "unnatural", and eagerly lapped up misinformation on social media about the superiority of natural/homeopathic/homemade alternatives. Then, repressed diseases like measles started outbreaking in exactly those progressive communities in places like California. I remember one researcher darkly quipping that you could model the locations by looking at a map of Whole Foods stores.
That dangerous tendency was brutally stamped out by saner members of those communities, not by civil discourse, but by relentless, cruel "dead unvaxxed kid" memes. Being anti-vax was subjected to vicious mockery, and the granola girls quickly dropped it because it was too uncomfortable to be ruthlessly pilloried for being dangerously fucking stupid.
This was the right move, tactically speaking. Rational arguments against the vaccine-autism link had been available the whole time. For most of those people, it was an ego/status thing. As the saying goes, you can't reason someone out of the position they didn't reason themselves into. You definitely can, however, shame them for being low-status losers until they rationalize themselves out of their stupid beliefs and get their kid fucking vaccinated.
And back to your specific situation, I have never, ever, ever, ever seen trans ideologues ever respond positively to civil discourse. I am not saying this about "all trans people". I have encountered plenty of them over the years who seem psychologically normal for whatever community we were in. But of the subset of trans people who are politically activated about the topic, the co-morbidity of serious, delusional derangement seems to be approximately 100%.
If your friends are the sort of people who are deeply upset about JK Rowling in general, I think attempting civil discourse is almost certainly a waste of time at best. I encourage you to try it anyway, for the same reason I encourage leftists to attend DSA meetings - I expect nothing will blackpill you faster, though that will probably burn the relationship. Ridicule will be healthier for your own mental state, and has a better (i.e.non-zero) chance of manipulating those friends into less stupid and contemptible behavior.
Shaming doesn't work very well when the shame-ee has a bunch of people who will promptly reassure him/her that it was all bullshit and also the person who shamed him/her is evil (a.k.a. a safe space). There are lots of safe spaces for transfolk - indeed, there has been quite the deliberate effort to install them everywhere. Vaccines are not a great analogy here (assuming for the sake of argument that your story is correct) because being anti-vax was always low-status and had few safe spaces.
Also, in general I think there are points to be won for not being the first to turn hostile, particularly between scrupulous people. If the other person pulls the trigger, there's no niggling doubt about "what if I hadn't done it".
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So, I appreciate the case you've made (and the story), but I got to thinking:
Are you sure the memes and shaming are what caused the change in behavior? Wouldn't the simpler, more likely reality be that when kids started dying and getting really sick, enough people changed their minds and herd immunity got better and the status race around anti-vaxxing waned in popularity?
Like, I vaguely recall hearing that the DARE (anti-drug-use-amongst-kids program in the United States a few decades ago) initiative, despite its intention had no effect or the opposite of its intended effect. Isn't that true of many of those public awareness campaigns (and today many of them use coopted memes?) Are you sure that isn't the case with the SoCal anti-vax stuff?
I'm open to the idea that civil arguments aren't always the right approach. I do want to at least have a rationalization for my position, then I can start making convincing arguments and poking fun (ridiculing?).
Do you have any particularly good zingers you would use to ridicule someone who is complaining about the harry potter stuff? (I realize this sounds insensitive, but I would imagine there are some good ones, and the likelihood that I will use them against my friend(s) is low. It's possible that some of the zingers might have kernels of interesting arguments)
I'll admit I'm not omnisciently certain about that version of history I relayed. But the problem with DARE is that it told people wildly exaggerated lies, from a position of authority. Then people tried some pot, realized they didn't kill their friends and destroy their life, and figured that heroin was probably fine too. The anti-vax stuff was also fairly exaggerated, but in a more defensible, joking manner. Also, it was coming from a stance of higher status, well-off STEMlords ripping into their friend's housewives for being gullible and negligent. Basically, I think in those situations, mean girl tactics worked better at manipulating behavior than out-of-touch lectures from the principal.
I might go with variations on the Read Another Book memes. Treat caring about Harry Potter at all as low-status and childish.
I wish you the best of luck. If you have any success, with any approach, please let us know.
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This is great advice, thanks for the suggestions and the story.
I’ll consider this approach.
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