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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34928 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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That was someone else.

Ah, yes my bad.

Your right to believe you're a cat ends at my right to not be forced to say "heeereee kitty, kitty, kitty!" when I see you.

This is a bit too abstract to address. We definitely do put social and legal expectations on one another that compel us to do or not do things all the time. And sometimes we hit one another with serious consequences for these things.

Perhaps we could focus it a bit.

Perhaps we could focus it a bit.

I thought it was pretty focused? You gave the example of someone identifying as a cat. I added examples of someone identifying as a Muslim or Japanese without being accepted as one by these groups. If you don't like these comparison feel free to give another one, but I'd like that to be accompanied by an argument why the new analogy is better than the ones we already had.

Mmm, I kept rewriting my post because I was having trouble relating it back to trans situations, which are really what all our metaphors are presumably about.

There are lots of object level issues there that play into the social expectations.

I can argue that there are cases where you will be socially punished for not accepting someone as a Muslim or Japanese.

But what I'm really thinking here, is that the analogy isn't useful at all.

Social expectations do exist for all sorts of things, and the expectations and their punishments are very diverse.

Sometimes the punishments come from your local friend group, sometimes they come from formal repercussions.

But whether those expectations and punishments are warranted in the specific case of say, not using someone's pronouns, is really only answerable if we talk about pronouns.

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