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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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A conservative man can go to a pride parade, just like in the blog post you linked, and not be threatened.

Uh... I strongly disagree with this analysis. Go to your next pride parade in a MAGA hat and see what happens.

You're continuing to demonstrate my point. A conservative has to display specific political speech in liberal spaces to have his presence politicized. However, gay and trans people just need to display their personal identities to have their presence politicized.

They're not equivalent. Conservatives engage in hatred based on identity, and liberals engage in hatred based on beliefs.

This ad campaign is just a reminder that conservatives still view being trans or gay as a political choice first, and a personal characteristic second.

  • -22

They're not equivalent. Conservatives engage in hatred based on identity, and liberals engage in hatred based on beliefs.

I would say that's a pretty bold statement to make about two very broad groups of people. I've personally observed both groups hate people for both reasons.

Putting aside the excessive generality, I would say that I object to this rather glib slogan on the grounds that beliefs are quite often an integral part of a persons identity and that in fact the lines between identity and belief are often so blurred as to make the distinction meaningless.

If I, a member of the Hawkmanii tribe, attack and murder a member of the Boarmanii tribe from the next valley over based solely on him being a filthy Boarmanii (who had it coming because you can't trust these "people"), would I have killed him based on his identity or his beliefs? By modern standards we would be considered to be members of the same ethnic group, distinguished only by our styles of dress or perhaps how we choose to wear our beards. Yet both of us would become murderously violent towards anyone implying that there is anything even remotely similar about us, I was born a Hawkmanii, I will die a Hawkmanii.

This ad campaign is just a reminder that conservatives still view being trans or gay as a political choice first, and a personal characteristic second.

So these hypothetical conservatives consider gays/transgender types to be repugnant because they perceive them as making an incorrect political choice, not because they perceive it to be an immutable characteristic? This seems to undermine the argument you made in the very line above.

The difference is not meaningless. If you would murder someone from another tribe regardless of their personal beliefs, then you're murdering based on identity. If you would murder someone from your own tribe based on their beliefs, you're murdering based on belief. The existence of green doesnt mean blue and yellow aren't different.

The trend is obvious. Liberals will frequently eat their own based on failures of belief regardless of identity, like with Al Franken. Conservatives will frequently support their own based on identity and regardless of belief, like Donald Trump and his history of cheating on his wife with a porn star.

Liberals will support someone like the current Pope, intrinsically conservative in identity, for expressing more liberal beliefs on gay people than previous Popes. Conservatives will shoot a case of their favorite beer, or applaud such a shooting, because they made one commercial with a trans woman. The trans woman doesn't express political views in the commercial, in fact, she actually says "whatever team you love, I love too" but conservatives hate her based on her identity.

Regarding this:

So these hypothetical conservatives consider gays/transgender types to be repugnant because they perceive them as making an incorrect political choice, not because they perceive it to be an immutable characteristic? This seems to undermine the argument you made in the very line above.

Conservatives would like to pretend they are hating people for their beliefs, rather than their immutable characteristics, so they recast immutable characteristics as political beliefs so they can justify their identity based hatred.

This is evident in one of the other replies to me that claims that blue collar hostility towards gay men is justified because gay men are intrinsically likely to sexually harass straight men. The poster linked an identity, being gay, with an inevitanle political action, sexual harassment, to justify the hatred of gay men.

They're smart enough to pretend that it's just harmful beliefs and actions from gay and trans people that they object to, like drag shows for children, surgery for children, and men in women's sports.

This commercial cleverly displays that this is just a facade designed to persuade moderate liberals such as myself that they are looking for any compelling reason to attack gay and trans people because their hatred is based on identity.

This whole website is based on the idea that it's better to object on ideological rather than tribal lines, even if tribalism is powerful. Conservatives are clearly the side of power through tribalism, and liberals are clearly the side of power through persuasive ideology.

The other two posters here are arguing with me. Because they think I'm gay and they think that is deviancy, or morally inferior. Maybe you are too. I'm arguing with them because I disagree with their comments. I don't hate them based on perceived identity.

  • -10

Do you believe that identities can be disputed at all? Can someone wrongly identify as something?

It's not about right and wrong. It's about social perception. Social identities are based on the fact that people have persistent perceptions of each other and their group affiliations.

To address the Marsey in the room, if you want to say Dylan Mulvaney is wrongly identifying as a woman, that is going to depend on the social context. I don't think he's a woman, but apparently millions of people do. Womanhood means different things to different people, which is why i don't like compulsory pronoun usage. You can refer to yourself however your like, and you can try to persuade people to refer to you a certain way, but I don't like being forced to pretend to believe something I don't believe. However, at the same time I don't feel the need to tell other people they're not allowed to believe trans women are women.

Isn't is reasonable then that the conservative response to transgenderism is to deny the existence of the identity rather than oppose its constituents out of hatred? Or put differently, how could you tell the difference?

But when you say you are transgender, you at least believe in the theory that gender and sex are not the same thing, right? Certainly, if you claim you are a unicorn, you believe unicorns do exist? Do you think that the hatred toward a cisgender white man claiming he believes in this theory would be any different from the hatred toward a transgender man?

I'm not transgender, and I never said I was.

Sorry, I meant when someone says is transgender, surely he believes that gender and sex are different things and that transgender people really exist. So what you call his identity is itself a belief, isn't it?

If you would murder someone from another tribe regardless of their personal beliefs, then you're murdering based on identity

But their beliefs are their identity, it's the only way in which they are different (from a modern first world perspective). Identity is a question of what individuals believe to be important, both in themselves and in others. You can take a Hutu baby and a Tutsi baby from their respective homelands, raise them in a black american ghetto without any information about where they came from and they would not identify or be identified as Hutu and Tutsi, they're just black. Yet raise these same babies in Rwanda and one may very well end up dismembering the other with farming implements in a wide ranging genocide based solely on their identity.

To give another example that you keep banging on about, being gay. There are plenty of examples of cultures throughout history that do not share the modern concept of "being gay". I'm massively over-generalising here, but for ancient greeks, having sex with men was something that you did, not something that defined you. If you showed up to ancient Athens and insisted that having sex with or being attracted to men was this incredibly important, immutable part of who you were, they'd probably consider you to be strange and childish.

In both the cases above, the cultural context informs the identity of the individuals involved far more than their genetics.

The trend is obvious. Liberals will frequently eat their own based on failures of belief regardless of identity, like with Al Franken. Conservatives will frequently support their own based on identity and regardless of belief, like Donald Trump and his history of cheating on his wife with a porn star.

How exactly does Justin "Minstrel Show" Trudeau fit into this? And what intrinsic genetic traits does Donald Trump share with his fellow american conservatives that is shielding him from harm? As far as I can tell, there is no genetic link between conservatives (if there was then by your logic it would be haram for liberals to oppose them based on their conservative genetics anyway).

This is evident in one of the other replies to me that claims that blue collar hostility towards gay men is justified because gay men are intrinsically likely to sexually harass straight men. The poster linked an identity, being gay, with an inevitanle political action, sexual harassment, to justify the hatred of gay men.

It is strange to me that you consider sexual harassment to be a political act. I would say it's pretty reasonable to assume that gay men are more likely to sexually harass straight men than a straight man is. Ergo, if you're afraid of being sexually harassed or assaulted by a man, you would be wise to focus your defenses towards gay men. From the perspective of our hypothetical blue collar worker, the problem is not the immutable characteristic (attraction to men), the problem is the increased risk of the bad things he doesn't want happening to him.

I wouldn't blame a woman for being more frightened of being sexually harassed or assaulted by a straight man, why would I fault this hypothetical blue collar worker for drawing the same conclusions?

This whole website is based on the idea that it's better to object on ideological rather than tribal lines, even if tribalism is powerful. Conservatives are clearly the side of power through tribalism, and liberals are clearly the side of power through persuasive ideology.

Ideological lines are tribal lines. The very next sentence you accuse the enemy tribe of being the bad mean people who are ignorant (perhaps they are also smelly?), whereas your tribe are the good virtuous ones who seek to rise above such petty nonsense. You would have to be willfully ignorant to end up on a site like the motte and not have been presented with an abundance of examples of those from the liberal tribe acting solely out of opposition to the conservative tribe.

Conservatives would like to pretend they are hating people for their beliefs, rather than their immutable characteristics, so they recast immutable characteristics as political beliefs so they can justify their identity based hatred.

They're smart enough to pretend that it's just harmful beliefs and actions from gay and trans people that they object to, like drag shows for children, surgery for children, and men in women's sports.

This commercial cleverly displays that this is just a facade designed to persuade moderate liberals such as myself that they are looking for any compelling reason to attack gay and trans people because their hatred is based on identity.

I honestly can't tell if you're trying to rile people up here or if you're just that arrogant and close minded. I would say that you started from a fundamentally flawed understanding of identity and have developed a self-serving explanation of why your team are the goodies and the other team are the baddies from there. How does your mental model account for the existence of gay conservatives for example? Trump is probably the most pro-gay president ever, he was publicly pro gay marriage while Biden and Obama were still saying that marriage was between a man and a woman.

Identity is the perceived membership of particular in-groups and out-groups. It's a factor of human psycho-social dynamics, not biology. As we have seen here, conservatives seem to view their political alignment as an identity. They also seem to be eager to ascribe other people's political alignments as an identity, as you and the other two people replying to me have all eventually accused me of being on the side of liberals and making assumptions about my political affiliation. Liberals engage in that to a lesser degree, which is why there are so many different liberal factions that spend almost as much time fighting each other as they do conservatives. They couldn't even successfully elect Hillary Clinton because of ideological differences, which is an extreme weakness of the liberal movement.

Justin Trudeau wore brownface once as a high schooler. It is well within the ability of most liberals to understand the idea of doing something stupid and ignorant when in high school. Conservatives try to use that to weaken his political influence, and liberal don't let it work. It's too weak of a transgression, and he's too strong of a political force for liberalism otherwise.

There are obviously going to be counterexamples of these tendencies on both sides, but I'm talking about general trends and the behavior of the plurality, if not the majority. In a democratic system like ours, the tendencies of the plurality determine who is elected to political power.

This isn't about good or bad, or mean and virtuous, and I didn't use any of those words. Those are value statements you read into my opinions because apparently that's where you center your discourse. I might say the liberal tendency to eat their own is very bad, because it resulted in failing to elect Hillary Clinton. I might say the conservative ability to support each other in an identity based way is good because it enabled them to achieve political goals liberals thought were impossible, like repealing Roe v. Wade. Liberals frequently use ideological purity tests to be cruel to each other, and that probably leads to higher levels of anxiety in liberals. Conservatives will extend each other a great deal of kindness and community, which can lead to more prosocial behavior in conservative circles.

Generally though, I'd rather be a conservative at a pride parade than a trans woman in a men's locker room. Liberals are generally more tolerant of dissent and while a few might become aggressive, you have a distinct possibility of others defending the conservative's right to free speech. If one man in a locker room decides to be aggressive towards another for being gay or trans, the other men will not intervene, even if they disagree, because they will immediately be targeted as well.

Straight men absolutely do harass each other far more than any gay man harasses straight me. Straight men say crude and sexually demeaning things to each other all the time, especially in male only contexts. It is not reasonable to assume gay men are more likely to sexually harass straight men than that straight men are likely to sexually harass each other. I actually think the real disruption that gay men create in straight male dynamics is that straight men cannot safely sexually harass them, or just generally engage aggressively with them, the same way they feel safe engaging with other straight men. The same sexual jokes they can make with other straight men suddenly are recontextualized, and that makes them uncomfortable and uneasy. Gay men don't have a lot of choice but to learn to live with straight men to at least some degree, but many straight men, however, have trouble with the threat that a gay man can pose to the social dynamics of a straight male dominated context. If a straight man is too nice to the gay man, will the other men call him gay? If he's too mean, will the other men call him gay? If he imagines the gay man having sex with other men, does that mean he's gay? Straight men who exist in cultures with hostility towards gay men aren't worried about being harassed by gay men, and the idea that they are is laughable. They are worried about being harassed by other straight men regarding the way they choose to interact with the gay men. They don't know the rules.

You can see this right now with Bud Light. According to them, a gay man, Dylan Mulvaney, is drinking Bud Light, and has entered their social context. No one is worried about Dylan Mulvaney's harassment or reaction to them choosing to continue drinking Bud Light or not. All of these conservative men are performing for each other, lest they be harassed themselves for an improper reaction to this gay male encroachment on their beer. Some feel the need to make a video shooting bud light. Some make videos of themselves throwing away bud light. I'd bet a lot of conservative men don't care about it, but are worried about buying bud light in front of their friends in case their friends use that to harass them.

Straight men are not afraid of gay men, they are afraid of other straight men.

It is not reasonable to assume gay men are more likely to sexually harass straight men than that straight men are likely to sexually harass each other.

This strikes me as prima facie so implausible that I am genuinely curious what your basis is for believing it. You are claiming that men who are not sexually attracted to other men are more likely to give them unwanted sexual attention than men who are sexually attracted to other men? Perhaps you meant on a raw numbers level, there are more male-on-male sexual assaults committed by straight men than gay men, which is plausible given how many more straight than gay men there are. But as a proportion relative to population, why on earth would we expect men who are sexually interested in X to be less likely to aggressively angle for sexual contact with X than men who are not sexually interested in X? It would be like expecting gay men to be more likely than straight men to sexually assault women.

Are you unfamiliar with the common problems of hazing in fraternities and sports teams? If you are, I would suggest you google the phrase "sexual hazing" without quotes:

"Male hazing most common type of sexual assault, expert reveals":

https://www.army.mil/article/166188/male_hazing_most_common_type_of_sexual_assault_expert_reveals

"The brutal secret of school sport initiations":

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46282988

"How Hazing Escalates To Sexual Assault":

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa53mm/st-mikes-college-school-how-hazing-escalates-to-sexual-assault-

Justin Trudeau wore brownface once as a high schooler.

Three times that we know of, once while he was teaching highschool -- and it was pretty black, although "brown" would have been more appropriate for an Aladdin costume.

Trudeau himself is on the record as "not remembering" how many times he wore blackface -- so there may have been more instances that weren't recorded in a publicly accessibly way.

He has not been noticeably "eaten" from the left -- although the normie centre is starting to be upset at his apparent links to Chinese money and general air of corruption.

You're right, I misread my sources.

I would say, Justin Trudeau isn't in the American political context. I don't think an American Democrat politician could wear that much black face and not get eaten by the left. Trudeau also apologized, called himself racist, and what he did didn't directly harm anyone. It was also politically and culturally insensitive, but not malicious, so it's not like a huge stretch to believe he was more stupid than maliciously racist. He's also very good looking, and as Prime Minister, not directly elected, so the vote that puts him in power is not as much a personal referendum on him. I don't know a lot about Canadian politics, but I'm guessing it's not as polarized and identity based as US politics because it's parliamentary. The American political structure has given it a particular propensity to in-group out-group dynamics and emotional affiliation with one's party.

You're continuing to demonstrate my point. A conservative has to display specific political speech in liberal spaces to have his presence politicized.

Putting aside that you consider "wearing a police uniform" a political statement, what do you propose as a clear way for a conservative to self-identify at a pride parade to see whether or not he'd be threatened?

Could we raise some money and get Ben Shapiro to attend a pride parade, just attend, with no political statement of any kind? I'd be willing to wager money people would get up in his grill, if not literally attack him.

This website is named for the motte and bailey fallacy, right? I believe that's relevant to this discussion, where you started by expressing anger that a beer company picked a trans woman for one commercial and expressing glee at the violent and angry responses from conservatives, and now are asking me to find a way for a political pundit to express gay and trans hatred at a pride parade to prove... something.

My original point stands. The bud light ad with Dylan Mulvaney and the response to it demonstrate to gay and trans people that conservatives require to be allowed to exclude them, with violence if possible. It's a smart way to demonstrate that conservatives don't care about women and children as much as they just hate gender nonconforming men and women. They have gone from seeking out gay and trans people to victimize, to creating silos in which they feel justified in victimizing any gay or trans people who dare to enter, but the urge to react to gay and trans people with violence is unchanged.

Conservatives were making headway with their concern for trans children and women's sports, but they took the bait and started shooting cases of beer because a trans woman drank a bud light.

  • -10

the violent and angry responses from conservatives

....? They're not buying beer. One guy shot a case of Bud Light and posted it on social media. It was not a case with Mulvaney on it, just a blue box.

now are asking me to find a way for a political pundit to express gay and trans hatred at a pride parade to prove... something.

Your core argument is that your side is morally superior because conservatives are welcome in gay spaces if they're not "political", but gay people are not welcome in conservative spaces, regardless. This is not some pedantic nit I'm picking. Please demonstrate that a legible conservative can enter a gay pride space and not get a hostile reception. I've tried to demonstrate it's possible for legibly gay people to enter a conservative space in the same way.

Your core argument is that your side is morally superior because conservatives are welcome in gay spaces if they're not "political", but gay people are not welcome in conservative spaces, regardless.

No, this is not my core argument. My core argument is that this advertisement is a smart unifying tactic for liberals because it demonstrates how much conservatives hate gay and trans people during a time when conservatives have been making political headway by pretending their anti-gay and anti-trans rhetoric is really about protecting women and children.

You don't actually know which "side" I'm on. You seem to be making assumptions about it. I feel no need to argue about which side is morally superior, because that's reductive, personal, and, as far as I can tell, directly not what this site is for.