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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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What would you try to use, to show how important the issue was in 2022?

The first step would be to figure out what happened and what's the status of the issue right now. What happens in 2122 when a dude wants to be a dudette or vice versa? What if a dude wants to bang other dudes while remaining a dude? Is everybody ok with this? Do they get arrested by the cyberpunk inquisition? Perhaps this never happens because those tendencies have been genetically engineered out of the population.

Your hypothetical doesn't explain this, but I think it would be important to know when planning out a culture war history lesson. (Or maybe deciding to shut up about the subject altogether, if it turns out that the cyberpunk inquisition is real.)

I can elaborate on the story, but I don't see how what exactly happened is relevant to how do you prove how big the topic is now.

What happens in 2122 when a dude wants to be a dudette or vice versa? What if a dude wants to bang other dudes while remaining a dude? Is everybody ok with this? Do they get arrested by the cyberpunk inquisition? Perhaps this never happens because those tendencies have been genetically engineered out of the population.

All of that is allowed, it's just that transitioning is nowhere near as popular as it used to be. Some people still do it, it's seen the same way as cutting, or anorexia nowadays. There's no inquisition, and no evidence of mass scale genetic engineering. It's hard to find out what happened to change people's mind, because hardly anyone even knows about that episode in history.

it's seen the same way as cutting, or anorexia nowadays.

These are still massive deals, you're just not a teenager anymore. I might be wrong but I'd even guess there's more of both now that social media has subsumed much of teenage socializing.

Assuming that 100 years has not improved how well transitioning works and transitioning is no better than it is today, the current status as of 2122 still matters because much of the trans controversy is directly related to how you are required to act towards other people. Does 2122 think those requirements are still requirements? If yes, but nobody minds the requirements, the left won. If no, the left lost, and you can tell your friends "imagine that you had to use trans pronouns and let trans women onto women's sporting teams and..." Since your friends don't do those things, they should have no trouble understanding why forcing people to do them results in controversy.

Let me ask you this–if you were to walk into a bar and someone was wearing MC colors, how do you think society would require you to act toward them?

The question is whether my friends in 2122 would understand why it's controversial. If I said "you need to obey what the trans activists tell you or they beat you up", I'm pretty sure they would understand why that's controversial. Even if the things demanded by the trans activists were things nobody demanded in 2122, they would still understand it.

(Of course, the activists get you fired rather than literally bashing you over the head.)

Like they were a potentially dangerous unleashed animal? Our society at least. But maybe in 100 years the panopticon is actually effective and you could be an unmitigated dick with no fear of consequences? Or maybe in a hundred years we will be celebrating the quinquagenary of our victory in the Sino American war, where motorcycle clubs provided the last line of defence against the invasion, and society expects you to treat them with deference and respect.

Then I think the model would be something like recovered memories and you'd want to emphasize the scale of the issue. This isn't really the type of thing contemporary articles are good at doing, so maybe some of the more dubious modern 'studies' that show some preposterous number of individuals being some form of 'genderqueer'. It's difficult t get it all in one article because you'd also want to capture how suppressed opposing speech is. I think the money article is probably yet to come out, maybe in the 2024 election if this issue is still as salient as it currently is, and I expect it to be, we'll have an article clarifying what the Democrat nominee's position is on it and that seems like it would be an ideal time capsule.

Since you brought up the subject... I'm vaguely aware of recovered memories, I think some Skeptics I used to follow would bring them up, but how big were they?

I can't say I was alive at the time to provide a first hand but this survey suggests around 18.5 million Americans at least discussed the idea with their therapist. There are more contemporary accounts that seem to indicate that the concept had some hold on the nation being discussed widely on TV and taken seriously by the law and professional clinicians.

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