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Have you seen the reaction to Contra points saying she doesn't like being asked about pronouns? Have you ever seen how they treat detransitioners?
Websites like transgendermap.com, and apps like Shinigami Eyes tell you which sources of information are good, and which are bad, so you know who to avoid as a good practicing member, and who your friends will know to dismiss if you bring them up.
If this is they key than the case falls flat on it's face. I straight up disagree a cult needs to have a leader.
Why is it bad to give people more information to make a decision? That seems like the opposite of controlling information!
I was referring to their profiles on critics of transgender medicine.
How did you miss the part where I said "tell you which sources of information are good, and which are bad, so you know who to avoid as a good practicing member, and who your friends will know to dismiss if you bring them up"? You quoted the text!
Well the way you phrased your comment made it sound like transgendermap or Shinigami Eyes were themselves the problem, rather than the way people use them.
They are themselves the problem. Shinigami Eyes is literally an app for marking social media accounts as TERFs so you can dismiss them (at best). Likewise the problem with the profiles written by transgendermap.com isn't the people who read them, it's the people who write them. Their entire purpose is to demonize the critics of gender medicine.
This still sounds like an objection of the way people use the tools. The demonization or dismissal are the issue. There is nothing that forces someone to dismiss (or take seriously) a person or website on the basis of Shinigami Eye's evaluation. Similarly there's nothing that forces people to demonize those profiled on transgender map.
This do not seem to be true, to me. The profile you linked identifies specific beliefs O'Malley has that the website considers anti-trans. Specific groups she's affiliated with that the website believes oppose trans writes. It links to outside resources as citations for these claims and even links directly to a number of social media and other websites operated by O'Malley herself so people can do their own evaluation.
At this point I have to ask you, how do you think cults do control of information?
...dismiss her, and all the groups she's involved in, without ever engaging with them directly.
They encourage people to use cult-approved sources of information, generally other sources inside the cult, and disapprove or punish the acquisition of information from non-approved sources. The fact that transgendermap links directly to O'Mally, in her own words, seems quite the opposite of that.
Not quite. Discouraging even looking at outsider information is too obvious (contrary to popular belief, the typical victim of a cult is pretty intelligent), so what you actually want to do is convince your followers that a certain class of arguments is evil. That way they'll stop themselves from considering the arguments without the impression they're being prevented from looking at something.
You'll notice that you yourself have pointed out O'Mally's positions are "anti-trans" according to the website, even though in itself there's nothing anti-trans about "disease models", "gatekeeping", or ROGD (or even "LGB without the T" though I can grant that it's more debatable).
It's funny you should say that. Every single link on that page links to another page on the website itself, not to primary sources where O'Malley explains her positions in her own words. The only direct link to her material is a link to the homepage of her personal website, but by that doesn't help you find what her arguments about the mentioned positions are, and point the well is poisoned anyway.
BTW, do you think that portrait on top is neutral and accurate, or might be at all caricatured?
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You're all for the app that marks social media accounts as Jewish then, presumably?
What do you imagine my objection to this app would be?
That's interesting - I'd personally find it distasteful at best but can't but into a short sentence why. Let me think on it
Are we talking about the jew finder or the TERF finder? For starters, being ethnically jewish isn't a choice.
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It breaks the gentlemen's agreement that a pseudonym you encounter for the first time online is a blank slate.
Outside of 4chan and a handful of other places, that gentleman's agreement disappeared 10+ years ago when mass adoption of smartphones enabled normies to use the internet easily.
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I can. It's coordinating meanness against people who don't deserve it. That's always a bad thing.
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I suspect this is tongue in cheek, but one wonders about the gish-gallop style of rebuttal that takes place here in contrast to debate on the substantive issues.
I'm lost, who's doing "Gish gallop debunking"?
Im over generalising and it's not the right term probably. I mean picking at the margins, like the 'well that doesn't sound exactly like a cult to me', when the OP was making parallels. Or, pointing out how rare it is, when the argument is not about volume.
It's not arguing the substantive points but rather deflecting in a manner that can be defended as being a legitimate argument, this hiding the true motive.
I may be projecting however...
Oh, that's fair enough as a criticism, but yeah "gish gallop" usually refers to spamming with sources in hopes of their sheer volume leaving your opponent unable to respond.
Yes, it's not the right term, I agree.
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I agree that other groups count as cults, too.
OP’s choice of comparisons had clear examples of financial and informational control, emotional abuse, and personal gain/leadership. I felt it was appropriate to argue that trans activism lacks some of those.
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My mental model of a cult is just "religion, but less popular," so I probably have a lot to learn about how cults work, but this comment and the one to which you are responding made me think about how cults and religions have to adapt to new environments. With respect to the information environment, obviously the 21st century is vastly different from - and more liberal than - anything that came before, which means information control is very difficult and thus will have to look very different from cults in the past in order to achieve similar things. The stuff you point to seem like decent analogues to past censorious technologies; they can't outright control what you have access to, so they manipulate which sources that you actually choose to access.
And this connects to my own observation from about a decade ago when I began to recognize the social justice movement of which I had been a part as a modern incarnation of religion. In this modern world of science, the traditional notions of faith are much more difficult to keep popular, and so religions that rely on that suffer, and religions that find other ways to get people to believe things prosper. The beauty of social justice (aka Critical Race Theory, aka "wokeness," aka "it's just basic human decency," aka "empathy") is that it allows people to enjoy all the beliefs of faith while eschewing most of the leap that's usually required. You still have to leap, but now you have a whole structure built to reassure you that this leap is totally justified because of historical reasons and very smart scholars who have done the Work and published in their peer reviewed journals to prove that simply listening and believing (the Right People) is the correct way. So if you're (like me at the time - whether that has changed now is something I honestly couldn't answer) someone who thinks of himself as non-religious and, in fact, better than those deluded religious people who cling to their faith, this is the perfect religion to latch onto.
However, I've also heard people call social justice a cult, and I would agree with that to the extent that a cult is just a less popular religion. But I also recognize that a cult is often more than just that, because being less popular comes with it many of its own complications, such as the whole recruitment process that can require much more brainwashing and thus much more control than a typical religion. I wonder what other cult-specific patterns we will see 21st century versions of, which route around the additional difficulties of the new environment. Obviously cutting one off from one's friends and family is a big one, but that seems to be just following the standard playbook as best as I can tell.
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Naming your app after the ability to see people's names so you can murder them with your grim reaper notebook certainly isn't great optics, eh?
It's anime and the target userbase is autists that live online. It goes with the territory.
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