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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30046 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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With those numbers, you’re exceedingly unlikely to know anyone with kids going through those procedures. To me, this just seems like a moral panic amplified through the news in order to distract the masses from real issues - the housing crisis, corruption, school shootings, inflation, wealth inequality, social services being stripped away, the erosion of the middle class. Why do you care about this? Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?

Welcome to the culture wars in America. This trend dates to the early 90s, in which a few suicides possibly due to lyrics was the most pressing thing in America at the time. 'Big issues' are understood to be hard to fix and out of anyone's control. Smaller-stakes culture war battles get more mileage. Trans issues are seen as being symptomatic of broader-scale problems...the canary in a coal mine.

'Big issues' are understood to be hard to fix and out of anyone's control. Smaller-stakes culture war battles get more mileage.

This line of thinking is why I sometimes think that the Culture War is best described as bike shedding at the scale of governance: we fight hardest about the things we think we understand most, even if they are, at the end of the day, mostly inconsequential.

the Culture War is best described as bike shedding at the scale of governance

This analogy is so uncomfortably accurate that my knee-jerk reaction was to downvote. Instead I'm nominating it as an AAQC. It was a real life "they hated him because he spoke the truth" moment.

I agree we should focus on economic issues and intergenerational disparities but gender ideology is ubiquitous - in the sense of scale it's huge, an attempted takeover of a prior social consensus. Just because a lot of people ignore it, doesn't mean it's not consequential.

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