It's been remarked on here before, but it seems nobody particularly cares about FtM trans people. They blend in easier and - more importantly - don't seem to threaten anybody either in physicality or status. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable sharing a dressing room with one, but I wouldn't be eyeing an immediate exit either. The 'disgust' phenomenon seems mostly localized to MtF.
I think Silverdawn's question is assy. But as somebody who is more anti than pro on most trans questions, I don't think increased exposure to trans people will resolve my problems with the movement. My feelings are less 'Enemy Mine' and more 'TNG: Chain of Command' in that people are trying to make me digest and parrot what I regard as an obvious untruth. No amount of positive experiences with trans people will change that I do not see them as their declared sex or gender, and whatever positive experiences I accrue could be suddenly outweighed by negative ones should my stance be revealed and unmoved.
Are they anticipating where the market is going, or where the ADL, NYT, and advertisers are going? Of course any CEO is going to factor them into their business proceedings. But it leaves the very likely possibility that the CEO is not demonetizing people or terminating deals because he's worried about his userbase rebelling against him and jumping ship, but because he's worried about a hit piece, ad networks getting the willies, or being subjected to all sorts of extended, motivated muckraking if they decide otherwise. CEOs are also not a separate species from humans; they socialize, fret, have principles with about as much 'integrity' as anybody else, and are subjected to many of the same social pressures most other people deal with, even if their venues and peers are gilded upper-class. I don't think they mind losing some money if they already have a lot, somebody else is willing to cover their losses with ESG funds, or if they can sit in security with no viable competition. And this should go without saying, but they too can be stupid.
I contend that when people refer to the free market, they usually mean a decision or assessment gleamed by the aggregate, collective spending decisions of consumers en masse - if a plurality of citizens respond positively or negatively to a product, as expressed by how much money they threw at it, and if it's enough to keep production going. You are pointing to a small cadre of Lords and Tastemakers who either step in before the product hits shelves - or has them removed because Sprint Mobile doesn't like having a booth next to it or whatever - while using that same term. These are clearly very different things. And if you insist on using that framing with justifications such as "Well, of course CEO anticipations and decision making are part of the market!", that's... fine, I guess. I can't even say you're wrong on any technical level.
But be clear. Because this always comes off as a low-effort gotcha. If the stuff I want to reward or patron are being removed from the menu by executive or committee's political fiat, the free market did not operate as most people would understand it. And yet, many progs will insist it did, if only for the cynical retainment of the feel-good glow around "every voice must be heard" and "power to the people" sentiments you need to half-heartedly pay lip service to so people don't see what's really going on.
I'm a midwit. These videos don't do anything for me. At best, they prompt a "well, that's neat" reaction, and nothing else. Without trying to be dismissive, somebody waxing about the beauty of mathematics comes off as very wanky. I can sort of grok what they're getting at, and understand that their brains are wired very differently from mine. It is certainly very interesting, but nothing that can elicit the same gut punch of awe and appreciation from my favorite film or still image; the ceiling of a well-constructed chapel (I'm not even religious) or the stature of an ancient monument; a quaint Shire-like village in the mountains or a barren desert bereft of human imprint. I can imagine myself and many others breaking down in tears when confronted with any of the above. Somebody moved to mania by a formula on a whiteboard and an accompanying 30-minute Youtube explainer would be... completely alien to me. There's way too much thinking involved for me to consider this beautiful in any meaningful sense, when what I think most people are gesturing towards are phenomenon and constructs that could catch one unawares and demand their gaze and attention.
I'm happy that some people can 'get off' on stuff like this, since I'm not sure where we'd be today if they didn't exist. But I don't see the aesthetics, or what the common man should take away from them other than perhaps an eyerolling "Yes, yes, you're so smart that you don't need the beauty of this material Earth - numbers are totally sufficient." Perhaps that only attests to my aforementioned midwittery, but it is honest.
I certainly wouldn't want such people charged with any attempted beautification project. No offense.
DTulpa
10mo ago
It's a garbage post, and would just be as garbage if it was about Biden (which I assumed it was on an initial skim).
And my point is that assuming children's gender identities or sexual orientations are being shaped by exposure to online porn, then we are from and away from 'born this way', and parents may feel they have a duty to restrict and deny access to such material, its relatives, and all their associated theorycrafting if they they deem it ultimately harmful for their offspring - without having to deal with a decentralized mass of sneering 'betters' who repeatedly/fraudulently cite The Science as being on their side, and who will utilize any mass of power they've accrued to culturally coerce you into behaving differently, up to calling CPS (and why believe it would stop there, left undeterred?).
Parents are often reliant on the integrity and validity of our institutions so they know what to expect, preempt, encourage, or ameliorate when it comes to the acculturation of their children. Instinct can probably get you far, but in a complex society with layers of social/economic/political abstractions, parents are looking for a consensus guard rail that reinforces their beliefs, gently reminding them "Yes, encourage that!" and "No, do what you can to curb that!". Validating the trans phenomenon as 'just some other way of being' after saying something that layman's ears might interpret as "The porn is mind controlling your kid and nobody should be concerned because #Pride" is seriously messing with the credibility of that rail, and the more it is emedded and officiated, the more concerned parents will be left out to dry, because...
"...Holy shit, I can't believe you disagree with the doctors and the teachers and about 75% of politicians (see, this is a totally non-partisan thing!) about the utility of teaching gender fluidity in Kindergarten! You still think it's a memetic contagion run amok? That is soooo 2023. Jordan Peterson is calling, and he wants you to clean your room! Haha."
I'm not sure if the above counts as uncharitable or inflammatory. But I was compelled to write it out and illustrate my point because these are very real conversations I've had too many times to count. I'm not too keen on the consequences of that dismissive disregard getting heavier.
DTulpa
1yr ago
The concern is less that something dies and more that it reanimates as a zombie hungry for brains.
DTulpa
3mo ago
There was a bit of cheating and wonkiness, but trust us - no more than usual.
It's not that I can't believe Trump lost fair and square. It's that I have no reason to trust that claim from people who regularly lied (or insinuated falsehoods) to me repeatedly in the run-up to his ousting. I can't expect then be honest about praising Nazis, I can't expect them to be honest about Russian collusion, I can't even expect them to be honest about feedish fish in Japan. But I'm supposed to buy the narrative that everything wasn't just above-board for the 2020 election, but even so much better than historical standards, no ifs or buts. That is until these conversations play out, and that S-ranked election integrity gets downgraded - but don't worry, not downgraded enough to suggest anything was questionable.
FWIW I think you're being super reasonable in your demands for evidence. And it's highly probable that that the general Right's refusal to concede this matter is a product of their pattern recognitions producing an error. Just because they were lied to about 10 other things doesn't mean media and political organs aren't telling the truth about lack of evidence for fraud and shenanigans. Unfortunately, when they all decided to sacrifice their integrity and honesty, they took my charity with it. I don't think this is a reactionary position, but an informed one.
Who cares any more, any way. As if anybody at this stage is going to change their mind based on the verdict of some tribunal or investigative body. The ship of legitimacy sunk well before all of this, and I can't believe anybody thinks it can be restored with some official paperwork. What awful stewards our leaders are, for putting us in this position
I'm a Signal user, and definitely one of those people who are too mundane to be noticed most of the time. While I do use regular SMS for most convos, there are particularly spicy chats with trusted friends and family that I use Signal for because I don't trust the alternatives. Perhaps this is paranoid of me, but a few things triggered its adoption:
-
A blast from my edgy teenage past (about 15 years old at the time of the incident) popped up out of the blue with potential professional consequences for not only me, but an old friend as well. I was shocked that a JPG uploaded to the middle of nowhere on a webzone stuck in early 00s design and infrastructure managed to turn up in a company's background check for him. I was lucky to get a response and takedown from the current owner after spamming his email for a week.
-
There's this phenomenon where people caught in freak, chaotic situations who make a bad move have their text histories pored over. This is to be expected, I imagine. But... Did you express violent displeasure at the 2019 protestors to a confidant? Maybe use some colorful language? Were you so bold and colorful to suggest that maybe a certain kind of protestor should have the ambulances they're obstructing drive right through them? Hope you didn't write that down. If you end up in a situation where somebody gets hurt or killed, you're a premeditated murderer! Let's say that I would be fucked beyond measure if one of MY antisocial morning-before-coffee shitposts got dug up after a protestor died after attacking my dad, for instance.
And during these moments, I'm noticing that the open, mind-your-own-business, permissive tech culture of old has been largely inverted by men and women who sound like you. I don't trust that change, and I don't trust you or your fellow travelers to never take it too far. Sure, I'm too boring today - unless an aggrieved party forces my publicity. But I can certainly imagine an evolved, V2 future wokescold developing the interest once they've exhausted every other one of Al Capone's vaults in their quest to find racism and intolerance as an explanation for why the world sucks. When you can no longer find any mechanism for systemic racism in the processes or the data, but you don't yet have mindeaders, why not go for the next best thing like their lifelong chat history? And who wouldn't be tempted to ctrl-f the word 'nigger' to see what comes up in a paper trail of that size?
Part of the concern is that today's mundane can quickly become tomorrow's problematic. That transgressing popular orthodoxies is not as ruinous or catastrophic as it could be by historical standards doesn't assuage my fears, because I honestly don't know if and when such curiosity regarding wrongthink and badspeak will be sated. I think I need to cement here that I did not have 'privacy concerns' as a foremost thing in my mind until I felt like the culture and people I'm surrounded by got bizarrely tilted and bloodthirsty.
I recognize that my small, amateurish attempts to guard against this are probably futile and incomplete, and possibly laughable by your vantage. But the impulse to escape your sight lines will continue to be very real. Dangling a hypothetical pedo bunker over the scale doesn't move me. A world without privacy and encryption looks more like the Trump investigations stretching into infinite than a parade of young girls rescued from Joseph Fritzl. Even the latter would require real work and resources, so I expect more resume-padding and activity among DEI hires in the Department of Bad Texts than anything else.
If I have to submit to your preferred apparatus, it would only be in the 'nice until meanness is coordinated' sense. Secretly I'll keep hoping it's destroyed by implosion or external force.
I think most Dems aren't personally enamored with Joe Biden the man, and more than a little embarrassed by him. Attempts to cast him as 'just a boring understated centrist' who doesn't really offend anybody is a kind of cope, and a facade of false humility that permits them to say 'Boy, how unhinged right-wing anger is! He's not even really progressive and you're still foaming at the guy! Partisan politics much?" while progressivism turbo-charges under his watch.
The only people I have ever heard describe him in such a fashion are... Democrats. Many of them who are rather politically milquetoast and blasé now (a sharp change from their demeanor under the last presidency), and it frankly feels like deflection. The random assortment of people I've talked to where he comes up as a topic - the closest I can get to a 'man on the street' whose political affiliations I'm unfamiliar with - typically have a very different take on the guy.
Which isn't to say they're right wing or would vote for Trump.
Blue elites may have developed a disdain for Chappelle. For the rank and file (and anybody who grew up with his old show), Dave still has the cultural cachet of being the 'the GOAT' and for his BLM sympathies. The trans stuff is at most slightly unfortunate in their eyes, but not enough to tip the scales.
DTulpa
6mo ago
That movie even had the self-awareness to mine humor from the varying perceptions of the Confederate flag circa '05, with neither view being promoted. Just acknowledged.
It is practically dispassionate in comparison to where we are now. And that's where I thought we stood maturity-wise as a nation. Northerners rolled their eyes and tut-tutted and Southerners told them to shove it, but it didn't seem to amount to much beyond the mundane neighborly squabbling endemic to any nation, state, or city. The kind of shit talking little different than that between New Yorkers from different areas, Western European countries between each other, or the Eagleton vs Pawnee stereotype that comes up in any given state.
Now this is being recast as an existential and moral fight to the death. A reckoning long overdue since we averted our privileged eyes from obvious stains of evil. And while I've long heard talk about the Union 'not going far enough' in destroying the Antebellum South, I chalked so much of this up to tough online posturing uttered by cowards that couldn't shoot a dog, let alone raze a town. Shame on me for not treating this with the full contempt it warranted, since I never thought this view would rank up to the level of legitimacy it sees now.
I find it hard to trust people who don't acknowledge this switch. It wasn't motivated by recently unearthed knowledge or a radical reappraisal of our understanding of the conflict. It was pure present-day vibes, and those come from now, and are only very tenuously connected to a long-gone war a century and a half ago. And it's why I'm not moved by anybody linking to historical and/or academic documents debating full removal of Confederate symbols, because people talk all the fucking time.
DTulpa
8mo ago
Of all the new progressive-led 'ways of doing things', are there any examples of one that got 'refined' and dialed down a bit from its prior fervor?
Will this refinement entail not trying to cut off people from their income based on public accusations made under anonymity and that nobody attempted to bring to court?
This sorta rubs me the wrong way, but I find it difficult to articulate why. I've had similar encounters with a trans worker in my office, and my occasional slip-up with their pronouns never raised to the level of being harangued about it or being threatened with HR. I did indeed "get better at it", and we continued to work together as well as anybody else until one of us transitioned to other projects.
But what precisely did I get better at? Being polite about something that I think is frankly ridiculous. And while there are many beliefs or opinions I find ridiculous wether religious or political, they never come up in a professional context or require an update to my language model. I have a lot of negative things to say about Islam, but that's neither here nor there when I'm working shoulder to shoulder with a Muslim peer. It just doesn't come up, and neither of us can make any demands of each other.
No matter how much it was prettied up, a falsehood (IMO) was being imposed on me, and there is no escaping or ignoring the sword hanging over my head if I were to continue to misstep, or politely respond that this preferred pronoun business is not my bag, but I still fully respect you as a fellow coworker. Basically, I reject the idea that I am 'slipping up' at all when I refer to them with the pronouns that historically correspond with their birth sex. Even a well-intentioned "No foul! You'll get the hang of it in time" gets my hackles up, as if there is a deficiency on my end requiring shoring up.
I wouldn't say they were being dicks - that's far too strong a word. But I don't think "not being a dick about it" lets them off the hook for what they're doing, because it still boils down "do it or else" in the end. No amount of smiles or soft chuckles about my faux pas changes that.
My coworker seemed fine in all other respects. We could crack jokes about other topics, talk vidya, bitch about work. But I never stopped being on the backfoot about their pronouns, because continued absentmindedness or deliberate refusal would be a road to catastrophe. I could say I used their pronouns because I respected them, but it was also inseparable from the motive of self-preservation. And when the motives are mixed up like that, I don't know if I'm being fully honest with myself regarding my intentions.
This is not comprehensive, but my sample can be boiled doen to some types: random barber in my area (southern but with ample blue ambition for decades in no small part due to transplants, myself included), Latino working class man and his wife looking to escape LA who I met at a wedding, tattooed nerd-chic good-looking friend of friend in AI tech, immigrant Uber driver shooting the shit, cosmopolitan (and attractive) Peruvian office co-worker with a pronounced accent and stereotypical latin flair, and a few others I'm probably forgetting. On a very shallow reading based on appearances and speech patterns, it wouldn't be out of the question to assume many of these people would lean Blue to some degree or another, which often left me a bit surprised when an unprompted 'state of the country' or 'Biden is making a mess' comment would leave their mouths. None of them struck me as obsessive partisans in the same way I often wonder I am.
If I could synergize and condense their words into something, it is: Being a gaping hole through which progressive ideology spills through you does not make one a centrist or a moderate. A number of these folks did the usual "I couldn't stand Trump" disclaimer, but now find themselves livid over things like student debt cancelation, soft-on-crime policies in their local area, and (but of course) the normalization and pushing of transgenderism on children. I wondered if these people are outliers, but they would match up broadly with polling that indicates the growing unpopularity of these movements and attendant policies. These are people who truly expected the promised "return to normal", and now feel cheated. For Biden to qualify as centrist or moderate in their eyes would require him pushing back on the excesses among his ranks, and instead they see a doddering figure who probably doesn't even understand half of what's being shoveled through him. Like, do you think Biden has even a semi-coherent understanding of transgenderism, or does he get by just aping the rhetoric of yesteryear's gay rights battles? They wanted Bill Clinton, and instead they got a puppet that can barely conceal its strings. Biden is most likely 'moderate' as a mere man, but as a President he is anything but, and acting like the former means anything or is consequential in any way feels like gaslighting.
Now, it's not like I had extended conversations with many of these people. I'm at risk of filling in some gaps with my own concerns and putting words into their mouths. But, I have only ever heard "He's just old and boring" said by people who are hard-coded Democrats and who could never even entertain the idea of voting for a non-Trump Republican, no matter how moderate or 'presidential' they would be by comparison. Like a good friend of mine who may say "Y'know, it seems like conservatives are making a bigger deal out of the pronouns issue than liberals", and I have to irritatedly remind him that cons aren't the ones who kicked up this 'pronoun issue'; that to whatever extent they are mad about it, it's in reaction to progressives pushing and enshrining it out of seemingly nowhere. Or the kind of person who dismisses seething over the Pride flag with "Jeez, I can't believe you're that burnt up over a little ol' piece of fabric!" but then goes to DEFCON-4 with media and institutional support if anybody were to sully or remove one. The kind of person who says they don't care for Biden at all and only considered him the least worst option, but conspicuously never has any specific criticisms of him and his performance (except old/boring) and is very eager to change the topic to some Republican malfeasance instead of giving a straight Yes/No answer if puberty blockers for toddlers is a good idea.
It's the same ploy behind his or his handlers' "Do I look like a radical socialist?" statement during his 2020 run. Because we all 'know' that geriatric white politicians who say "folks" are just an aged, bland flavor of vanilla, and how could anybody be incensed by it unless they're nuts. It's the same machinery behind "I can't believe the Right is going after Big Bird!" when Sesame Street is pushing vaccines, "I can't believe shooting Nazis is now controversial!" when a game company is intimating similarities with MAGA supporters, or "It's just a comedy show!" when some dumb shit falls out of John Oliver's mouth.
DTulpa
10mo ago
Regarding trans children at least, I don't know how many parents take their cues on child-rearing from online porn. I think there's a general heuristic that the internet is a crazy place, and whatever hot new fad or kink that is expressed from online spaces is just "that weird meme crap my kid ocassionally references that I don't understand or feel like understanding, because the 'net is crazy". It's hard to separate it from "The Grimace Millshake Challenge" or whatever bizarre FOMO meme is being reported on, and you can see your Mom's face screw up in judgmental confusion as you attempt to explain it.
If this is just crazy internet shit, you can hold onto the hope (somewhat reliably) that the fad will pass and all you need to do is hold down the fort as the storm moves past you. Codifying it into education sanewashes and perpetuates the phenomenon, because you can't so easily dismiss an army of smart-sounding educators who supposedly knows what's best for your child and are 'experts' on teaching kids - since you're just some dummy that has the humility to understand some things are beyond your understanding and intellect, so might as well to defer to your betters even if it makes you uncomfortable
I think many people are wising up to the idea that this trusted dynamic has been utterly abused. And resisiting the trans push into education is 'holding down the fort'.
"Bud Light is throwing their weight behind the idea that a natural born man can transition into a woman - an idea that is harmful in its consequences, disrespectful to reality, and is quite possibly the most ridiculous development in our political arena in ways I could have never foreseen."
If you believe the above, I think this is a decent enough reason to boycott? This isn't an argument over some sprawling, poorly-understood topic like the pros/cons of taxes or immigration policy. This is more like a company telling you that the color green is no different from red, without a trace of winking, Millenial irony attached, except worse given the subject matter.
Some hack writer burning a Trump effigy in his show is dumb, but mostly just eyeroll-inducing. The psychology behind such a person and their behavior is completely legible to me, even if it's idiotic. But for trans issues, it does feel like many on the left are downloading their views from a heretofore undiscovered alien planet. I can break bread with or let bygones be bygones to some extent with somebody who really likes socialism. It is increasingly difficult to do so with people who are being absurd on an even more fundamental level - if not the most.
The Bud/Mulvaney controversy was likely sprung from a critical mass of people already predisposed towards being unfavorable having an "Oh, come the fuck on" moment, particularly attenuated by having this come from Bud Light of all brands.
Were they overrepresented? I'm sure they were at various points in time, but I'm not sure how much of that was intentional versus the realities of working with the materials on hand.
There is an interesting question as to what exactly constitutes overrepresentation here. If the average USer is white, and I make products targeting that average, then that could entail making films with just white people and never black people. It would be fair to say black people are not represented under that dynamic, but I'm not quite covinced it's fair to say whites would therefore have too much representation. Not that I wouldn't wouldn't find this hypothetical phenomenon somewhat offputting and worth correcting for to some degree.
If I recall films from the 90s to the 10s, I think the average filmgoer saw representation in aggregate that was more proportional to their lived experience. Yes, a lot of movie leads were white. But you still saw occasional movies from Denzel, Sam Jackson, Will Smith, Snipes, and so on. Movies and performances that weren't really coded 'black' and were intended for average peoples' consumption. Depending on where you are, this pattern probably lines up everywhere from your childhood upbringing to your office personnel: mostly white, and a few black people. And while you weren't blind to their skin color, there was a sense that it was wrong to approach them in those terms.
So while you may not have gotten a complete balanced breakfast of diversity and inclusion in any one given film, you probably did get it through a dozen or more films throughout the year. Nobody's wires gets tripped because this pattern matches to more Americans' lives than not. People get cynical - rightly so, I'd argue - when the images they regularly see on their screen is consistently discrepant with their realities. And it's especially repellent when it is clearly being done as a kind of moral mandate. When so many current media products individually reflect this kind of template diversity, you start to wonder what's up.
DTulpa
6mo ago
Didn't the black VAs encourage using the word? I remember when some game journo outlet went after Rockstar with some headline like "Rockstar Needs To Take Responsibility For Its Depiction of Black People", because the casual use of 'nigger', referring to women as 'bitches', and all other sorts of vulgarity were demeaning stereotypes.
Except it turned out IIRC that the VAs thought Rockstar's original script and dialogue weren't authentic enough. It didn't feel 'real', and the actors were given discretion in their performances to punch it up, so to speak. And it worked because yes, people in that social rung in those areas with those cultures absolutely do talk that way, even if it makes progressives' skin crawl. Of course, that attempted rebuttal wasn't recognized in the slightest because "We literally gave the black actors the freedom to perform these roles as they saw fit, and they did so enthusiastically" was too inconvenient to even acknowledge.
DTulpa
6mo ago
I definitely am discussing Reddit in general. The hot takes and easy karma shown in that thread appear any time Elon or any minimally right-coded figure pops up as a topic nearly anywhere on the site. You'll be browsing a sub for a video game or show you like and then one day there's a "DAE see similarities between Musk and the Dark Lord?" post sitting up top with 6 gold and thrice the upvotes relative to anything else.
Few are immune to smug convictions. But there is something stupefying about the particular thing they are convinced of. I'd frankly find it more tolerable if they accused him of being a grifter, a conman, a snake, or even evil. But dumb and incompetent? It's this reflexive tic among leftitsts where surely your opponents are just straight-up retarded; as opposed to you, brilliant cat man shooting for the 6 figures with your journalism and poli-sci courses (assuming they're even taking those and not just posing). And it's not just Reddit. I dont think a week goes by where I don't get fed an article about how Musk is doing something crazy or inscrutable. Just this morning I was reading about his digs at Wikipedia, and the article hintingly framed this as mental instability.
This started to feel tryhard with Trump, and it's doubly so with Musk.
DTulpa
1yr ago
People keep repeating this, but none of them have bothered to make the apples to apples comparison of discriminating against political viewpoints versus banning real-time location doxxing. Until they do, this is just more 'Boo Musk' weaksauce.
Wake me up when Elon starts banning people for referring to Rachel Levine by their preferred pronouns.
DTulpa
2mo ago
You're correct that the specific predictions didn't pan out as stated in the 90s and 00s. To cut them a little slack, nobody really anticipated a hot debate about the definition of 'man' vs 'woman' or the 'gender spectrum' to enter the fray.
However, that the Left enabled that kind of blindsiding has shown me that they can't be trusted to not flip the board and mealmouth things that I find rather horrid, like puberty blockers. I have to say that my trust for the Left to stay within reasonable lines has done a complete 180 on this topic, and I wonder if the 'kink wing' of the party is just waiting for more favorable conditions to finally push through. And they could very well do so even if the vast majority of their compatriots don't like it. We have not slid to the specific point that moral conservativism predicted, but I don't want to be distracted from the fact that a slide did occur, even if indirectly.
My suspicion is you will ultimately be found correct. There won't be a mass normalization of beastiality and pedophilia. But that's predicated on my faith that surely people don't change that quickly, and I don't know how I justify that. So personally, I'm going to extend the deadline to 2040 and see where we stand after swimming in AI futa cocks for a decade or two.
DTulpa
3mo ago
In addition, given how gay people (who I have effectively zero problems with) have been perpetually used as a wedge to justify the normalization and protection of the trans phenomenon, I would be terribly close-minded to not consider expelling them from course books if I thought it ultimately wasn't worth the tradeoff, at least under these conditions.
If Dems keep up the taunts of "So now what, you're gonna deny that gay people exist?", they may end up having a real Fucked-Around-Found-Out moment. There's a lot of things I might be tempted to sacrifice if they're going to be cynically propped up as shields against me.
I'm not sure it is inconsequential. Moreso if there's any plans for children and one would like a partner who could help guard against their kids getting sucked into this zeitgeist and not compromise with beligerent forces.
I wonder if the last decade of "Who cares, like it really matters, this doesn't affect anything" line IRT LGBTQ issues has led us to this fractious and confused state, where it's been revealed that of course it's consequntial, and in ways big and small affects sports, schools, prisons, women's spaces, law, dating dynamics, corporate duties and expectations, etc. And while that boulder was probably coming any way, I think its mass and power could have been shrunk a bit if more people in their various personal relationships were adamant in calling it as nonsense, and not treating their brain as a private refuge to keep hidden from others in order not to rock the boat.
IME many women I know are very receptive to LGBTQ framings - their husbands and BFs less so. But the men just kinda shut up about it. I know some very Trumpy anti-woke ex-mil guys who allow their wives to take their children to BLM protests and Pride painting sessions, and all they do is grimace and bite their tongue "as long as she's happy". This is simultaneously wholesome and admirable, and also infuriating. Infuriating because this feels too similar to the larger societal pattern of rolling over on LGBTQ issues because somebody (usually a woman or a minority) might be made uncomfortable, with predictably negative consequences.
He can weigh his own scales after this event. I don't think he should take any advice here going one way or another too close to heart. On some level it seems silly to consider breaking up over (ugh) politics, and I'll assume everything else about their relationship is going swimmingly, more or less. Then again, she's basically accused him of having bigoted opinions, and that's awfully close to being a bigot proper. I'd be wondering if there's anything else touching this topic that might prompt this reaction. This is either a trifle or the tip of an iceberg, and you won't know which without more time running into it.
DTulpa
9mo ago
There's something so comically simple and innocent about full-on transformations, for me. Like a 6 year old that really wants to be a T-Rex or a sentient tank, and would go full hog if given the opportunity, physical consequences be damned. Wholeheartedly rejecting your human vessel to be something else entirely because 'fuck yeah'.
But being a big-breasted female-presenting tiefling with a futa cock and dude voice? Feels like a strange midpoint. If you live in a world of magic and this can be done easily with a finger snap or a procured service, why wouldn't you go all in one way or the other? I'll admit to a possible failure of imagination on my end, but it just comes off as kink and fetishism. I'm sure there's some fucking official lore about how everybody in FR is pansexual and sexually super liberal (because the author just said so!) and so none of this is strange in-universe, but I think it just renders the whole thing silly and alien.
Any way, I know nothing of the DnD universe other than Planescape Torment and less than a handful of fun birthday party sessions that were never intended to be continued past that single night. But Spider Guy is intelligible to me in a way Ms Potato Parts isn't.
The investigations that ultimately ended up clearing Trump were treated as de facto proof of guilt by the media, Dem politicians, members of their investigative committees, and various NatSec officials in positions of seniority. Even with the Mueller report, the common refrain in its aftermath was "Trump may not have been proven guilty, but he wasn't proven innocent either". Even today, it is nigh impossible to get any plurality of Trump opponents to admit the accusations were bupkis, and there remains a substantial minority that still believes them outright.
As many here are fond of saying, "the process was the punishment". The investigations were blatantly weaponized, leaving a stench even if the shit didn't stick.
The CIA and its affiliates may be totally sqeaky clean and above-board behind closed doors. But since nobody has visibility into that apparatus, and history would indicate that's not particularly likely, I'm giving them zero deference.
More options
Context Copy link