DiscourseMagnus

DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

To me, the crux of the abortion argument is "when does life start?"

It should be. But pro-choicers really seem to love arguments that imply (or make explicit) that abortion should be permitted in all circumstances regardless of the sapience of the child. I take this as strong evidence that they're being disingenuous when they claim not to believe that the child is sapient. I think abortion is primarily a religious (Satanic) rite of child sacrifice.

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

You could justify a whole lot of things by explaining their benefit to some party involved and calling it a failsafe. I don't see how that's a compelling pro-infanticide argument.

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

I don't think women in a healthy society would, say, be greatly invested in making it more socially acceptable to kill their children, for example.

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

It's a really classic maneuver for anyone arguing for a generally "sex-positive" position, especially anyone arguing for it from an intellectually dishonest place. There's plenty of real hypocrisy from puritanical types that you can draw on for rhetorical effect, but it's also pretty easy to accentuate and exaggerate that hypocrisy through simple reframing. The puritanical types try to scare their bases with lurid accounts of what the perverts are doing, and the perverts simply redirect that fearmongering and try to get the uninvolved normies to focus on the finger instead of what it's pointing at.

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

At the moment, I work at a supermarket. Early today, a customer got pissed off about something at checkout - I don't know what - and started manically shouting a vulgar schizo quasipolitical rant, pacing around, targeting and physically intimidating my customers and coworkers, trying to start a fight, before he wandered back into the store. I'm not sure, in the end, if he left the store of his own accord or because security forced him to; I didn't care to ask around. He was a large, fit, middle-aged white man; exactly the kind of guy you'd stereotypically expect to see in the profile picture of a really deranged MAGA boomer Twitter account. We probably get several problem customers a day, but this was definitely the worst one I've seen in quite a while. It was mortifying to watch a walking hateful strawman of the Red Tribe, especially as I hail from the Red Tribe myself and used to be extremely invested in its success in the culture war.

(As of 2020 or so, I'm trending more centrist, because of exactly this kind of thing. I voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but I do not intend to vote this year; I have become disillusioned with democracy, politics, and the culture war. I feel that the mentally ill and generally unpleasant have become too dominant among the right wing. Of course, I always saw the mentally ill and generally unpleasant as dominant among the left wing; I feel that that's inherent to what the left wing is and represents, from its origins around the French Revolution to the ideology of Marx and on to the present progressive-stack day. But anyway, tangent over.)

The main content of the man's rant was that life in the modern US is shitty because [God presumably cursed the country because] President Obama was secretly "a faggot" and his wife was secretly male.

Now, I tend to have a pretty conspiratorial worldview myself. It's pretty obvious that the world does in fact run on conspiracies, and that much of the conventional wisdom suggesting otherwise is desperate copium, often pushed by the people in power. But, of course, we don't know all that much about what the conspiracies in charge are actually doing - that's the whole point of a conspiracy - and most of the "conspiracy theories" you see going around are deeply stupid, and you would need to be stupid to believe them. (The man at my workplace this morning threatened a woman in line for "calling [him] stupid"; she actually said no such thing, but I'm saying it now. I'm not a mind-reader, but I'm pretty sure that that man was stupid.)

Among these stupid conspiracy theories, the so-called "transvestigations" have always been the most striking to me personally, for many reasons. I'm sure ugly rumors about famous men secretly being women and famous women secretly being men have gone around for a long time, as ordinary bottom-feeding gossipy trash talk. But they seem to have emerged as a distinct, legible "type" of conspiracy theory relatively recently, starting in my adolescence, around the late 2000s and early 2010s. Noteworthy early individual targets included Lady Gaga (this was a "Marilyn-Manson-had-his-ribs-removed-so-he-could-do-autofellatio" tier schoolyard rumor for my generation) and, of course, Michelle Obama. However, over the course of the 2010s and on into the 2020s, as transgender people became central to the culture war, transvestigation metastasized into a more omnidirectional tendency to delusionally believe that any arbitrary public figure is secretly trans.

There are several key points here, in a natural order. The first is that the transvestigation phenomenon is nakedly psychological, in a way that feels like an exaggeration of the pattern of other stupid conspiracy theories. Transvestigators are obsessive in searching for rationalizations for their beliefs. They start with a single point that they want to believe - it would be convenient for their worldview if some specific person they hate, like Michelle Obama, were secretly transgender - and they start collecting and glomming onto "evidence" to reinforce the idea, ignoring any counterevidence. Confirmation bias. They strain to develop a suspicion, and that implausible suspicion quickly becomes ludicrous certainty. And that broken thinking winds up leaking out into and contaminating the entire rest of their worldview as they obsessively think back to it over and over again, fixating on their imagined secrets about their enemies' genitals, until eventually they wind up completely convinced that the entire ruling class is secretly transgender, and/or they wind up screaming to a crowded supermarket that the most popular First Lady of my lifetime is actually a man in a dress.

The next point is that the pathology of transvestigation very directly parallels and acts as a foil to various pathologies associated with the transgender movement itself. People can go crazy over both sides of the "we can always tell" coin. Transgender people often try to build confidence through denial of it; they convince themselves that it's much easier to pass than it actually is. From there, they can convince themselves that any given person around them could plausibly be of either sex, and that transgender people are arbitrarily common. Transvestigation has the opposite general motive, but follows a similar path to a similar endpoint. They want to convince themselves that they're always able to identify transgender people, and so any note of ambiguity in their minds, however disingenuous, starts throwing up panic signals and fostering conspiracy thought, which feeds itself in a vicious cycle until they've ironically destroyed their own ability to reasonably perceive/intuit people's sexes.

The more nuanced truth about passing, which both sides of the coin are missing, is that it's fundamentally a modern problem. Back in the olden days, it was much easier for men to pass themselves off as women and vice versa, because people weren't thinking about that possibility in the back of their minds at all times. The more relevant that transgender issues become to the zeitgeist, the harder it is for transgender people to pass, as normies start to consider the sex of those around them with more skepticism; a predator/prey-population-style cycle leading towards equilibrium. But, as transvestigators demonstrate, we might be hitting the limits of that process now; the appearances of the sexes are in many ways distributions with overlapping tails. Plenty of ugly people look remarkably like ugly people of the opposite sex, and you don't even really need that kind of natural androgynous ambiguity to get confused, if you're flooding your brain's training algorithm with images of attractive transgender models while contemptfully scoffing and trying to convince yourself that you can Still Definitely Tell.

We are a confused and spiraling people.

Finally, I think transvestigation is plausibly a baptists-and-bootleggers situation. For transvestigators themselves and their close extremist-right allies, it's a simple and effective way to stoke hatred and fanaticism; they perversely make themselves more and more paranoid while comforting themselves that they're able to see through the great veil. They develop the assuredness and the sense of grievance necessary to shout threats at strangers in a supermarket. For the left, transvestigation-adjacent rhetoric lowers the sanity waterline and encourages their enemies to beclown themselves.

And here's the thing: when I was a kid circa 2009, and transvestigation was just getting started? I got sexually harassed a lot, like, a lot a lot, by the LGBT kids (and their allies) at school. It wasn't a sexually-driven thing; it was political activist shitflinging. I'll admit I was an open bigot about those issues at that age, and that painted something of a target on my back. They saw the trope of outspoken bigots turning out to be repressed queers as a strategy and a goal, and they sought to confuse their enemies' sexualities. I keep seeing people in the modern culture war say that transgender people entered the discourse after the gays had fully won, because the activist structure needed something to move onto. There might be some truth to that, but I think it largely gets the order of cause and effect completely wrong. (Many people seem to be under the impression that transgender was invented from whole cloth in the mid 2010s. Full strain copium.)

In my experience of that era, transgender people entered the discourse as a tactic for advancing gay issues; they were ubiquitous rhetorical objects long before they were an actual notable demographic. The 2009-era LGBT activist kids talked a lot about transgender people, far out of proportion to their actual prevalence in the movement at the time; hell, "LGBT" was already a common and very recognizable term and I'm not sure that any of them were actually transgender, though they would often tell me that they were, at an ambiguous irony level. It was a foot in the door for forcefully making people question their sexuality, like a more politically pointed, though equally crude, meatspace analogue to old 4chan's trap culture (back when the term "trap" was new!). Oh, so you're not gay at all, right? You're not attracted to dudes even a little bit? Just girls? No penises, just veejays? Okay, what about this girl? She's hot, right? You wanna fuck her? Well, she's got a penis. How about that? You wanna suck her cock? Or do you think she's a man? Do you think that would make you a faggot? Maybe it would, if you think so. Or maybe you'd prefer Buck Angel? Early prototransvestigation rhetoric was spread around by a mix of bigots mocking their enemies and activist perverts fantasizing. Whenever I found out at that age that a classmate professed that Lady Gaga was born male, I could not have reasonably guessed, just from that, their view of the matter, ideologically speaking.

(Out-of-touch right-wing nightmares of teachers grooming children to become queer through sterile corporate-board-room-esque gay lesson plans are largely ignorant of how children interact with their peers already.)

Anyway, bit of a swerve, but - has anything like the scenario transvestigation points at ever happened? That is to say, has anyone ever become a major celebrity presenting themselves as one gender and later turned out to have secretly been the opposite sex the whole time? The closest examples I can think of aren't very close, and/or they're much closer to microcelebrity status than someone a normie might have heard of; very niche YouTubers. Famous transgender people I can think of are usually either famous specifically for being transgender (the proverbial dancing bears; Laverne Cox; Jazz Jennings), they decide to transition after they've already become public figures for other reasons (the celebrities' public crises; Elliot Page; Maddy Thorson), or both (the Caitlyn Jenners; Caitlyn Jenner). I guess the closest thing to an example I can think of after a few minutes of thought is Brianna Wu; I never followed Gamergate all that closely, but I get the general impression that she publicly presented herself as an at-least-implicitly cisgender woman but was eventually outed by her enemies. But there's a pretty big gulf in fame level between Brianna Wu, twice-failed primary candidate for Massachusetts' eighth congressional district, and, like. Michelle Obama.

(Naively, one would assume that some devious conspiratorial plan to normalize transgenderism through an influx of secretly-transgender celebrities would involve those celebrities publicly revealing themselves eventually. You know. To normalize it. But this part never seems to actually happen, which moves the hypothetical conspiracy more to "taunting you by sneaking triangles into the media, because the devil wants there to be secret triangles there" territory.)

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

Of course, things would need to be pretty terrible to justify such extreme measures.

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

I was never dumb enough to fall for this kind of thing, but for the record, I see the appeal, for people who are better at deceiving themselves. My great disappointment with the Trump presidency was that I wanted many elites - probably at least tens of thousands of them - rapidly publicly executed for their great and horrific Satanic treason. And for a brief historical moment, I was optimistic enough to think Trump might be willing and able to do that; "you'd be in jail", etc.

(Still not convinced, years later, that Pizzagate was actually fake. You've most likely been sold a bill of goods about it being ridiculous and unevidenced.)

Anyway, I was young and dumb then - I had hope and energy for politics - but I remember that feeling. And it's made it awfully surreal for me to see the right wing as a whole, in the wake of the Trump assassination attempt, citing norms of civility and how you're not supposed to want enemy politicians dead. So much has been memoryholed. The young right-wing movement really has been eaten by the establishment.

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

and let it keep getting worse until both sides agree to stop

Do you have some reason to believe this is going to happen? Cold civil war turning to hot civil war seems much likelier.

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

As someone who was tracking the story from the start, long before the term "Havana syndrome" was coined to discredit it, it seems pretty obvious to me that it was a real advanced weapon, the feds didn't actually want the public to know about it for some reason (it was presumably one of their own secrets, not an enemy secret - maybe something that got stolen or misused), and they eventually decided to feign an episode of mass hysteria as a coverup.

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

Does he really think that gracefully turning the other cheek will magically convince anyone on the obviously dominant side that cancel culture is bad actually - or (less charitably) even lead to any, any "are we the baddies" entry-level introspection among those involved at all?

Do the people rationalizing the escalatory course of action as "something we'll do until the other side learns to stop" really think that their actions will lead to any basic "are we the baddies"-type introspection on the left?

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

Given a realistic model of human behavior, that sounds somewhere between "massive" and "infinity" to me. How long will we keep kidnapping our enemy's children and torturing them to death on stream? Until the blood feud stops. Obviously.

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

Yes, although the optics of the jokey 2-part tweet about the matter are bizarrely poor.

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

They apparently tested it.

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

He's also 81 and obviously in poor health already.

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

I would usually be inclined to agree, but this particular tweet seems critically unaware of how Twitter works, in a way I'd generally consider much more characteristic of an old man with dementia than a social media team.

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

That's because the guy who made the video tracked her down and confronted her at her workplace about her social media post. That was what this was about.

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https://x.com/JoeBiden/status/1813715902250017022

DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

Biden got COVID and tweeted out this? Seeing a lot of people speculate that he's prepping to drop out of the race with the COVID as a pretense, but at the moment he still seems to be trying to play everything off.

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

This is naked sophistry. Surely your opponents could as easily find supposed examples of Trump engaging in second level speech (uh-oh no-no bad), which would make calling for his assassination third level speech (Real American Defended Free Speech) and trying to get assassination fans fired fourth level speech (??????????).

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DiscourseMagnus 10mo ago

I would generally describe the attempts to frame this angry mob behavior as a productive and rational game theory strategy as "a serious game theory L for red tribe", yeah.

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