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Notes -
Election deflection, C-section abjection, complexion dejection, the Meccan deception
Psyops and "gotcha" questions as tools for exposing dishonesty, cowardice and ideological rifts
I
Jay Clayton is the US attorney for the southern district of New York, and the nominee to serve as Director of National Intelligence. Last week, he appeared before the Senate Select Committee to judge his suitability for the role, during which Senator Jon Ossoff repeatedly asked him who won the 2020 presidential election. Clayton declined to answer.
With this simple question, Ossoff has just provided a powerful counter to one that so many progressives have tripped over in the last decade, "what is a woman?" The first example of its deployment that occurred to me was this clip, in which Jo Swinson (then-party leader of the Liberal Democrats) took questions on a call-in radio show. Clearly taken aback, she stumbled through a vague, digressive answer about how "we know what we are" and that all women are important regardless of ethnicity, sexuality or social class. It was like something out of The Thick of It.
Other prominent examples of the question's use include the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (to which she memorably replied "I'm not a biologist") and Sen. Josh Hawley grilling a physician on whether or not men can get pregnant.
But while conservatives and gender-criticals understand how effective "what is a woman?" is in making their ideological opponents look absurd, I think many fail to grasp its precise mechanism of action. You'll often hear such people crowing "How can you claim to know how to run a country, when you don't even know what a woman is?" But of course Swinson knows what a woman is. While she might pretend to endorse a trans-inclusive definition, her revealed preferences surely tell a very different story. I fancy that if she was using a public bathroom and a specimen like "Karen" White strolled in, she'd be out of there like a shot.
Within the progressive coalition, there are a small number of people who subscribe to the woo-y circularity of "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman", a "definition"1 that sounds preposterous to anyone with an ounce of common sense. There is a much larger group of people who don't endorse this definition, but are afraid to say so publicly for fear of alienating the crazy people who do. This makes "what is a woman?" a powerful "gotcha" question, as there's no answer a progressive politician2 can give which doesn't serve the inquirer:
The fact that Swinson took the third option strongly suggests that she doesn't endorse gender ideology, but feared alienating the people in her camp who do. She may be a dishonest coward, but she isn't a lunatic: she does, in fact, know what a woman is.
Likewise with Jay Clayton in the clip above. From watching the clip, I imagine many progressives (and perhaps also many conservatives) will conclude that Clayton thinks Trump won in 2020, but refuses to say so outright, knowing that it's an opinion most people rightfully consider absurd. But I would put money on Clayton knowing full well that Biden won, but being too afraid to say so publicly for fear of angering the lunatics in his camp. (And by "the lunatics", I of course mean "the current occupant of the Oval Office and his army of true believers"). Ossoff appears to agree, asking Clayton if it's "humiliating" that Clayton is expected to "indulge the President's delusions". Clayton isn't crazy or stupid: he's just a coward who lacks integrity.
To sum up: "what is a woman?" and "who won the 2020 election?" can expose someone as a lunatic with crazy beliefs. But even if they don't, they can still expose them as a coward or a traitor to their cause, and in some cases that can be just as useful.
II
When I started writing this, it occurred to me that the structure of these "gotcha" questions (wherein the respondent stands to lose face no matter how they answer the question) bears a familial resemblance to a series of anti-woke psyops from a few years back. Beginning in 2017, a group of anonymous pranksters mounted posters around American college campuses bearing the legend "it's okay to be white". If you're a person who agrees that it's okay to be white (not "being white is better than being non-white"; merely that being white is "okay"), you'll respond to these posters with "well, duh". The ingenuity of the psyop was that it forced the people who disagree with the sentiment to lay their cards on the table. The only people who could find something objectionable in the statement "it's okay to be white" are those who actually think white people ought to feel ashamed of themselves for the colour of the skin - something the most extreme woke people obviously believe, even if many of them pretend otherwise. By responding to this utterly milquetoast statement with shock and outrage, these people out themselves, exposing the gulf between their stated and revealed preferences.
Watching these people dutifully step onto the rake laid in front of them was hilarious, but became a bit disturbing when you mentally substitute the specific sentiment they condemned so loudly. "It's sickening and disgusting to know that people think [it's okay to be white]." Superintendent Andy Bennett stated "It is inexplicable and unacceptable [to believe that it's okay to be white]". "[Believing that it's okay to be white is] completely wrong."
A later example followed a similar format. In Winchester, Massachusetts, pranksters hung up posters which simply read "Islam is RIGHT about women". A local woman tore several posters down and reported them to the police, but when pressed, she found it remarkably difficult to articulate what, exactly, she found offensive about them. (It certainly wasn't anything as simple as her disagreeing with the sentiment on its face.)
Here, the purpose of the posters was to expose cognitive dissonance. Here, the purpose of the posters was to expose cognitive dissonance. A person who disagrees with Islamic attitudes to women and isn’t afraid to say so would be disgusted by the poster. A person who endorses Islamic attitudes to women would read the poster and think "well, duh", as would a person who had swallowed the silly lie-to-children that Islam is a progressive, feminist religion (a sanitised, sanewashed version of the faith that bears essentially no relationship to the genuine article). The only person who would be outraged by the sentiment "Islam is right about women" (without being able to articulate the source of their outrage) is someone who privately believes that Islamic attitudes towards women are abominable, but who feels uncomfortable saying so out loud for fear of appearing racist. The slogan explodes this obvious contradiction, an experience many Winchester residents found (to quote them directly) "confusing" and "upsetting". It's rather telling that none of the people interviewed said anything like "the posters are correct, because Islam is a progressive feminist faith" or "the posters are wrong, because Islam is a misogynistic religion".
One last example. TERF activist Posie Parker paid for billboards bearing the slogan "woman: adult human female". The gender ideologues just couldn't help themselves, promptly calling for the billboards to be taken down and declaring the definition transphobic. Over at Wikipedia, the phrase is bizarrely included in the category "pejorative terms for women", alongside old stalwarts like "bitch", "slut" and "whore".
III
From the analysis above, "gotcha" questions and psyops serve three essential functions:
Hmm - a political coalition whose constituent factions have massive, irreconcilable points of disagreement which go studiously unremarked upon. A political movement whose members' stated opinions routinely appear vastly out of step with their revealed preferences. A political movement beset by cognitive dissonance at every conceivable resolution.
No doubt there are numerous movements meeting the descriptions above, but for me the first that comes to mind is the pro-Palestine/anti-Zionist movement.
As noted by Yassine Meskhout, if you attend a pro-Palestine march you're almost equally likely to encounter a well-meaning young person who's simply upset by gory war footage in her Instagram feed, and a nutcase who thinks that Hamas are nobly trying to finish the job dear old Adolf started. This fundamental difference of worldview is an absolute godsend for maintaining the movement's superficially positive optics, and is virtually never remarked upon by anyone within the movement:
Earlier this week, Shany Mor posted an excellent article in which he observed that, while most pro-Palestinian types claim to be disinterested humanitarians who object to Israel's war in Gaza solely on account of the needless suffering it imposes upon Gaza's civilian population - in many cases their revealed preferences indicate that they are closeted Hamas supporters who wish to see Hamas accomplish its stated aims, even if that entails more death and suffering among Gaza's civilian populace than would happen otherwise. And while I would like to think the accusation of cognitive dissonance is so obvious that it requires no elucidation, for completeness's sake I will note the peculiar irony that many pro-Palestinians accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing while chanting a slogan whose original untranslated wording3 is a transparent call for ethnic cleansing. They accuse Israel of genocide with every waking breath, while relentlessly signal-boosting propaganda published by an organisation whose founding charter is openly, unabashedly genocidal. It's a movement that purports to be anti-racist, but which is perfectly happy to recycle all of the old blood libels and canards against Jews (Jews secretly control the world, Jews murder Gentile children for their own amusement, Jews are sexually deviant etc.) provided they clarify that they are only addressing them towards "Zionists" * wink wink *.
I think the pro-Palestine movement is long overdue for its very own "what is a woman?" or "it's okay to be white", a psyop or "gotcha" question calculated to expose the irreconcilable tensions in the multiple factions gunning for a "free Palestine", and the gulf between what its members purport to believe and what they actually believe.
I'm not entirely sure what this would look like in practice. At last year's Berlin Film Festival, director Jun Li read out a speech on behalf of the actor Erfan Shekarriz, who boycotted the festival in protest of its purported lack of support to Palestinians. Li was heckled by audience members, one of whom yelled "Free Palestine from Hamas." That's a good start. I've noticed that when I discuss the conflict with my peers (most of whom are very hostile to Israel), many of them get quite taken aback when I point out that the most recent war in Gaza began when Hamas invaded Israel - the relentless focus on the perceived brutality of Israel's military response has caused many to overlook the basic fact that it isn't a war Israel started. Many also give vague evasive non-answers when asked "if you object to how Israel is prosecuting its war in Gaza, then how do you think they should have responded to October 7th?" Some pro-Palestine types explicitly object to admitting Gazan refugees into Europe (or even neighbouring countries) on the grounds that doing so would constitute "ethnic cleansing"; applying this logic to other world conflicts could be fertile ground for exposing the cognitive dissonance (e.g. "why should we play into Putin's hands by allowing him to ethnically cleanse the Ukraine?").
These are only off the top of my head, I'm just spitballing here. I'm sure someone more creative than I could think of something to rival "Islam is RIGHT about women" in wicked ingenuity.
1 I don't even think it rises to the level of a "definition", frankly. Circular definitions are no such thing.
2 The question is most effective when posed to politicians in democratic societies, as it's the nature of the job that such people have to appeal to a broad swathe of voters with heterogenous beliefs and opinions. It is not half as effective when posed to, say, activists working in the NGO space, wherein the incentives (per the iron law of institutions) favour ostentatious displays of ideological purity, even if you make yourself look ridiculous and insane to ordinary people in the process. Such people don't care what the "median voter" thinks, and will happily respond "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" with a shit-eating grin.
3 من المية للمية / فلسطين عربية, "From the water to the water / Palestine is Arab". I suspect it's not an accident that the English translation sounds so much more palatable to Western ideas of liberty and democracy.
The legal definition is "an adult who has an F in the gender field of their current birth certificate" (though some red states would use different definitions in some contexts).
This is a completely defensible answer to give. There is certainly value in accepting legal definitions even if you do not fully agree with them.
Suppose someone thought that the "Space Force" was silly for some reason ("Soldiers responsible for an environment which they are not in? Why not make the NASA rover teams the Mars Force of the US military while we are at it?"). There is still value to them acknowledging that the Space Force is a part of the military (even if they would organize things differently).
Of course, there are limits. If the Fuehrer declares that your first name is henceforth "Israel", you will probably not feel obliged to use that name in your personal life. But just because there are some hills you are willing to die on does not mean that you should be willing to die on every hill!
If the law said I had to marry some transwoman and give her BJs that would feel like a hill worth dying on. Instead some laws says that some people are legally women despite having dicks that seems like much less infringing on my personal liberty.
That is required for the state of cognitive dissonance, but not for simple outrage. It is entirely coherent to regard Islam as a backwards religion which is wrong about a lot of things including women and be outraged that someone is claiming the negation of this belief.
To defend the SJ people a bit on this (or strawman them, you be the judge), I think posting this as a poster commingles two different things:
There is a relationship between the truth value of propositions and how appropriate they are to utter as speech acts, but it is most certainly not 1:1. For example, if A tells their coworker B "yesterday I masturbated for an hour thinking about you", what HR might find objectionable is not that the claim is false or even the fact that A did indeed jerk off in the privacy of their own home, but purely the speech act.
In short, "It is ok to be white, but it is not ok to loudly proclaim that it is ok to be white" seems a coherent position.
But for SJ, this pits a sacred value (race) against a profane value (speech), so the outcome is overdetermined. The thing with women and Islam is nicer because it pits two of their sacred values (women and minority religions) against each other.
Somehow it's okay to proclaim "it's okay to be x" for all values of x except for a single particular one.
Indeed, one can say much more overtly positive things about every other ethnic group ("Black is beautiful", "Black don't crack", expressing pride in being Asian), but merely saying that it's "okay" to be white is completely beyond the pale. Drawing attention to this fact is, of course, the purpose of "it's okay to be white".
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Yeah, I worded that a little clumsily. My meaning was actually clearer in the original draft, I think I may have to amend it for my own peace of mind.
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It seems to me that this is a reasonable approximation of your thesis statement for this post; correct me if I'm wrong.
Some other examples I think might add meaningfully to the concept-space you're exploring here: DignifAI was a meme where people used AI image generation to take bikini/lingerie/nude images of various e-girls, and digitally re-cloth them in modest garb. This greatly offended the e-girls and feminists generally, for reasons that they struggled to explain. Likewise, there was a short fad of using AI to take mixed-race family photos and convert them to same-race family photos, presented as "what could have been"; there was discussion of both here some time ago.
The through-line here are novel attacks that turn one's own ideological commitments against themselves, exposing weak points and contradictions.
The flip-side is, rhetoric is not reality, and reality cannot be held off indefinitely by frame games.
You identify "who won the 2020 election?" as an effective gambit, and so it is. So here's one back at you:
"Republicans should adopt the strategies used by Democrats in 2020 in every election going forward." Agree or disagree? I think we both can see that this is far less effective rhetorically than "who won the 2020 election". I would happily accept the lesser rhetorical effectiveness in exchange for the actual benefit of Republicans acting this way in the real world. Does that seem like a good trade to you?
Funnily enough, this post originated as something I wrote shortly after the DignifAI brouhaha. It was a Substack post comparing DignifAI, "it's okay to be white" and "Islam is right about women". I couldn't figure out how to wrap it up so it stayed in my drafts for well over a year. When I saw the Clayton clip I had the idea to compare it to "what is a woman?", then realised I could use a few hundred words of copy from the unpublished post.
I'm going to plead "Fearful Symmetry".
I vaguely remember the essay, but after a quick scan find I don't understand the reference. could you explain?
More generally, which of the three types of answers you enumerated would you say this falls under?
[edit] - to elaborate on my interest here a bit, I went to some effort to defend Meshkhout here in his discussion of the 2020 election fraud theories, despite strongly disagreeing with his general takeaways. I defended him because, near as I could see, he was explicitly attacking falsehoods other commenters here were repeating, and I think that's a good thing. I strongly disagree with his takeaway because I think he focused his attention very carefully and very intentionally on arguments he could prove were false, in an attempt to dismiss a general argument that is in fact pretty damning.
The Democrats actually, in fact, did a bunch of bad shit to win the 2020 election, and suffered zero consequences for doing so. As a starter, they used Federal security and legal agencies to harm the trump campaign and protect the Biden campaign. I do not believe that an election in which the FBI and Justice Department is breaking multiple laws to help one side and harm the other is a legitimate election. To the extent that you or Meshkhout do not believe that this sort of behavior is worth talking about, I am willing to concede my error: these tactics are legitimate, and therefore my side should exploit them freely for our own advantage, and I'm confident that you and Meshkhout will obviously agree.
...To loop this back around, the rhetorical strategy you are talking about is both real and effective. But at the end of the day, what you're seeing isn't some tool that helps clear the fog of partisanship; it's just another symptom of the core nature of culture war. You're seeing how the capacity to live together decays, as the necessarily-simple heuristics we rely on to keep the peace break down under the unbearable strain of incoherent values.
I've said it before and I'll probably say it again, but "Who was the real Chief Executive in 2020?" (in this comment, referred to as they) is the most divisive issue in contemporary American politics. Both sides agree that the government was criminally awful, they just disagree whether the then-President of the United States can be blamed for the performance of the government.
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As people say, "should" implies "can." It does no good to establish the "legitimacy" of both sides exploiting a tactic that only one side can actually use. Because "FBI and Justice Department breaking multiple laws to help one side and harm the other" is something that only works in one direction.
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Scott was writing in 2015, when the idea of "cancelling" people via social media was a fairly new idea. While it had been popularised by progressives, Scott noted that conservatives were starting to catch up to the idea and deploying many of the same tactics. Scott optimistically hoped that eventually people would realise how pointless and self-defeating this was and agree to a mutual laying down of arms.
So, yes. If the tactics employed by the Dems in 2020 were legitimate for them to use, they're legitimate for the Republicans to use in every subsequent election. But my God, I wish both sides would agree to a clean fight and put the genie back in the bottle.
They'll happily agree to a clean fight, they just won't engage in it, and they'll laugh at you while cheating unmercifully -- ask Spencer Pratt.
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I'm neither one of them, but I'll heartily agree: what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If dirty pool makes a legitimate tactic for one side, it absolutely follows that it is for the other. I may not like it when either side does it, but I don't think it illegitimizes an election either way.
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What? No, this is base Bulverism. You are ruling out the only answer which matters.
Have you stopped beating your wife?
As you’ve framed it, the only reasons to take the third option are if you aren’t an abuser, but feel the need to pretend you are, or if you are an abuser, but realize you can’t say it out loud. Hence “dishonest coward.”
This is stupid. There is an obvious third reason: you aren’t an abuser, but it takes more verbiage to explain so, because the question is stacked against you. Both of the one-word answers are inadequate by design. You are forced to spend more time structuring your defense than the opponent had to spend making the attack.
Yes, this is a bad thing.
In the simple case, the accuser only gets a little mileage from an asymmetric question. Extending “no” to “no, because I never beat her at all” is relatively cheap. Anyone who cares can see the full version.
But we don’t live in the simple case. Setting aside intentional misrepresentation, a bad actor can get more advantage by extending the question. “Have you stopped beating your wife?” has an obvious gotcha. “Where were you on the night of September 13th, 1987?” is not immediately obvious, even if it eventually unfurls into the same accusation. Asymmetrical questions are the simplest building block of narrative control. Narrative control does not converge on the truth.
Okay, but I like it when my team controls the narrative!
Great. Unfortunately, so does everyone else. I think you should uphold norms which favor the truth rather than ones which flatter whomever has the initiative. Right now that involves some gender-critical congressmen. In two to four years, who can say?
For a different perspective, consider this.
You can also answer "I've never started", no one can actually force you to give a yes / no answer.
The reason progressives refuse to answer "what is a woman" isn't because it's some sort of trick question, it's because any possible answer is offensive to some part of their ideology. That's the only reason they settled on "anyone who identifies as a woman" even though it doesn't actually answer the question, and makes them look deranged - it beats the alternative of straying in to heresy.
Right.
Adding qualifiers makes your answer weaker. Doubly so if your every word is being mined for sound bites. The most charismatic and agile speakers can still manage it, making a “gotcha” look like a normal question. (I was reading some of the Lincoln-Douglas highlights, and they’re chock full of qualifiers and hypotheticals. It was a different time.) These clips are not particularly charismatic.
It's not about sounding weak or soundbites, it's not about looking good in clips, and it's not about charisma. This happens all the same in autistic wordcell forums, where people write page-long arguments, and getting clipped is simply not a relevant dynamic. We still either have claims that the question itself is somehow unfair, with no explanation what is unfair about it, or Celestial-body-NOS's heroic attempts to come up with something, and quickly running into one of the contradictions with an important part of the progressive ideology.
I can walk you through all the options and point out how they run afoul of progressivism. I can explain why "anyone who identifies as a woman" really is the only option for them.
I can understand that you want to be fair to all sides here, but ideologies do sometimes paint themselves into corners, and there's nothing wrong or tribal about that out. Do you think creationists or flat earthers are being unfairly gotcha'd, or is it that they just don't have good answers to many questions, and have to resort to mental gymnastics? I know, the question might seem provocative in itself, how can I compare reasonable people like liberals, progressives, and academics to religious and conspiracist weirdos. If this thought went through your head, consider that you're the tribalist one that wants your tribe to control the narrative. I'm just saying there are weirdos with goofy ideas on either side.
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"Force" is doing all the lifting, there. They can try so intensely hard to force you to give a yes or no answer that you have to either counter-bully or play slippery, and either way, you've lost just as hard. The only defense that works is to lean into the worst possible response and dare them to try and guilt-trip you over it, and that comes with its own set of issues.
No, normally they can't, it would make them look unhinged.
Here's a recent example of what you're talking about. The only reason it worked is because the target of the tactic is responsible for an unhinged statement she's not willing to defend, but can't back down from for political reasons. If she was actually explaining what the statement means, or distancing herself from it, the tactic would look deranged.
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Bulverism is when, rather than demonstrating that someone is wrong, you assume that they are and then explain how they came to be so silly. Asking them "what is a woman?" or "who won the 2020 election?" does not assume that they're mistaken about anything. Indeed, you are providing them with an opportunity to demonstrate that their model of how the world works is accurate.
I genuinely don't understand how you arrived at the conclusion that "what is a woman?" or "who won the 2020 election?" are loaded questions in the way "have you stopped beating your wife?" is.
The reason "have you stopped beating your wife?" is an unfair loaded question is because it assumes a premise which may be untrue of the person to whom it is put. What false premises are assumed by "what is a woman?" or "who won the 2020 election?"
You'll note that "what is a woman?" is not a question which calls for a one-word answer. "Who won the 2020 election?" does, but it is entirely possible to give a factually correct answer to this question which is one word long ("Biden"). I'm really not seeing the parallels.
I'm calling gender ideologues and 2020 election truthers stupid. Whose "team" do you think I'm on, exactly?
Asking gotcha questions is not bulverizing. Watching someone answer such a question, then theorizing on how they must be a turncoat, lunatic, or dishonest coward, though?
There is an excluded option, what I thought was the obvious one: they don’t want to play a rigged game. They recognize a loaded question, or outrage bait, and try not to walk into the minefield. Sometimes this works out. Sometimes it looks cringey and gives the baiters what they wanted. Regardless, it doesn’t require lunacy or cowardice or even cognitive dissonance.
Trying to rehabilitate “gotchas” as a totally legitimate strategy, one that only works on the deluded, is wishful thinking at best. One can score rhetorical points playing for any team.
As the prophet once said:
I’m not trying to accuse you of bad faith. I think you have a standard human blind spot for tribal affiliation, and right now, it’s telling you that this weapon only works on the outgroup. That’s wrong. It works on whomever you can put on the spot.
If Swinson had responded to the question "what is a woman?" with "a woman is an adult female human", I nor any gender-critical person would consider her a turncoat. The gender ideologues in her camp, however, surely would have. Likewise with Clayton: I wouldn't consider him a turncoat for saying "Biden won the 2020 election", but Trump and hardcore MAGAs would have. Do you disagree with either claim?
If Swinson had responded "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman", the gender ideologues would not consider her a lunatic (indeed, they would be cheering with delight). But gender-critical people (and, dare I say it, most normal non-extremely online people) would consider her a lunatic. Likewise with Clayton. Do you disagree with either claim?
These questions aren't Bulverism, and nor is my diagnosis of why they're effective. They are designed to expose either that someone has crazy opinions, or that they're fearful of alienating the people in their camp who have crazy opinions.
I've asked before and I'll ask again. What makes "what is a woman?" a loaded question? What controversial assumption is encoded into the question "what is a woman?" Likewise "who won the 2020 election?" What makes either of these questions "loaded"?
Firstly, I've already asked you who you think my "outgroup" is, and you refused to answer. Downthread, I argued that the number of Americans who are neither 2020 election truthers nor gender ideologues are probably a minority: a depressing state of affairs, to be sure, but that doesn't make it any less true. I likewise argued that, while I'm confident I don't suffer from either of these blind spots, there may well be a blind spot I suffer from that could be exposed by a gotcha question. If and when it comes up, I promise to let all of you know about it. As a moderator, I thought you might be a bit more cautious about ascribing opinions to people that they've never expressed and don't endorse.
Yes. Is this a bad thing?
We might say that gotcha questions of this sort are effective on anyone who a) believes things the average person considers crazy; or b) doesn't believe crazy things, but can't be seen to publicly disagree with the people in their camp who do. Does that describe literally every person in existence? Maybe it does. That doesn't mean "gotcha" questions are a bad or underhanded tactic: it means that, like so many other rhetorical or argumentative strategies, they expose the fundamental irrationality of the human species.
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I think this is totally a false equivalence. The most accurate take on the situation would be "there is no strong evidence that the 2020 election was stolen." But it's still within the real of possibility that it could have happened. Overall election fraud is a multifaceted issue with varying levels of evidence of varying levels of unsavory actions. It then has many layers of indirection to hide within and many viewers just won't care.
On the other hand, calling a burly man in makeup and a dress a woman is something that takes no special knowledge to understand. Additionally, it's a much more mandatory loyalty oath: If you're on the left if you don't clearly and explicitly make the oath, you will be attacked. On the right if you avoid talking about the election, nobody will care.
Indeed, one could just answer something like "I don't know who won the 2020 election, but I saw several legitimate concerns with the way it was run that were not properly addressed in my opinion." and it would be a statement well far of making a strong claim of fraud that I don't think Trump or his voters would object to.
Abbott and Desantis are officially ‘not sûre’ who won the 2020 election.
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I said it was a powerful counter – I didn't say it was the same as "what is a woman?"
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We've had this discussion so many times at this point that I would hope for at least a little grace, but barring that... I would like to point out that at minimum ~1/3rd of Americans believe in 2020 fraud, so it's not really me trapped in here with you, it's you trapped in here with me.
The position is more fringe than Young Earth Creationism, polling at an all-time low of 37%. Turns out there's lots of embarrassing litmus tests for in-group loyalty! Of course, it doesn't seem like YEC—or anything more than the barest of pretend theism—has been an effective litmus since Trump took over the GOP, but back when it was relevant, we got to witness Rubio dodging with "I’m not a scientist, man."
It's like poetry... they rhyme
37% is not fringe at all, that’s mainstream. It’s like saying 4/10 Americans practice the strange fringe custom of eating pizza once a week. At that level it would be worth asking if the people who believe it mean something different by those words than you do.
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Two-thirds of Americans sounds like "most people [in America]" to me.
If you combine the 1/3rd of Americans who believe in election fraud and the 2/5 Americans who believe trans women are women... aren't you the fringe here? Everyone is crazy but you?
If the argument is everyone else is a "lunatic with crazy beliefs," that's fine, I respect elitism. But the argument actually seems to be built on a consensus which doesn't exist. It's your opinions that are fringe. Maybe then we can start dissecting the "essential functions" your beliefs serve in your own psychology?
Every tribe's grand narrative of how the world works is flawed in some way. The Red Tribe came up with a great "gotcha" designed to expose a flaw in the Blue Tribe's model of the world ("what is a woman?"). Recently, the Blue Tribe has managed to catch up, developing a gotcha of their own. Not being American, I am fortunate enough to be afflicted with neither delusion, but have little doubt that my own model of the world is flawed in some way I'm unaware of. When I encounter a gotcha question of my own, I'll be sure to let you know.
Is it? Consider the following propositions:
It does not therefore follow that most Americans believe both of the above propositions, and I don't recall ever claiming or implying that it did.
But it's worth mentioning that it wasn't so long ago that most Americans could be assumed to believe both propositions (that American presidential elections are safe and legitimate, and that no one born with a penis is a woman). That consensus may not exist now, but it did quite recently, and I suspect it will again.
Again, belief in election fraud is just baked in with republicans, has been for a while, and the normies don't really care.
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This is quite weak from Meshkout and gives the impression that he has never been a part of a movement. The comparision to NAACP is particularily hilarious, because the black liberation movement had plenty of radical elements, and the pro-palestinian movement also have orgs like IMEU that stick to respectable retoric.
To take a more recent example:
The pro-life movement including very wide ranging views on women/society:
-girl-bosses like Amy Coney Barrett
-the Quiverfull
-mormons
-some who want to fight abortions by increasing access to contraceptives, other who want to teach chastity culture.
-even som democrats
But they all had one overarching "Abortion is murder. Period. Abortion should be outlawed".
I could make the same case for the civil rights movement, MAGA, hell the american zionist movement is full of contradictory positions.
The pro-Palestinian movement is, like the pro-lifers aligned, on 1 very potent political cause: "Israel is committing genocide. We should not give Israel any of our money".
Thats it, that is the winning message according to every poll, and before that is achieved the movement is not going to fracture. If it is achieved, meaning zionist zealots are reduced to mere 20-30% of congress/senate, I expect the cause to quickly lose steam outside of select pockets.
By his account, @ymeskhout grew up in Morocco, in which hatred of Jews was the air he breathed:
Additionally, I believe he has lived in several Dem-leaning American cities, and on his Substack he occasionally posts videos of himself trolling Palestine activists in person. Suffice it to say I think he has more than a passing familiarity with the movement.
Well, for one thing, the pro-Palestine movement exists outside of the US, so the second half of that cause obviously doesn't apply to pro-Palestinians in Europe or Australia.
I dont see how him being Moroccan changes anything. Living in an antisemitic society is not the same as being a part of a successful political movement for change.
Im sure there are many lolcows among protestors, but do zionist like Meshkout ever stop to think why the American public have moved sharply against Israel in recent years, even accounting for this? Could it be that people like himself, and other online warriors like Destiny and Ben Shapiro are even more off-putting?
Dems and indys, and basically every voter group under the age of 50, have adopted the pro-palestinian movements most important political goals according to nearly every poll on the matter, so all Meshkout is revealing himself as a zionist zealot.
This is silly name-calling. I might be typical-minding here, but from what I have read from him, it seems very likely that Meshkout (like me) is a) not in favor of Hamas killing all the Israeli Jews b) not in favor of Israel displacing further Palestinians to make room for a Greater Israel c) not in favor of Israels disregard of civilian casualties in Gaza to the point where some merely call it war crimes and others genocide
If (a) makes him (or me) a Zionist, then by that definition you will find a lot of Zionists.
Personally, Netanyahu has through his tireless efforts convinced me that giving his country further military aid is net-negative, and the best thing us foreigners can do is to ask the locals on both sides to perhaps consider not murdering each other, and sanction any regimes who are especially proficient at slaughter. (Obviously Israel is much better at killing, but if politically isolated they will also face some numerical disadvantage, I would not bet on them keeping the upper hand forever.)
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Well, "successful" is just about the last thing you could describe the Palestinian movement as.
The pro-Palestinian movement in the US is absolutely an underdog compared to the zionist one, but have been very successful in shaping public opinion against Israel in the past few years.
Aipac now routinely have to spend tens of millions for their candidate to win, and the ads mostly dont even mention Israel, because they know it is a losing position in most of the country. As we know from many culture war issues, elite consensus can hold on for a while against overwhelming public disapproval, but usually not forever.
Israel have been a rallying cry for the leftist insurgents in the party and many democrats have already fallen in line, and are promising to never take aipac money again. If the august primaries goes well for the DSA types, I expect AOC to be the dem frontrunner for 2028.
Okay, but what has any of this actually accomplished for the Palestinian people with which the movement is ostensibly so concerned?
You claim that the pro-Palestine movement is rallied around a singular cause of preventing Israel's "genocide". In your opinion, did the movement succeed in preventing said genocide?
Many pro-Palestine activists likewise claim to want to establish an independent Palestinian state, a goal that has not come a millimetre closer since 1948.
"Boycott, Divest, Sanction" died on its arse. No major American tech company can afford not to do business with Israeli tech firms. Neither can the US, if they want to stay competitive with China.
Netanyahu is still a free man. The US still provides plenty of armaments to Israel. Israel's economy is thriving. The likelihood of Israel facing ICC charges for genocide appear ever slimmer. Hamas is militarily weaker than it was prior to October 7th. The Abraham Accords remain in effect.
Let's say AOC secures both the Dem nomination and the presidency. At the end of her first term (in 2032) do you honestly think relations between the US and Israel will have significantly changed in any way? Do you honestly think an independent Palestinian state will have been established?
"But Mamdani is mayor of New York!" "Multiple European countries have recognised the state of Palestine!" "Lots of Americans agree with us!" "AOC will be the Dem nominee in 2028!" I have to ask – so what? Changing people's minds and "raising awareness" is only valuable in so far as these are instrumental goals – if they never translate into actual policy shifts and material gains, they're meaningless. Bragging about meaningless symbolic victories like this is what you do when your movement has nothing real to show for itself, and it's frankly embarrassing. The pro-Palestinian movement is not "an underdog": they have accomplished none of their ostensible goals. What's worse, they don't even seem to be embarrassed by this. They're not earnestly engaging in soul-searching and trying to figure our what they can do better – they're just carrying on business as usual.
Funnily, @ymeskhout has not one but two articles on this very particular pathology.
Comparisons with BLM are illustrative. There's no question that BLM was "very successful in shaping public opinion". And yet six years on from the movement's peak, what material goals have they accomplished? Police departments remain un-defunded, prisons have not been abolished, and if there's been any meaningful decline in the rate of black Americans getting killed by police officers, I'm not aware of it. By any objective, material metric, the movement must be judged a failure in its ostensible goals. Likewise here.
P.S.: I think it's rather telling that you don't say the pro-Palestinian movement has "been very successful in shaping public opinion in favour of Palestine in the past few years", but rather that it has "been very successful in shaping public opinion against Israel." The pro-Palestinian movement purports to want to put an end to the "genocide" and to establish an independent Palestinian movement, goals at which (according to the activists themselves) it has obviously failed thus far. But if these goals are just smoke and mirrors for the real goal of ostracising and harassing Jews, then I must acknowledge you've had slightly more success in that venture. The top-level post was inspired by my longstanding impression that so-called pro-Palestine activists are motivated less by genuine concern for the welfare of the Palestinian people and a desire for them to achieve national self-determination, and more by a hatred for Israel and the people who live there. This interaction with you has done nothing to disabuse me of this impression.
BLM did do one thing, they contributed to the rise of equipping police with bodycams, which is unquestionably a moral good. Naturally, they immediately reversed on this policy goal when bodycams revealed that most police were not in fact unjustifiably using deadly force against blacks, but that blacks routinely pull guns or knives on cops. So the one material change they achieved that they should be applauded for is something they don't want now and don't take credit for.
Oh, and BLM also bought a $6 million mansion. (Which, to be clear, enriches the leaders of the movement but does nothing for black people at large.)
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No they are not, because support for BLM rose in the weeks after George Floyds death, and then within a few month fell off a cliff. Support for ending aid to Israel is on the rise for 3 continuous years.
Yes, it will quite obviously entirely change the US policies towards the whole of the Middle East, including Israels enemies. If you are in denial about this, I suspect you are in a minority, even among zionists.
Aipac is spending 40 million on one senate race in Michigan, and they spent 30 million to primary Thomas Massie.
Well like any movement, they build their case gradually. See the pro-life movement.
If you believe the US-Israel relationship is built on some billion shekels, then sure that's a possibility.
But what about the extensive interoperability created from decades of joint ops? What about the co-developed missile defence systems? Multiple mid-level officials across the Pentagon, State Department, and intelligence community, as well as key committees (Armed Services and Foreign Affairs) have entire careers, doctrines, and planning assumptions built around the US-Israel relationship, and favour continuity. Multiple laws, MOUs, and bipartisan resolutions across 8 decades have created locked-in commitments. Changing this needs a historically rare sustained coordination across both parties to amend many, many layers of complex legal procedures over a foreign policy issue.
Are you willing to bet AOC can girlboss her way through such overwhelming institutional inertia and rewrite war plans and agreements to overturn 8 decades of sustained policymaking?
@FtttG 's point is that these movements rarely impact foreign policy, abortion is a domestic matter. But the fact that both BLM and Palestine protests erupted across Europe, Australia and New Zealand clearly shows they were US culture war exports.
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Just like support for BLM was on the rise for six continuous years (the Ferguson riots were in 2014) before abruptly falling off a cliff in 2020. Very interesting!
Remind me to check back with you in six years. I
suspectknow AOC is not quite as incorruptible as you would have me believe. I look forward to the day the DSA turns on her for being a "Zio stooge" and claim that Mossad has some dirt on her that means her hands are tied.Eighty years since the founding of Israel, an independent Palestinian state has not come a millimetre closer. How much time do you people need?
"Building a case gradually" suggests that you're winning tangible stepping-stone victories along the path to one's terminal goal. But I will reiterate that, aside from meaningless symbolic victories, the pro-Palestine movement has accomplished nothing, in the US or elsewhere.
The idea that anyone could consider the pro-Palestinian movement an example of a "successful political movement for change" is so laughable that I literally thought you were joking at first brush.
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α
My answer¹ to "What is a woman?" is "It depends on the context."
In most contexts, a woman is a person whose gender identity is that found more commonly in people who have, or feel viscerally that they ought to have, concave genitalia. This is both trans-inclusive and non-circular, although one could, I suppose, model it as an expanding spiral.... (Note that 'born with concave genitalia', 'born with organs to produce large gametes', and 'has XX karyotype' are strongly correlated; thus, substituting any of them would still point to the same identity.)
In medical contexts, a trans person might be a man for some purposes and a woman for other purposes; the same can apply to some cis patients.
¹Unless the question is being asked by someone rudely shoving a camera in my face while I'm busy, in which case my answer will be "A large happy pile of public information". (If you know, you know.)
β
Part of the reason 'adult human female' rubs me the wrong way is that using 'female' as a noun in reference to humans is associated with misogyny. 'Adult female human' would avoid this, but 'female' as an adjective picks up much of the same flexibility in meaning as 'woman'. For the biological categories to which I believe you are attempting to gesture:
Less biologically:
If and when we figure out how to grow new gonads in vitro, 'gonadally' and 'gametically' can be modified in the same manner as 'anatomically'.
γ
I have noticed a certain form of argument over the years, of the approximate form "My opponent knows that I am right and he is wrong, and is continuing to contradict me out of less-than-honest motives." It is annoying when it is Evangelical preachers assuming that non-Christians 'know' that Jesus Is Lord and reject Him in order to continue sinning, it is annoying when it is the Blue Tribe telling the Red Tribe "You know what an assault weapon is, and you know you don’t need one.", and it is annoying when it is the gender-critical assuming that everyone 'knows' that the True Definition Of Woman does not include trans-women.
Atheists actually believe that God doesn't exist, 2nd-Amendment advocates actually believe that they have legitimate reason to own firearms that the Blue Tribe thinks look scary, and progressives actually believe that trans-women are women.
δ
With regard to whether Islam is right about women, there are two clarifiying questions that need to be asked:
What variety of Islam? If Fred Rogers and Fred Phelps can both be Christians, even both be Protestant Christians, and have such a wide gulf between them, I don't see why a similar gulf cannot exist between Zohran Mamdani and Abdul-Rahman Ballout.
What are we comparing it to? Attitudes that seem retrograde compared to XXI. century progressivism look a lot more enlightened when compared to ante-Islamic Arabian paganism.
I'll believe that when the phrase "white male" is eliminated from discourse.
One of the strongest senses of resentment (contempt?) I've ever felt in a professional setting was several years ago when my boss, her administrative assistant, and I were sitting around a conference table before a meeting and they were discussing the conference they had just come from. The derision and dismissiveness with which they casually trotted out the "stale, pale, male" refrain to describe a panel that was 4/5 men—in a field that's 80% male and had a three decade hiring drought, mind you—was palpable. In that moment, a realization crystallized:
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I feel like 90% of the discourse surrounding "civility" is liberals expressing casual contempt for normie Americans and then clutching thier pearls when normie Americans reciprocate.
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Is it associated with misogyny, or is it associated with accusations of misogyny?
Who has produced and maintained this association? As far as I can tell, it's the same people who would find it convenient if those using the phrase "adult human female" were tainted by association with misogyny and whose claims could be safely ignored on that basis.
"Female" is allegedly misogynistic in certain contexts, specifically those where you would say "woman" or even "girl", or if the genders were swapped wouldn't say "male", especially when there's already ambiguously implied misogyny.
Because we refer to animals generically as males and females (although there are specific words for some animals like "cow" and "bull", other animals like mice or fish), while we have specific words for humans, "man" and "woman". Also, incels at least used to frequently use the term while most people do infrequently.
For example, "my cousin is a cool female, you should meet her", "I met a nice female at work the other day", "I like to hang out at that cafe because of all the females". Personally, I think those do sound creepy and imply depersonalization, like the "female" is an exotic species whose main characteristic is sex appeal. I wouldn't call out someone, maybe they're autistic, but would (subconsciously) pay more attention to other signs they think like that.
But when talking about biology, or used as an adjective where gender is relevant, it's OK at least to anyone reasonable. "The disease only affects females", "not 'he', the bus driver is female". Women are no less human than men, which means they are beings capable of reason and complex emotion etc.; but humans are ultimately still sexually dimorphic animals.
"My cousin is cool; you should meet her." is the "normal" way to say this sentence and conveys the gender; straight substitution of "woman" sounds similarly odd in place of "female".
"I met a nice woman at work the other day" does sound more natural to me when "woman" is substituted, and I take your point that it sounds at least a bit odd with "female" used here as a noun. I'm not sure why I should assume misogyny, though; none was conveyed.
"I like to hang out at that cafe because of all the females" is creepy for reasons entirely unrelated to diction, and I suspect you'd side-eye someone who told you, "I like to hang out at that cafe because of all the women" in much the same way. In fact, the value judgment you make in the next sentence accrues here with "women" in place just as strongly!
I think we're on the same page as far as how the flow of things sound when "female" is used as a noun (vs. an adjective), and this seems like an apt place to point out that "woman" has usurped (!) the use of "female" as an adjective in quite a few places despite (to my ears) sounding far clunkier. "Woman doctor" and "woman engineer" don't exactly roll off the tongue, and my brain goes "noun -> noun" internally every time I hear them...and yet, I have never once heard misogyny attributed to their speakers! I think what I'm trying to say is that both words are used validly as nouns and adjectives when referring to humans, we have aesthetic tastes for when a sentence flows and when it doesn't, and it doesn't make much sense to me to assume anything about the speaker's intent (edit: or beliefs).
I mean, I agree; I'm just not sure how this applies.
In old fashioned British English, "lady doctor" was idiomatic. It fell out of use alongside all non-fossilised uses of "lady" (we still have ladies' toilets and begin formal speeches with "Ladies and Gentlemen") around the time it became acceptable to speak in Estuary English on BBC news bulletins. My experience is that if you talk about a "woman doctor" you will be accused of sexism regardless of the words you use - she's just a doctor after all. (There is the obvious exception if you are doing feminist activism. They use people-first language and talk about "women in medicine".)
Yeah, I also just always called them "doctors", which probably added to how jarring "women doctors" sounded to me. Somehow, the latter became the "socially conscious" verbiage, though it seems counterproductive to highlight it.
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There's a few reasons:
English is in a rough spot where the simplest way to say "a person who's a woman or a girl but age doesn't matter" is "a female", and yet the simplest way to say "an animal who's got the larger gametes but species doesn't matter" is also "a female". Connotations from the latter use case leak over to the former and make it sound dehumanizing.
In your "met a nice female at work" context, as in many others, the "age doesn't matter" use case would be a bit creepy too!
Talking about "males" and "females" is a natural way to discuss gender differences that are meaningful regardless of age. But normal people think that such a discussion is at least risky if not inherently problematic, so the people who discuss it anyway are more likely to be weirdos who want to analyze everything (i.e. mostly men) and who have ingroup bias (i.e. everyone, but "mostly men" means mostly the ingroup is men), so at one end of the range you've got people trying overcome their biases but at the other you've got outright misogyists.
This Star Trek episode was just the first of several in TNG and countless in DS9 to make "female"-as-noun a major verbal tic of the Ferengi race. It may seem silly to list this, but are probably a few tens of millions of people, disproportionately including the types who love to come up with linguistic norms, to whom the noun "fe-male" sounds like it should be read in that accent and with that attitude.
I'm not thrilled by any of this - my favorite author is Heinlein, who often uses "male" and "female" as nouns via category 3, maybe 75% of the way towards the "trying to overcome [his] biases" end of that range - but I can understand it.
No? ‘Girl’ implies unmarried, but referring to a woman as a ‘girl’ would be uncontroversial and normal outside of liberal bubbles, and ‘lady’ is a perfectly normal polite term to refer to a random woman or girl in third person. ‘That lady waiting in the cafe’.
I think calling an adult woman a "girl" is now restricted to dating and sex-related contexts (including sex work-adjacent jobs like Hooters "girls")
It is quite normal to refer to ‘the girls in the office’ referring to secretaries and the like in my dialect, or ‘girls trip’/ ‘girls night’.
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For #1 (& #2), I guess I just don't quite get how baggage a word picked up when someone else used it is supposed to be the preferred interpretation for how I used it when the context for how I used the word is present, unless I uttered some sentence in isolation to a stranger (or I work at a middle school or something, in which case that's more than a bit creepy).
For #3, it's not established at all that the people with ingroup bias wouldn't alter their language to use "woman" in the noun case but keep the bias (clever
girl!), so in practice it ends up being the people more likely to be weirdos who want to analyze everything (i.e. mostlymenmembers of this forum) catching an accusation of misogyny by association. I'm sure some ingroup-biased individuals are also among those using "female" as a noun, but if both groups contain this element, why are the people who insist on using "woman" not also tainted by association with those among them with ingroup bias? What I'm trying to point out is that normal people didn't spring forth from the womb1 with this belief, and the noun use of "female" clearly used to be widespread based on published works of the past, so where did the association between the two come from? As best I can tell—and I am not about to wade through the sewage that passes for sociolinguistics literature to attempt to track it down—it got memed into existence as a tool of social ostracization. Now, that is certainly a flex, but I'm choosing to respond to that flex by giving it the finger2.I'm not sure what to say about #4 except that I haven't seen any of the Ferengi episodes, and I kind of doubt that very many of the people who come up with this stuff have either.
1Perhaps we could figure out a word to refer to people bearing wombs?
2Thus qualifying myself as a
weirdo who wants to analyze everythingmember of this forum :)I would say 100% of the people involved in the Geek Feminism lamewar were aware of the Ferengi connection. I don't know how much of the wide conversation about calling women "females" has passed through that filter, although I first came across it in the Geek Feminism context.
Ah, I was thinking about the wider conversation when I doubted the proportions; seems we were evaluating two different groups.
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It doesn't help that when I hear "female" in a non-technical context I immediately picture in my head a Ferengi talking about "fe-male hu-mons".
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Somewhat ironically, this sort of "'female' is misogynistic" declaration by fiat is a microaggression against recent immigrants for whom English is a second language, since referring to some individual as "a female" or "a male" is a natural way to translate from the original language (e.g. Korean, in my experience). And, symmetrically, someone who's still learning English and just doesn't know any better would be committing a microaggression against the types of feminists who consider such usage misogynistic.
Of course, intersectional social justice demands that, on the oppression totem pole, women who complain about this sort of this stuff are placed above recent immigrants and autists.
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Funnily enough, both my wife and my mother have used female in this context. I had to explain to both of them that it sounded weird. Bless their hearts for not being up to date on what they're supposed to be offended by.
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They call them "foids" now.
I also find the idea of trans activists complaining that it's creepy to use the word "female" as a noun more than a little rich, given the changes to the vernacular they demand of the rest of us. Women may not like being referred to as females, but I can't imagine they like it less than being referred to as "menstruators", "birthing parents" or "chestfeeders" (each of which has a "bonus hole").
As RJ Fletcher wisely advised, never call chicks broads.
Indeed; they prefer the long ball.
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That's incorrect. Many documents put male/female as sex marker, and there's nothing misogynistic about them. Cases where it might come off this way are fairly limited.
What's more, literally the only reason why people started using "female" was to disambiguate after the trans movement changed the definition of "woman". This was done on the assumption that the trans movement is acting in good faith, and it's all just misunderstanding that can be cleared up by using terms that both sides will understand. Your claim clearly shows that none of this is not happening in good faith, as even official pro-trans materials use the words "male" and "female", so your goal can only be to silence opposition.
Finally, it's extremely hypocritical to demand that your opponents entertain your outlandish definitions of words, while reserving the right to unilaterally declare the other side's words "misogynistic".
"Female" being associated with misogyny has nothing to do trans and is more related to normie feminism. Feminists complained that people were using "girls" to refer to groups consisting of at least some adult women, so some people started using "females" to refer to those groups as a hypercorrection. This didn't satisfy the complainers; for an example, see the /r/MenAndFemales subreddit, dedicated to pointing out instances of people using "men" for men and "females" for women and gesturing at the apparent misogyny.
This has led to a hyperstitious cascade where the people still using the word "female" are less feminist than average.
The polite way would be to refer to ‘ladies’ or ‘girls’. Some people don’t like the latter but it’s not controversial with the normies.
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They're kinda the same picture. Simone de Beauvoir came up with the whole "woman is a social construct" idea, and a whole lot of feminism was built on top of that. Later it was obviously also used by trans activists as well.
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To most people, such an answer would make you appear suspicious and dishonest, not unlike responding "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
Which is to say, your definition of the word "woman" rests on unfalsifiable claims people make about their own inner experiences. And despite many of these people claiming that they viscerally feel that they ought to have female genitalia, the overwhelming majority of them choose not to undergo a surgical procedure which would give them an approximation (however crude) of said genitalia, even though many of them could presumably afford to do so.
It's also a strange definition in that you're using the exact same word for people who are X and people who wish that they were X, which is not how we define any other word in the English language. The word "billionaire" does not mean "a person with a net worth of at least 1 billion, or someone who wishes they had a net worth of least 1 billion": it only means the former. For the latter concept, we have "aspiring billionaire" or "wannabe billionaire".
This, again, makes you appear weird and dishonest.
Why would your answer change depending on whether a camera is being rudely shoved in your face? Does a word have a different meaning depending on whether the person defining it is being observed or not? Is "woman" an example of Schrödinger's word?
But not referring to female people as "menstruators", referring to mothers as "birthing parents", or referring to their genitals as their "front" or "bonus" hole. Curious.
A nonsensical categorisation. A bodybuilder is not "more male" than a nerdy coder.
I will reiterate that the vast majority of trans-identified males have not undergone bottom surgery. I genuinely don't know what "would have given the opportunity" means here. Many trans-identified males do have "the opportunity", and voluntarily pass it up. But this appears to have no impact on your opinion that they ought to be categorised as women.
This is not generally how I see the phrase "male/female presenting" being used. It's usually used to mean "this person is dressed in a conventionally feminine manner" without passing judgement on whether they successfully pass.
Some and some. I don't think Swinson's response to this question is remotely consistent with her "actually believing" that trans women are women. The purpose of this "gotcha" question, as I said, is designed to expose ideological rifts: separating the true believers in gender ideology from those who are merely pretending to endorse it out of convenience. I think Swinson falls into the latter category.
Even among those progressives who do actually believe that trans-women are women (and I acknowledge that such people do exist), the question is useful in exposing how many of these individuals are unable to provide a definition of the word "woman" which is coherent and non-circular, thereby demonstrating how fundamentally nonsensical gender ideology is. On some level you obviously know it's nonsensical, given that by your own admission you would refuse to define the word "woman" if you knew you were being filmed.
We're not comparing it to anything. I take the assertion "Islam is right about women" to mean "the collection of factual and normative assertions the Islamic faith makes about women are correct". If I say "the statement '2+2=4' is true", it's meaningless to ask "compared to what?": factual claims are true or they aren't ("directionally correct" notwithstanding). Likewise if I said "respecting people's preferred pronouns is the right thing to do", you would never ask "compared to what?"
And the Greek characters are such a pretentious affectation.
Which is why I elaborate on the various possible answers, the contexts in which each would be relevant, and possible terminology that would allow one to specify each unambiguously.
Yes, sometimes a question rests on a point of fact which cannot be empirically determined, and we face a choice between a non-zero rate of dishonest people getting away with it, and innocent people suffering burdens which are in our ability to ameliorate.
I was attempting to give an extensional definition, akin to Charles Sanders Peirce's proposed definition of lithium:
If you take all the people in the world, put everyone with convex genitals in a blue room and everyone with concave genitals in a pink room, there will be one gender identity that is more common among those in the blue room and another more common in the pink room. The one more common in the blue room is the 'man' identity; the one more common in the pink room is the 'woman' identity. A woman is someone with the 'woman' identity.
If you take everyone who feels that they have the wrong genitals and move them to the other room, the correlation will be even stronger.
Putting people with XY chromosomes in the blue room and people with XX chromosomes in the pink room, or people who produce small gametes in the blue room and people who produce large gametes in the pink room, would have the same gender identities more prevalent in the same rooms, and thus would not change the identity-based definition.
The operative word there is 'rudely'. If I am giving testimony before a governmental organ, or a scheduled interview on television, I will expound on the answer given above. If I am coming home from the shops, and am accosted by a less-respectable individual looking for a sound bite, I am likely to give a crankier answer carrying the message that I do not take him/her/them seriously.
These terms are not widely used by people who hold misogynist attitudes.
The former two are an attempt at rigorous disambiguation. 'People who menstruate' or 'menstruators' is pointing to a category that, in addition to including some trans-men, also excludes many cis-women, who do not menstruate due to age, removal of relevant parts, malnutrition.... 'Birthing parent' is probably an attempt to unambiguously indicate that, if trans-woman Alice and trans-man Bob have a baby, we are at this time referring to Bob rather than Alice; I would consider 'biological mother' or 'reproductive mother' to be acceptable in that instance. Re terminology for genitals, that area of the body has accumulated a vast array of less-than-formal nomenclature (cf. an annotated edition of Shakespeare).
I have previously questioned the use of the term 'chestfeeding'.
I was more gesturing at 'cis-men, trans-men on artificial hormones, and trans-women not on artificial hormones' versus 'cis-women, trans-women on artificial hormones, and trans-men not on artificial hormones', or 'on a graph with testosterone levels on one axis and estrogen levels on the other, someone in the part of the graph with natal-anatomical men/women'.
People who can't afford it. People who can't find a chirurgeon who does it. People who can't afford the time off work for recovery.
I don't know what the distribution of these or other reasons is, as the source previously cited did not divide the 'trans without bottom chirurgery' group by why have not gotten it; it didn't even separate out 'has bottom chirurgery scheduled' or 'in early phase of transition'.
Among the Kamilaroi of what is today New South Wales, Australia, women are divided into four groups: an Ippata is the daughter of a Buta, a Buta is the daughter of an Ippata, a Mata is the daughter of a Kapota, and a Kapota is the daughter of a Mata. (Men are similarly divided: a Kumbo, a Kubbi, a Murri, and an Ippai are, respectively, the sons of an Ippata, a Mata, a Kapota, and a Buta. Marriage is only permitted between a Kumbo and a Mata, a Kubbi and an Ippata, a Murri and a Buta, or an Ippai and a Kapota.) (S. Alexander, review of Arguments About Aborigines, July 2025)
No Kamilaroi could offer you a non-circular definition of Ippata; is their kinship system non-sensical?
Please refer back to the third section of my previous post.
Which still leads us to the same two questions.
١, Islam is not a monolithic hive-mind; the factual and normative assertions made by Saudi-funded Wahhabists are not the same as those made by Sufi mystics.
٢, outside the realm of formal logic, 'correctness' isn't black and white; things can be more or less correct.
The assertion "the collection of factual and normative assertions Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab made about women are more correct than the collection of factual and normative assertions the in-this-house-we-believe crowd make about women." is not the same as the assertion "the collection of factual and normative assertions Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd made about women are more correct than the collection of factual and normative assertions the ante-Islamic Hijazi society made about women.".
Only because I can't think of more than one obvious answer: "Compared to referring to people with the pronouns of their ASAB regardless of how many times they have asked you to stop."
And prexactly what has that got to do with the price of tea in China?
Supposing you meet a male person who is independently wealthy, doesn't need to work for a living, and lives in an area with numerous cosmetic surgeons experienced in vaginoplasties. The person claims to identify as a woman, but makes it perfectly clear that he has a penis which he has no desire to remove.
In your opinion, is such a person "really" trans?
This is not an armchair hypothetical. Consider the National Transgender Discrimination Survey from 2011, which polled over 6,000 people who describe themselves as transgender or gender non-conforming, of which 3,870 were male. Of these, only a quarter claimed to have undergone a penectomy, while 23% claimed to have undergone a vaginoplasty. 14% said they had no interest in undergoing either procedure (this finding is on the page numbered 79, or page 85 of the PDF). In your opinion, are these 14% "really" women? (The finding is even more striking among trans-identified females, 72% of which report no desire to undergo a phalloplasty.)
For a more recent source, consider the US Trans Survey from 2022, which surveyed over 30,000 trans-identified males. Only 11% had undergone an orchiectomy, and only 9% a vaginoplasty. 21% affirmatively said that they did not want either procedure, while 27% said they were "unsure" if they wanted the former and 25% the latter (pg 48).
One-in-five trans-identified males have not undergone a vaginoplasty and explicitly do not want to, while a further one-in-four have not undergone one and are unsure whether they want to. Someone who's on the fence about whether they want something can hardly be said to "viscerally feel they ought to have it". By the terms you specified, nearly half of all trans-identified males in the US are not women. I'll ask again: if you meet a trans-identified male who has not undergone a vaginoplasty and doesn't want one, do you consider that person a woman?
Well, I think quite a number of trans-identified males hold misogynistic attitudes. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the median autogynephiliac male is more misogynistic than the median cis man.
As I've argued repeatedly before, it sure is interesting that trans activists are so keen on "rigorously disambiguating" different categories of people and using maximally clear terminology
... right up to the point where someone points out that, regardless of how they identify, a male person remains male, with all that implies, at which point these trans activists throw a tantrum and call you a Nazi. Dora Moutot bent over backwards to avoid using language that trans-identified males might find offensive, insisting that women need to be wary of "people with penises", and she still got slapped with a €1,000 fine. Don't dare tell me these trans neologisms are just about maximally unambiguous language. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.
Yeah, sounds like it.
Nothing, just that I find it annoying, along with many of your verbal tics (including "prexactly"). Even in the comment I'm replying to you used the term "chirurgeon" for no earthly reason I can discern.
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See, this is what I’m talking about.
When someone gives you a measured, qualified answer, you accuse them of cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning. That looks—looks!—like bad faith. Why is it so surprising that people might not want to engage with such a gotcha?
I understand that you think this is only possible because your opinion is simple, pure, and obviously correct. I promise you do not have a monopoly on that feeling.
Where did I accuse him of either of those things?
Was this meant to be a gotcha? I do think you lack confidence in your own arguments to persuade people. Unlike you, I would be more than happy to define the word "woman" while being filmed.
And I wasn't jeering at you like an adolescent: I genuinely, sincerely think that your stated reluctance to define the word "woman" while being filmed is indicative of a deep-seated uncertainty about your own worldview. Many trans activists are willing to define the word "woman" while being filmed, up to and including by a person who doesn't share their worldview. I find it interesting and, yes, rather telling that you don't fall into this category.
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Would they?
I thought the obviously correct interpretation of that clip is that Clayton knows that Biden won in 2020, but also knows that Trump thinks that he won and will not tolerate anybody telling him the truth. Saying that Trump won in 2020 is the calling-a-deer-a-horse loyalty test of Trumpism.
Clayton can't answer the question because if he says "Biden", Trump turns on him and he needs Trump's support, and if he says "Trump", he is firstly saying something on the record that is verifiably false, and secondly alienating everyone who isn't MAGA.
Surely it's a well-remarked-upon fact, at this point, that an awful lot of Republicans quietly, behind-the-scenes, think that Trump is crazy, but are willing to insincerely mouth agreement in order to keep their jobs, in the hope that by 2028 he'll go away and they can go back to normal? Maybe they're wrong - certainly the ongoing transformation of the Republican party will have effects, and it won't just reset back to where it was in 2012 - but I'm pretty confident that's what a great many of them are thinking.
Oh I completely agree with you. I was specifically arguing that that interpretation (that Clayton thinks Trump won in 2020) is false. I think many progressives will arrive at that conclusion, but I think it's the wrong one:
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I dont think the "who won 2020" is really all that good of a gotcha. The correct answer, is, "Biden won because Democrats stole the election, as they try to do in every election and are only sometimes thwarted. Yes, Americans, you are consistently defrauded by election thieves. Do as you must with your local politician if the are not voting for the SAVE America Act." This is incredibly simple, accurate, and defeats the line of questioning in ways "what is a woman" cannot be responded to.
I don't think that escapes the gotcha. It's just equivalent to saying trump won. In that case, you expose yourself as either earnestly believing a very likely falsehood, or as someone willing to lie for political expediency.
Nah. Just emphasize the Kennedy steal from Nixon. Its a good teaching moment for the rhetorically skilled.
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This is about as far from a mainstream view as the Democrats' crazy gender ideologies. It is not a message that appeals to the average voter.
Not to mention less accurate. The average Democratic office-holder lives in a woke bubble where "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" is a correct description of the local usage of the word "woman". I do not think the GOP has a widespread alternative meaning of "stole" and "thieves" which would make @anti_dan's proposed response a true statement when parsed as conservatalk.
I don't believe this is true. I don't think the average Democratic office-holder lives in something that could accurately be called a "woke bubble" (though almost undoubtedly he lives among far more woke people than the general population). And, as someone who does live in something that could accurately be called a "woke bubble," I don't think that actually is the correct description of the local usage of the word "woman" in such a bubble.
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Educational opportunities often come from unexpected places
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OP's point is that if you answered this way then you win favor with the MAGA crowd but out yourself as a nutjob who believes in conspiracy theories to everyone else. So there is no way to answer "who won 2020?" without losing favor with someone.
I don't imagine it should be a big deal since Trump is sitting President now. 2020 was a low CW flashpoint for the right, but 2024 was a rebound.
I still think Trump would get very irate if a member of his cabinet directly told him that he didn't win in 2020, incumbency notwithstanding.
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I am split between love and hate for these kinds of phrases. I can appreciate the rhetoric and my favorite art form to consume is standup comedy which is basically all rhetoric. But funny and witty isn't the same thing as true or useful. Scott has a few good posts on this somewhere, but I can only remember where he makes the case that we haven't really been trying 'debate' and instead only been trying rhetoric: Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons.
I'd like to encourage people not to try and make more of these phrases, because most people horribly fail political touring tests. And instead of making gotcha phrases they instead make what I'd call a shitstorm of stupidity. The phrase betrays such an extreme ignorance that anyone confronted with it can only win by walking away and ignoring them (making the idiot even more confident).
Phrases such as
“Jet fuel can't melt steal beams”
“The Earth is flat, look out your window”
“If vaccines work, why do vaccinated people still get sick?”
“If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”
“If the Earth was spinning at 1,000 mph we’d all fly off.”
I think more earnest conversations would do a lot of good. I have asked a few palestine supporters how they think palenstine might treat the Jews if they were suddenly in charge. Only one was fucked up enough to say something like "exactly as they deserve". Most of them got thoughtful looks and realized ... ya there might just be another genocide going the other direction. Which turns the situation into the old joke:
In the case of Israel we have already accepted there is going to be genocide, now how bad do you want it to be? And to whom should it be committed against?
At the risk of trying to steelman a belief not my own, but I think they don't expect that to matter because I think they envision something where Palestine exists as a place no Jew should probably ever enter, but will never be strong enough to hurt Israel. And that they will be less willing to try to attack Israel if left alone.
Note that I don't agree that it'd work out that way, but this is my best guess at what they are thinking.
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I could write a long reply, but to keep it short:
I dont want to use my tax money to make sure jews are the ones who dominate Palestinians and not the other way around.
From a humanitarian perspective, I would prefer if they find some workable 2-state solution. There are plenty of Palestinians in the West Bank who live with constant harassment from IDF and settlers, and they mostly try to live their lives the best they can. I think that shows some promise towards peaceful coexistence being possible. Muslims and Christians also coexist in the West Bank much better than with Israeli settlers.
But again, even if it is not possible, I dont particularly get riled up over possible future bloodshed among Israelis
I am against American funding or intervention in the middle east. But I think that position is rarest among people willing to express an opinion about the conflict, and it's also probably the most common opinion among people who are quiet about it. I've had very little success in converting interventionists of either stripe into non-interventionists.
You get to have that political opinion today because America got very good at shale oil and became an energy powerhouse.
Non-intervention in the ME was not a possible political position pre-2010 unless you were also willing to accept a lower quality of life in the US. Back then we needed to keep the oil flowing.
Today the biggest benefit to America playing geopolitical games in the ME is Jared Kushner getting a PE fund.
US support for Israel is not and never was driven by oil. The oil is controlled by the Gulf Arabs, and the Gulf Arabs hated Israel as much as everyone else in the region until the 2010s when the Middle East became a giant proxy war between Iranian and Saudi-backed jihadi groups. The first oil shock in 1973 was engineered deliberately by the Gulf Arabs to punish America (and other western countries) for supporting Israel. The "realist" policy in the post Cold War era (as practiced, for example, by both Bushes) was to unofficially tie American pressure on Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians to commitments from the Fremen to keep the Spice flowing.
True I left out the support of Israel causing a lot of pre-2010 issues. And that’s a big reason we had negative Middle East issues back then.
The broad security blanket we provided the ME wasn’t that expensive and necessary. Supporting Israel was expensive. Mea culpa I wasn’t thinking about the costs of Israel back then and it’s a glaring omission.
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Any market that sells to the world is open to world price fluctuations. Holding the position today is the same as it was back then. That also fails a basic cost benefit analysis. We spent in the trillions to decrease the price of a thing that was in the 100 billions. If we had just eaten the higher oil costs and not started wars over there we would have been better off. And its likely we would have arrived at the "American energy powerhouse" situation earlier.
So we have had lower quality of life to do these interventions. But even if that wasn't true I'd still bite the bullet of non-intervention, for many reasons.
Energy prices are inelastic in the short term.
It’s a core necessity for production of anything. If you don’t have chocolate well you don’t eat chocolate. If you don’t have energy a lot of high value add businesses needs to stop because energy goes into everything.
2 & 3. Imply that gdp impact is > import costs
Iraq and Afghanistan were not oil wars but about terrorism. Long term backing of Saudi Arabia was oil. Iran war now is probably oil but to deny it to China. Afghanistan doesn’t even have oil. Iraq 90% of it was probably wanting to fuck some brown people because of 9/11. So the trillions in the 2000’s was mostly not about oil.
I don’t know the true amount the US spent on securing oil supplies over decades but it’s not the trillions of the Iraq War. It also had spillover benefits for allies securing oil.
I don’t know when the US would have become an energy powerhouses if oil surged sooner. Higher prices would have started the process earlier. The 1970’s oil prices didn’t trigger shale. And Europe has high energy prices and no plans to improve on that situation.
I'm confused. First I say I don't want middle east spending and intervention. Next you say I couldn't have had that opinion pre-2010s because the intervention was required for lower oil prices. Next I say we spent trillions on that intervention so it seems not worth it. Now you say that intervention wasn't related to oil prices (which I agree with) but makes your original objection seem strange and pointless.
Some interventions were necessary. Arming the Saudis 100%. Doing some form of balance of power politics etc.
It’s just the Iraq War and Afghanistan were not about oil directly. Iraq War 1 could be considered an oil war. The post 9/11 stuff was terrorism related and the only oil connection was some OBL hating us for propping up the Saudi regime.
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I don't think you're quite understanding the point @FtttG is making here. It's not merely gotchas and catchphrases, it's gotchas which are specifically unanswerable to people with contradictory or controversial viewpoints that they don't want to expose, forcing them into a catch-22 in which they cannot answer your question.
If you say “The Earth is flat, look out your window”, the round Earther can explain math to show how curved surfaces apear approximately flat when zoomed in far enough, or about GPS, satellites, orbital mechanics, and/or just ships disappearing over the horizon. They are not afraid of answering, because everyone around them will smile and nod approvingly. Even if the answer is complicated and simpler minds might make fun of them for having such a complicated answer to such a simple question/observation, there is an answer.
If you say "It's okay to be white", the correct response is "yeah, and?" The more sane leftist will then proceed to go on about how everyone already knows it's okay to be white so your statement is stupid and pointless but black lives matter is an important statement because police blah blah prison statistics etc.
But the radical leftist does not believe it's okay to be white. They can't/won't say "yeah, and?", they will become angry and try to cancel and censor you and expose themselves for anti-white racists.
The gotchas being promoted here ARE guided by the beauty of our weapons, because they're the specific type designed to exploit contradictions, lies, and cognitive dissonance. They're taking logical and truth based arguments like "you can't simultaneously promote peace, harmony, and anti-racism, while also being an anti-white bigot" and condensing them down into a more memeable form that has more visceral impact when made properly. We already have logical arguments, but some people don't care to listen. It'd be useful if we had plenty of logical arguments AND asymmetrical memes that have broad appeal and can only be used against illogical people.
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I think there's a midground here, because I occupy it. The 2020 election was a titanic clusterfuck, and whatever you think happened, explicit belief statements need a giant asterisk.
Gun to my head, one word answer or I get shot, I say Biden. In any other context, I want to spend a half hour driving caveat shivs in before getting to that conclusion, and no one in any kind of government hearing ever gets to explain a nuanced position.
I think I'm fairly close to this also. There's the Hunter Biden Laptop Story, where the NY Post's reporting was suppressed before the election, and it's even documented on Wikipedia. There's also the suspicious timing of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trial results, which in a pre-mandate world would have handed a massive win to Trump just before the election, via Operation Warp Speed; I've seen it argued that it was political, that there was "no evidence" it was political, and that changes to the assessment schedule could plausibly have been done for scientifically justified reasons. I can't find a smoking gun document either way; interested people can probably argue forever about that one without ever making progress. TIME Magazine also came out in Feb 2021 and laid out how they "fortified" the election result to make it all-but-impossible to contest, revealing significant command-and-control capabilities among those who wanted to see a Biden presidency.
Do I believe they did anything so crude as to manipulate the count or the voting machines themselves? Not really; I think isolated manipulation is almost certain and uncoordinated widespread manipulation plausible, but I don't think anyone will be able to meet the standard of proof to convince anyone who has already chosen a side. I do think the environment in 2020 was stacked to favor D as much as possible as the country went to the polls. On top of that, vote-by-mail is always less secure than in-person-only elections, and there's a fair amount of means/motive/opportunity to harvest and submit ballots.
It is disappointing that the result of the contested 2020 election was not a bipartisan effort to secure the elections to the satisfaction of both parties, and that Voter ID seems to be impossible to pass even now.
A Democracy is dependent on certain institutions/people broadly acting fairly and honestly so that the voters can essentially be like a baseball umpire and call balls and strikes with a reasonable set of trusted information.
That being said we also accept that certain actors get to be partisan and try to shape public opinion. Politicians and PACs get to run attack ads which do not need to be nice to the opposing side and can give colorful takes on current events. We would probably assume more groups than these get to be partisans but the exact line of who gets to be partisan is not clearly defined.
And this is where 2020 gets really confusing because there are actors who are not allowed to be partisan using professional credentials to be partisan. The withholding of the vaccine data feels like it was for partisan and probably actually killed a lot of people. Fauci feels like he had other motives (in his case his own ego). The CIA is not suppose to be propagandizing the American people and acting in a partisan way in US elections. So when 50 revolving door CIA agents write an op-ed citing their CIA spy credentials to declare Hunters laptop a Russian Op I feel like that crossed some lines.
The environment stacking felt to me like it crossed a lot of lines on how institutions are required to play in a Democracy that go far beyond the dirty politics that happen in a Democracy.
That being said the Dems probably win the election in a landslide if they didn’t go down the path of fortifying an election. The riots really did costs them a lot of votes. If they had done that then Trump probably just goes down as a one term POTUS who did Republican stuff like cut taxes and appoint conservative judges.
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I'll add the revelations from Fauci's diary that Rand Paul just released. That motherfucker apparently knew the wet market theory wasn't true, believed it was only as bad as the flu, and was having a narcissism gooning session about how famous and important he was even as he destroyed the economy with lies.
I know many of the skeptics here remain insistent that COVID wasn't a big deal but that belief is nearly absent within healthcare itself, even the people who have concerns about the vaccine, social distancing plans, and other factors...they all think it was a big deal and if they worked inpatient they watched a lot of people die.
Even if he and they (us, really) were wrong...that's what we thought.
Also...the flu is bad and has been catastrophic before?
My understanding is that Fauci wrote in his diary that the mortality rate was one figure, and then went on TV and publicly claimed it was roughly ten times higher, and worked to get anyone repeating the accurate mortality he himself had privately accepted as genuine shouted down and censored.
Also, he knew it was lab made, and appeared outside a lab where he and his underlings had been funding research to produce exactly this sort of virus, despite such research explicitly being banned by the federal government. I'm planning a larger post on the subject, but my understanding is that it's straightforwardly true that Fauci generated one of the worst clusters of bad policy decisions of the last century, is directly responsible for something like 32 million human deaths and dozens of trillions of dollars in economic damage, along with vast and pernicious violations of a variety of human rights.
The fact that this is now all out in the open and the elite class is choosing to attempt, even at this late date, to aw shucks it back under the rug is... well, "enlightening" is a start. Personally, I intend to employ these facts as a cudgel from this point forward, and find it difficult to imagine why I shouldn't.
At this point we aren't going to get anywhere with the whole "how real" COVID was discussion, but I am here to point out that we really authentically were worried. Healthcare was about to collapse (not because this was The One pandemic but because the system has little slack). The dominos are still falling directly from COVID.
Additionally, people zigzagged between it was a far right conspiracy theory to no this is real to scary Italian estimates to bad flu and all over the place but throughout we knew that some bad shit was going down.
What we did with that information is a much more debatable thing, but I'm here to remind the conspiracy types that if nothing else the healthcare and public health people believed it was a big deal.
AIUI, this was a great concern that functionally didn't happen. Yes, most critical care units only had so many beds, and if they got a surge of people who needed ventilators it would have plausibly overwhelmed existing resources, but, again, AIUI, that pretty much didn't actually happen outside a few isolated, short-term clusters.
Maybe some of the drastic measures helped with that, but the cost was things like "grandpa dying alone in a nursing home where he caught and spread the illness, while his healthy, functionally-immune grandchildren were forbidden to visit or even attend the funeral".
So in the acute phase this is the Y2K problem - people assume it wasn't an issues because everyone was proactive and the mitigation measures were opaque. We did stuff like put dermatologists in the ICU. That's not good! It worked well enough to get people through the immediate situation.
Now we have the chronic problems. Healthcare was already having a lot of problems but COVID kickstarted or hastened a lot. An example is the death of rural hospitals. Another is the way physicians have transitioned from being practice owners to hospital employees with a decrease in level of ownership (as in responsibility). Docs jump ship out of clinical practice way faster, won't put themselves at risk anymore. You also the travel nursing thing...
It caused a lot of problems that are still unfolding.
On the patient side we are still seeing things like decreased cancer screening and increase in treatment hesitance play out.
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There's a lot of ways to seriously defend some COVID responses. I was a COVID hawk, and if not as aggressive as what coastals had to deal with, not only a hawk by Tophattington standards, and I'm still more mid-position than most here. But the trouble here is that people either need to seriously defend, or actively eject, bad actors. Fauci isn't some rando, and whether he was actively lying, rather than mistaken, is a massive deal even and especially if you want a serious public health response to ever work ever again.
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Nobody who doesn't already believe you will change their mind. Their control over the normies is total.
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Flu is bad. COVID was as bad as some of the worst pandemic flus of the past (aside from 1919)... that we pretty much forgot about until COVID. Healthcare people obviously tend to see the worst cases; public health people should avoid that bias.
See response to FC, trying to call out one narrow bit.
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One, there was a separation of several weeks between the diary entries and the Congressional testimony; new information could easily have fit in that temporal gap.
Two, 'as bad as influenza' covers some rather alarming territory (e. g. 1918).
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Your misrepresentation obscures the Left's true motivation for opposing "it's okay to be white", which they are wholly justified in doing.
Everyone agrees that "being white is better than being non-white*: the question is in how whites obtained their Privileged position. The Left does not believe that whites should be ashamed "for the color of their skin", but for the innumerable crimes they have committed against non-whites* in the 500 years since they set out from Europe to gain their globally advantageous position. If, on the contrary, whites achieved their prosperity through entirely legitimate means, or by means no worse than the global baseline, then all non-whites* ought to be deeply ashamed of just how poorly their societies compare to whites', especially after 120+ years of the end of extractive colonialism and 80+ years of independence from Western powers. Either it is okay to be white, or it is okay to be otherwise*.
*East Asians (mostly) excluded.
I have an extremely long schizopost brewing about this exact topic that I don't have the time to write right now, but the tldr is that this entire framing IS implicitly accepted by everyone in the modern west (right and left alike) and it IS a hubristic arrogant stifling ridiculous situation that leads to terrible outcomes and excludes all evidence and experiences to the contrary while privileging literal white supremacy to the exclusion of every instance where being white may actually be a disadvantage for example in sports or in the face of male sexual competition with more dominantly gened people. The blindness to this reality is born out of a combination of arrogance, laziness, and an unwillingness to course correct or admit mistake/defeat/obvious humiliation.
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To echo Nwallins, I also disagree. Being a higher IQ (or otherwise talented) black is better than being white, because you get both the advantages of affirmative action and the benefits of your natural talents.
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I disagree
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The left could, ya know, just not play this abhorrent word games to cover up for racism, too, and they wouldn't be "misrepresented" (that is, interpreted entirely correctly but in ways they don't like, so on go the word games).
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I think gender ideology in general is a "gotcha" question such that, no matter what you believe, you are forced to pick a side. Consider the choice of which pronouns to use to refer to a transgender individual, let's say a male-to-female.
There is no choice you could make that means you are neither for nor against gender ideology, especially when progressives treat neutrality the same as being against. The difference between pronouns and the "what is a woman?" question is that the latter is used by conservatives to explicitly call out and expose the beliefs of the answerer, while pronouns are a way for progressives to hijack an existing social norm and turn it into an implicit belief test.
I don't think it's quite as bad as that. I'll use "she" in person for someone who, in my judgement, is clearly committed to being transgender. (And I reserve the right for this to be my judgement call.) It doesn't mean I "believe they're a woman", just that it's low-cost for me to be polite. The Democrats may have gone way, way, way too far on gender ideology (especially the coercive parts), but if some people want to be treated as women, why not do so? In most real-life situations it's not actually a big deal. And you don't need to bring the culture war with you everywhere.
Calling everyone "they" just sets my teeth on edge. It's not a fence-sitting position - it's very much in line with leftist ideology, forcing us all to unlearn that men and women exist.
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There's a weird shift in progress amongst certain sects, that are starting to insist that "they" be used for everyone, regardless of gender. It remains to be seen if it'll win out.
Wouldn't be surprised; singular 'they' isn't that much more of a stretch than singular 'you'.
It depends. Singular "they" is a motte-and-bailey among lefty groups that support custom pronouns, where the motte is "singular they has been around since the 14th century, you chud" and the bailey is "people should be able to identify themselves with 'they' as a nonbinary gendered pronoun".
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On the balance this is a good post, but I am rather disappointed that you failed to represent the "pro-Palestinian" position charitably in the end. For example, is the categorisation you offer in
really the best you can imagine? Do you not find it conceivable that someone could have gotten an accurate picture of the toll of the war in Gaza from a multitude of reasonably objective sources, and then from that drawn the conclusion (perhaps informed by other values they hold, however much you may disagree with those) that they ought to oppose the Israeli position with all that entails? I don't know what percentage of protesters nowadays get all their news from Instagram, but this is as immaterial as the question what percentage of Israel supporters get all their news from grandmas reposting AI slop on Facebook groups. In either case, their conclusions would most likely not change if you were to put them on a forced diet of Pulitzer-class fact-checked highbrow journalism instead.
I imagine some protesters, with perfect information about what transpired until now, would be happy with an outcome that involves every non-Muslim being expelled from the Levant. Others might not be happy with this, but have the delusion, as progressives are wont to do, that with sufficient reparations and contrition the Muslims will actually flip to running a pluralistic rainbow-coloured paradise in no time (delusional, perhaps, but not definitionally misinformed; information usually is not taken to include inductive reasoning). Yet others may just believe that the Israelis, using their considerable advantage in brains and brawns and wealth, can surely grit their teeth and figure out a way to make everyone there coexist more equitably, if the US just forces them at gunpoint to abandon their preferred strategy of whatever they are doing now (this, to me, seems plausible). Neither of these exactly implies support for "finishing the job dear old Adolf started", and each of them is a considerably more interesting category to engage with than the putative feel-good Instagram pollyannas you choose as the other representative.
To begin with, I don't know if you really want to be playing the "look at the sort of dumb people that exist on the other side" game, considering how much your side depends on the support of people who principally want Israel to exist so it can troll everyone and trigger a sequence of predetermined events that involves Jesus beaming them up into heaven before the UN institutes a one-world government under a Romanian dictator.
I mean, if people had gotten an accurate picture of the toll of the war in Germany (or Japan) during WWII (or the starvation of WWI!), or the South during the US civil war... somehow, I still think they wouldn't have opposed the Allies/North, merely thought "How dumb must those people be to not surrender and keep wanting to fight us for no good reason?"
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I am confident that people meeting this description exist, somewhere in the world. But I'm being completely honest when I say that I've interacted with dozens of people who could be characterised as "pro-Palestinian" or "anti-Zionist" over the past three years, and not one of them expressed any opinions even remotely similar to these. Moderate pro-Palestinians of this sort, so far as I'm aware, simply do not exist in Ireland. Unhinged conspiracism ("they rigged the Eurovision!!!") and barely concealed seething hatred of
JewsZionists is the norm, not the exception. My modal interaction with a pro-Palestinian type does not look like a sober-minded, dispassionate analysis of how to bring about a lasting peace in the region and what a two-state solution might look like in practice: it looks like them accusing me of being a paid Mossad bot who positively delights in the murder of innocent Gazan children for no better reason than sheer bloody-mindedness. Even my own mother (who I ordinarily consider fairly level-headed and even-handed when it comes to politics, Covid excepted) has, in my opinion, become radicalised by a deranged moral panic.It's one thing to request that I represent the pro-Palestinian movement fairly and charitably. It's quite another to demand that I represent it in a manner that bears no earthly resemblance to my (for lack of a better term) "lived experience".
For context: I've mentioned on several occasions that the Crown Prosecution Service was considering charging the hip-hop band Kneecap over their yelling out "Up Hamas" and "Ooh! Ah! Hezbollah!" during live performances. They eventually declined to press charges, which I believe was the right decision. But of all the people I've spoken to about this case, exactly one agrees with me that, while yelling "Up Hamas" shouldn't be a criminal offense, it's a shitty thing to do.
So yeah. "Hamas are finishing the heroic job dear old Adolf started" may not be an accurate representation of your experience of the pro-Palestinian movement, but it is an accurate representation of mine, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
Ever since antisemitism became appropriate in the social consciousness for every day conversation in the West, there's been a drift towards people going way over the top on it. I've got some problems with how Israelis and Jews operate, but also on the whole think that it's an admirable culture and that people 'Rabbis sacrificing 3 year olds to Moloch'posting are retarded.
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I'll take your word that they don't exist in Ireland, but haven't you seen "rainbow Hamas" types on social media?
What do you mean by rainbow Hamas?
That is, people who delude themselves into believing variations of the idea that the claim that an independent Palestine would be an oppressive, misogynistic, Islamo-fascist regime is just Israeli slander; that left to its own devices, Palestinians might very well become an enlightened liberal democracy, and it's racist to believe otherwise when they haven't been given the chance. In my experience, it's what a lot of Queers For Palestine types claim to believe when pushed, and I don't really doubt their relative sincerity. It'd be psychologically challenging to cheer for people who you actually believed would behead you if they got the chance.
It's not like this is even particularly unique as a concept. The jarringness of the Islam/Pride coalition is silly, but like we've come off decades of 'Without the British colonializing SOCIETY WITH WIDESPREAD HUMAN SACRIFICE, they would have been natural progressives. They were progressive on gender due to SHAMEFUL EUNUCH CLASS being a third gender' takes
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Probably the closest I've come to people meeting that description is the people accusing Israel of "pinkwashing". Pro-Palestinian types, in my own experience, won't go so far as to deny that Gaza is a horrible place to be a woman or a gay person: they will simply loudly insist that such claims are Zionist propaganda, while sidestepping the question of whether they're true.
Sure, they don't tend to believe that Gaza is currently a bastion of progressivism; but @4bpp was talking about a wishful belief that "with sufficient reparations and contrition", Muslims will eventually "flip to running a pluralistic rainbow-coloured paradise", not the untenable proposition that they're already doing so.
I feel like this opinion, not specifically about Palestine but generally about Muslims in the Middle East, was very common-to-nigh-ubiquitous in the early-mid-2000s pre- and early-War on Terror. I think the way that things played out in the intervening years has made this opinion much less popular.
However, as they say, there's a sucker born every minute, and a substantial portion of the people in the "pro-Palestine" side of this culture war were born too late to be old enough to pay attention to the War on Terror in the 2000s-2010s. So, despite being less popular, I could believe that there is still a substantial proportion of these people (maybe even a majority!) who believe this sort of thing about Palestine specifically and Muslim nations in the Middle East generally.
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I think I might've read something similar to this reasoning once. No, wait, that was Douglas Adams.
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Well, in that case I'll have to say that I don't at present recall ever meeting a person meeting that description, nor interacting with such a person online.
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I don't think seething hatred of Israel and its supporters as you describe it is particularly incompatible with neither being pro-uncle-Adolf nor being low-information. "Expel all non-Muslims", the one position I suggested you didn't quote, is surely a pretty uncompromising position (and not exactly peaceful or sober-minded, if you try to imagine how this would have to play out in practice). The problem I had with your Instagram dig is that it suggests Instagram was instrumental (and hence that the position would fall apart with a "better" source), but I don't believe that and your description of your "lived experience" is not really giving evidence of it either.
(Perhaps you are making the mistake of thinking the conspiracism is upstream of the hatred, rather than downstream. For most people, once they find someone repellent, attributing additional evils large and small to them is just the natural course of pro-social action.)
My read is @FtttG was using Instagram as a byword for "reductive, zero nuance, zero context, sheltered takes from privileged people supporting the current thing out of peer pressure". Just like George Floyd 2020 and ACAB. The human mind is drawn to one-note takes with cut and right moral clarity, so naturally they get the most decibels both online and IRL.
"Every problem has an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
In 2026, some flavours of antisemitism are acceptable in common parlance when sufficiently couched in progressive speak about Palestinian suffering ("poor brown babies colonised by white (adjacent) people"). Muslim antisemitism is excusable (if not justified) for the same reasons why anti-whiteness is excusable. White antisemitism, less so, because holocaust and uncle-Adolf. However, it is inconvenient to give too much oxygen calling out these folks (real as they are) when they're attacking Jews, at risk of giving ammo to the pro-Israel narrative.
Though I am surprised that @FtttG hasn't heard of "Rainbow Hamas", since they tend to overlap with this demographic:
They also overlap with the noble savage myths in woke academia, which insist that any retrograde practices like slavery and superstitious anti-female, anti-gay violence in indigenous cultures were amplified (if not outright imported) by white colonialists. Modern portrayals of Native Americans (see RDR2 and Yellowstone/its spinoffs) are basically Bay Area woke self-inserts wearing Native aesthetics. Even if they know this isn't true, it's simply not optically feasible to acknowledge, let alone reconcile with progressive priors ("Should I support the browns or the brown gays?"). You don't wanna steelman colonial apologists, because again, it's a decibel contest!
Regardless of if they truly believe it or not, hardcore progressive pro-Palestinians have to pretend the browns they so zealously defend won't go back to oppressing women and uncle-Adolfing all Jews and gays.
I've certainly encountered these people before, and people who believe in a kind of secular original sin where all homophobia exhibited by Islamic cultures is ultimately the fault of white colonists. But I can't personally recall ever seeing someone claim that Palestine would promptly become a progressive paradise were they to be granted their own nation-state.
Well, never mind then. I don't think it's a claim even they seriously believe in, just like the one-state proponents, because their real audience is domestic (not the Gazans). "Queers for Palestine" is a loyalty test, it is inconsistent but the real currency is status and tribal payoff.
That is why I don't see any "gotchas" working against the Palestine movement for now. The sexual violence and homophobia should've sufficed. But a "gotcha" only works when a non-trivial number of politically neutral or moderately-aligned people are already experiencing private friction with the movement, and the side shooting the "gotcha" carries enough status and optical legitimacy to attract more supporters. Yes, it can still damage the target. Yes, it can expose the contradictions in the coalition. But it won't make the Zionist opposition more attractive. "What is a woman" works because opponents of trans ideology aren't immediately dismissible as unhinged cranks, and it turns beliefs and internal logic directly held by its proponents against them. Zionism is politically homeless in American CW.
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I'm sorry, I'm afraid I really don't know what you're talking about.
I'm confused as to what you are confused about.
Correct me if you disagree with anything in this summary: You gave two caricatures of pro-Palestinians, which seem to broadly be glossable as "naive person whose views are attributable to tragic pictures on Instagram" and "actually wants all Jews to die". I disputed that this is a charitable or reasonable taxonomy. You counter-objected that the people you encountered in real life are asserting unhinged/implausible things ("they rigged the Eurovision!!!" - is that actually so unhinged? I thought it was common sense that Eurovision results are always 100% inside baseball astroturf theatre) and that they are cheering on Hamas. I didn't address the latter (though I think it's at most consistent with "expel them from the Levant" which falls well short of "kill them all" - no evidence that they wish death, even indirectly, upon any Jew outside of the Levant), but asserted that the former is not evidence of being fairly described by either of your two caricatures.
The recent norms flip where antizionism is increasingly just a common position amongst the youth has led to a bunch of people just randomly ingesting a few basic slogans and not really having any full-formed ideas on the subject. It's getting towards anticolonialism territory where there's a lot of people who just think in terms of 'Israelis are not being nice, they should be nice and if they were nice we'd all get along' or 'Jews sacrificing babies to Cthulhu' level stuff.
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Well to start with, I disagree that my "caricatures" are any such thing. I personally know a great many young women who really have learned everything they know about the conflict from extremely selectively composed Instagram infographics, including many now known to contain false information. This was obviously true during the BLM craze of 2020, so I don't know why you're acting so shocked that it's true now.
Likewise, when a person who explicitly supports Hamas, thinks the October 7th attack was a good thing, explicitly states that they no longer feel any sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust etc. – I think it's reasonable to conclude that such a person fundamentally supports Hamas's stated mission of exterminating all Jews, even if they wouldn't say so in so many words, even if they would get very defensive if you suggested they have a terminal goal in common with Hitler. The point of the OP was that I would like to devise a gotcha question that would force these people to be more forthcoming about their opinions than they are currently being. When you say "be more charitable – many of them just want to ethnically cleanse Israel of the yahud!" – well, my response is that these people would never openly cop to supporting ethnic cleansing, even though that's obviously the logical endpoint of their worldview.
(And, seriously – you're getting so defensive about how I characterised the pro-Palestinian movement. "How dare you say we want to kill all Jews – we just want to forcibly ethnically cleanse them from the nation-state they've lived in for the better part of a century!" Is that seriously the moderate option? Is this what a "reasonable" pro-Palestinian person looks like?)
Even if that's the case, that's a completely different claim to the claim that Mossad and Shin Bet rigged the votes without the EBU's knowledge. And if they were capable of doing this, I cannot fathom why they'd rig the vote so that they'd come second, making the conspiracy theory doubly inane.
...and I don't think I was disputing that. I just think it's uncharitable in the simple sense that it is luring the reader into dismissing the position as flimsy or based on incorrect information, when it is neither (not flimsy in the sense that it would be easy to flip, nor based on incorrect information in the but-for causal sense of based on), using the hypothetical example of making a similar sort of assertion about the pro-Israel side. The majority of them can probably be accounted for by one of "Jewish with unapologetic ingroup preference", "actually hates brown people" and "have learned everything they know about the conflict from crazy posts on FB/Twitter", and I think for my lived-experience intersection of "American" and "pro-Israel" this is actually basically exhaustive (I can't comment on the Irish, because the last time I knowingly talked to an Irishman in the flesh was over a decade ago during undergrad); but I don't think that taxonomy would be appropriate either, because the crazy post people implicitly anchor their worldview in community leaders who do have a more interesting position and likewise would not be swayed from their position if you forced them to read some proper objective reporting.
I disagree about Hamas/Oct 7th. The "no longer feel any sympathy" thing is a bit more complicated, though I have to say I have not heard that in the wild from leftists (even those who fall into the former two categories) at all. If you do see it that way, are you willing to bite the bullet and say that the Russian depiction of Ukraine and supportive Westerners as russophobic and genocidal is likewise accurate, given the abundance of similar rhetoric about every Ukrainian hit on Russia? (If yes, well, props for consistency, although I still disagree; if no, I will argue that you seem to be treating Jews as a special category where ill-wishes upon some members and emotive expressions of hostility are treated as uniquely more serious than for any other)
I don't recall ever claiming that it is "moderate" or "reasonable"; I was defending it only against your implicit charges of being non-serious (or, to be precise, either non-serious or significantly more immoderate/unreasonable than this still), as I explained above. I believe that on this forum, at least, we ought to be more careful about pegging movements precisely, rather than doing the normie thing and throwing everything outside a fixed window in the "literally Hitler" (literally so, in this case!) pit.
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I don’t believe you have to want to exterminate the Jews to believe that Palestine is the historic homeland of the Palestinians and a bunch of Europeans with some shared genetics with the historical population are basically colonizers.
The Ashkenazis basically did colonize Israel. Leftists are universally against colonization. At this point Ashkenazis do have alternative places to go. I’m not against colonization so I don’t have a problem with Israel.
Leftist seem to believe colonization is great for white homelands. So they aren’t anti colonization—they are anti white (or perhaps more charitably anti western).
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I've said it before and I'll say it again: in Israel, Mizrahi Jews far outnumber Ashkenazi Jews.
I agree that being opposed to the existence of Israel doesn't necessarily imply that you want to see its citizens exterminated. But the two do often seem to go hand in hand, explicitly or implicitly.
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I do have to agree most of the other questions have truisms to support them that I really do not believe you have with “what is a women”.
Pro-Palestine - You can perfectly take an anti-might makes right argument and declare the Palestinians as the true natives of Israel and hence have a more valid claim on the land. Most of the modern world in the west has some foundations in might makes right, but it’s still an intellectually coherent framework. Modern Jews likely have significantly less genetic connections to the historic inhabitants.
I feel perfectly fine making arguments the fourth estate completely gave up on their responsibilities in a Democracy which completely flipped the election. If people were informed the Hunter laptop was genuine then it’s an easy Trump win. Plus, Zuckbucks probably crossed legality in Wisconsin. That the vote was actually changed is a hard argument, but Democratic norms do feel like they were violated all over the place in 2020. And actual Biden administration campaigns to suppress media seem quite valid in 2020. I think a GOP staffer can validly cite 2020 as not Democracy without needing to say specific vote fraud.
Was this supposed to be in response to some other post?
No I agreed that he didn’t represent the other positions charitably. People can make rational pro-Palestinian or 2020 election denial arguments. Which I do not believe you can on “What is a women” (besides a very narrow small percent of true abnormal chromosome people).
My guess is you don’t like me labeling the pro-Palestine people as being anti-might makes right, but I do think you need to take that view. It is a coherent argument to believe might does not make right. Otherwise Palestine was conquered 80 years ago and at some point they just need to accept that and quit fighting under traditional western doctrine.
"What is a woman?" is a question about the meaning of words, not about the world. And "We should, where possible, use words in a way which avoids hurting people" is a good (though in my view insufficient given that it makes it impossible to talk about sex-specific medical issues in non-technical language) rational argument for using the word "woman" in a trans-inclusive way - see any of the multiple Yud essays on this point, or Scott's "The Categories were made for Man"
There are a lot of insane transactivists who think that "What is a woman?" has an objective scientifically correct answer which includes transwomen, but you don't have to agree with them to avoid cancellation.
Given Hobson's choice on the issue, I would rather defend pro-Palestine in front of a hostile audience than TWAW*, but I would rather defend TWAW than a blatant lie like the MAGA position on the 2020 election.
* My actual position on this issue is that Israel is almost certainly the lesser evil, but I don't take sides in evil-vs-evil conflicts where I don't have a stake.
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I'm a bit confused as to the "what is a woman" connection, but also my brain is somewhat more mushy than usual right now, and you are not making it easy with the slightly sloppy/casual grammar. I'll try to reread it when I am more lucid.
(assuming men -> me) I do think "anti-might makes right" is a common motivating value among those who hold the pro-Palestine position, though by no means universally present.
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They were, and they did; that's why they co-locate military installations with schools and hospitals and cry crocodile tears when they get exploded. Western doctrine post-1970 or so really doesn't have an effective answer to "I guess I'll just kill myself, lol" (and the inability to shut down "what is a woman" is heavily related to this), mainly because Western populations are unwilling to permit/enforce that a belligerent that intentionally disregards Western laws of fighting gets to suffer the wages of disregarding Western laws of fighting (and 'we'll step in if you're about to get genocided' is very high on the list of protections those laws claim to offer).
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Bro, what? What on earth does this mean?
OP still remembers the top bestseller of the noughties. Now it is mercifully forgotten, but it was really big thing in halcyon times of Dubya's administration.
Thanks, I wasn't familiar.
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It's the belief of a minority of American Evangelicals that supporting the state of Israel can bring about the events of the book of Apocalypse.
Most Evangelicals do not believe this, although they often believe that supporting a Jewish state on that particular plot of land is commanded by God and the country which does not do it will be punished for it, with no strong eschatological matrix for that belief.
It's very interesting to me that people never complain about evangelicals for interpreting Matthew 24:14 literally and always for supporting Israel. If the complaint was actually about "evangelicals trying to bring about the end of days" the complaint against evangelicals would be for evangelizing.
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This is probably a reference to the Left Behind novels, using them as a synecdoche for the particularly American strain of Zionist Christianity notably prevalent in the Bush era, with its memes about support for the modern state of Israel being commanded by God, and the modern state of Israel being key to the fulfillment of various end-times prophecies relating to the second coming of Christ.
I might argue the prevalence of this memeplex in the present, but it has, regrettably, actually been a thing, and his description of it does not strike me as particularly uncharitable.
Thank you for the clarification.
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The Dispensationalist view that (1) the Apocalypse of John was a coded prophecy about events in the near future and (2) the advent of events therein can be hastened by facilitating the events that are described therein was mainstream in American Protestantism since the early days of the Cold War, significantly carried support for Israel (under the idea that the events of the prophecy are set off by the reascendancy of Israel in its original location, followed by two nations called "Gog and Magog" waging a war of annihilation against it) and in particular re-peaked under the Bush administration. During the latter, the Left Behind series of books, which combined this theology with du jour political concerns of the US Right like opposition to the UN/international governance and socialism, was immensely popular, and random samplings of online protestant commentary from the era made it clear that plot points from the book (in particular, the ascendancy of a Romanian UN One World Government leader who is actually the antichrist) significantly coloured how pedestrian believers imagined the biblical apocalypse would play out in practice.
Thank you for the clarification.
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Counterpoint to "It's okay to be white". The people objecting are correctly seeing that it isn't being posted as an innocent statement, it's effectively a gang sign marking turf, and these people understand those posting the sign to be in a hostile gang.
But the only reason that it can be posted not as an innocent statement but effectively as a gang sign is because the actual innocent statement is in direct conflict with the revealed beliefs of the people who object to this. The act of judging this statement as the sign of a hostile gang is, in itself, the act of rejecting that innocent statement.
You could say the exact same thing about "black lives matter". And then "all lives matter".
I don't think it fits in that case though. No one rejects the statement "Black Lives Matter" as "unacceptable" or "completely wrong". Sceptics agree (at the very least pretend to) with "black lives should matter", but not with the implication of "but in current society they specifically aren't treated as such", and therefore their opposition always routes around opposition to the surface level statement.
"All lives matter" is specifically an attempt to state disagreement with the implications and the "gang affiliation" while not disagreeing with the surface statement. The equivalent would be "it's okay to be any skin color" or "it's not just okay to be white, it's a privilege" which would paint over the gang sign just fine if you didn't actually disagree with the surface level statement, but is curiously nowhere to be heard.
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Indeed. One common hypothesis is that whoever came up with "It's OK to be white" was consciously trying to ape the exact tactic followed by whoever came up with the "Black Lives Matter" slogan (or whoever decided that that phrase ought to be coordinated around).
Ape...??
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Sure – but the same is true of Progress Pride flags, RESIST TRUMP posters or any other number of progressive adornments, and no police officer would take you seriously if you called them to complain about those being mounted in your neighbourhood or workspace.
Oh, for sure. There's definite asymmetry there.
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I think there's a missing possibility in your bullet-point categorization of what a floundering response to a gotcha question might signal: sheer ignorance, rather than cowardice, i.e. the respondent might simply have been parroting a slogan with no actual understanding of why it's held to be true by their ingroup. It's not that they don't believe in the slogan, necessarily, but they've simply memorized it as an article of faith without even stopping to ask why. "Trans women are women" is true because gender studies experts say so and they wouldn't say so without good reason; "the election was stolen" is true because Trump says so and he ought to know. Crucially, good arguments are assumed to exist, it's just that the respondent never bothered to learn them.
Of course, there's nothing necessarily wrong with this. Most people accept both scientific and moral truths ("nothing can travel faster than light", "rape is morally wrong") as claims from authority, without personally seeking to rederive the conclusions. But it's a bad look when a person in a position of authority is shown to have no actual idea what they're talking about. Mouthing along to the Nicene Creed is all that Christiniaty has ever asked of random laypeople, but being unable to articulate a biblical argument for the Trinity would not reflect well on the Pope.
I know what you're getting at, but I don't think it fits the specific example of Clayton. Ossoff didn't ask him his reasoning for why he believed that so-and-so won the 2020 election: he just asked him who he thought won the election.
It may well be the case that Swinson blindly believes in gender ideology, but neglected to take the time out of her busy schedule to memorise the current definition of "woman" set out in Judith Butler's latest missive or whatever. But I'd hazard a guess that her attempt to appease the gender ideologues was only a marriage of convenience.
Agreed, or for that matter a person who aspires to be in a position of authority.
I think Clayton and Swinson might have correctly anticipated that if they give the inflammatory, partisan answer, follow-up questions will be asked. The safest way to avoid backing yourself into a "What makes you so sure?"-shaped corner is to simply not answer the first time. Come to that, I think ignorance can also be in play even with insincere people. I don't know about Clayton in particular, but it's easy to imagine someone who, regardless of their own beliefs, would more confidently answer "Trump" if they've memorized a suitable Gish gallop of alleged voter-fraud evidence that they can rattle off upon request, than if the only answer they could give to "why do you believe that?" was just "because Trump told me to". Thus, the embarrassment can result from an awareness of one's personal inability to defend the claim, not necessarily self-consciousness about the innate ludicrousness of the claim.
(Also, re: the specific "woman" scenario, a crucial detail IMO is that the slogan everybody learned by heart was "trans women are women", not "the word woman means XYZ". "What does the word 'woman' mean in you head, anyway?" is itself the awkward follow-up question: "when you chant trans women are women, what do you mean by that word?".)
This is a very good point. Yet another interpretation of Swinson's response might be that she realised on the spot, not only that she didn't know what the trans-inclusive definition of "woman" was, but that there is no such definition which is coherent and non-circular.
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I’m genuinely not trying to be sarcastic when I say this doesn’t seem like something I have to imagine? The existence of hardline misanthropic sentiments in environmentalism and hardline race war in black advocacy have just been an understood part of the landscape for decades. Look at the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam!
I know that many environmentalists carry a misanthropic streak, but if Greenpeace actually published anti-natalist literature under its own banner, that's news to me. Likewise with the NAACP, who to my knowledge are still quite a respectable organisation with admirable message discipline.
Sierra Club used to be outright racist and anti-natalist, if I recall correctly. Can't let Africa have cheap energy, or there'll be a massive third world population boom!
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Oh, no, I think they have more message discipline because they are old movements with an org chart. But I think the factional dynamics behind the scenes are pretty similar.
That's fair.
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The reason what is a woman was so effective is that the activist approved definition raises its own questions in a way answering ‘trump’ to ‘who won the 2020 election’ doesn’t. That is what redefining known categories into metaphysical abstractions inherently does. The ‘who won the 2020 election’ question is an effective way to tie the opponent to Trump, but most of these people don’t need that- they tie themselves to Trump plenty on their own.
In addition to FtttG's reply, "Trump" as an answer to the election question does raise a lot of follow-up questions in its own way, e.g. "Does the respondent think that government actions enacted under Biden were invalid?". (The funniest is of course "then wouldn't Trump have been ineligible in the last election?").
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True, "what is a woman?" is much more of a metaphysical question. But what "who won the 2020 election?" has in common is that the person being asked is forced to choose between pandering to the lunatic fringes in their coalition at the cost of making themselves looking foolish to the mainstream, or vice versa – and, obviously, one of these choices also requires them to be dishonest.
In a US political context, 'widespread voter fraud favoring democrats which sometimes changes election outcomes' is not a lunatic fringe belief. It is the belief of normie republicans and everyone knows it, and it's not a deal breaker for swing voters(who often do believe in shady electoral chicanery on a limited basis, like in specific cities).
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More like "common sense" and "basic sanity" question. To dispute whether girls do have dicks is by several magnitudes further "out there" than to dispute official narrative of single historical event.
I suppose I should clarify. Gender ideologues treat it as a metaphysical question, but for gender-criticals like myself, it's anything but.
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