This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Is there a youth backlash brewing against LGBT?
I came up out of the subway the other day, and nearly my entire field of view was filled by a massive glowing screen full of flapping pride flags, wall-to-wall and six feet tall. It was a project by some charity or other claiming that "hate crimes" (or victimization, or incidents, or whatever they measure) jump by 60% during pride month. I've been so burned out by the sight of that flag everywhere that the only reaction I can muster is "maybe stop being so obnoxious about it then?" From the POSIWID perspective, one could consider the purpose of pride month to be to spike hostility against LGBT people, so why do it?
A long tweet from sci-fi author Devon Eriksen claims that pride month is downstream of the "toaster fucker" problem, in reference to an ancient greentext. Condensed: the internet brings together people with bizarre niche interests (what he calls "toaster fuckers" — he claims it's meant to be a general term but he's clearly writing about the LGBT theater of the CW). A supportive online community stops these people from leaving the toaster in the kitchen and adjusting to the normal world around them, and instead these online groups metastasize, eventually spilling over into the wider world: intra-group status competitions start with "who can fuck the most toasters", lead to "'toaster-fucker pride' bumper stickers" and then "bragging about how they sneak into other people's kitchens and fuck their toasters, too" and "swapping tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking."
I think I agree with some of that description but not all of it, and may write it up in another thread if I get time, but it's not so important for this post. I need it as context for the bit that I think is more accurate: the normies getting fed up with all the toaster-fucking, the backlash, and the response (lightly edited to concatenate multiple small tweets, but no words changed):
I think this explains the split in normie opinion pretty well: red states have had more than enough and that's led into the various legal battles that Devon alludes to, school choice advocacy, campaigns to replace progressive school boards, etc. I don't think I've seen "beaten with fenceposts"-level backlash (I figure it would pop up here if it was an issue), but even the memory of such events in the semi-recent past could explain normie "I want to be a good person so I'll call myself an ally"-ism. Compare the number of "racist hate crime" hoaxes over the past few years, to the point where "the demand for racism exceeds its supply" has become a dark joke among cynical online commentators. I don't think I've seen LGBT activists fabricate incidents (certainly none as badly as Jussie Smollett did), but it seems useful for a group to have opposition to keep its supporters energized ("our work is not yet done!") and I could definitely see obnoxious pride month displays as accidentally serving this function.
Onto youth. A recent tweet by a newish Twitter account, America_2100, claims a drop in support for LGBT over the past few years (2022–2023: US-wide: -7 points; Republicans: -15 points, to a 10-year low of 41%; Democrats: -6 points; "young people": -8 points). In particular, they claim Gen Z's support for gay marriage dropped by 11 points between 2021 and 2023, which is double the time span of the other stats but could indicate an ongoing decline in support. Unfortunately the tweet doesn't source the surveys it refers to beyond saying that it came from PRRI and I don't have hard data beyond a couple of anecdotes. Lime, a scooter rental company, made a pride-flag crosswalk in Washington a 'walk-the-scooter' zone after several teenagers were arrested for leaving skid marks on it. I saw a recent comment on a gaming subreddit (sorry, I can't find it), in response to yet another pride-month-themed mod, saying something like "don't be discouraged! 50% upvotes for a pride mod is pretty good these days". But when I interact with university students, the discourse is still very pro-LGBT: they talking about being excited for pride events, etc.
So, questions for the floor:
The anti-racism movement started well before the gay rights movement, so by this reasoning we should be in the middle of a massive backlash among the youth against any sort of anti-racism movements. It's fair to say that we don't have that.
I think a big difference to keep in mind is that you can choose your own gender (according to the very in-group of gender minded folks) but you cannot choose your own race.
I think that part of the backlash - to whatever extent it exists - is that the the internal logic of lgbT activists is so flimsy and self-contradictory that people are essentially pointing out "none of the rules are real and I kind of feel like you're just in this to browbeat me into blind submission to .... whatever the hell you're on about"
Anti-racism at the very least does hold to obvious and immutable attributes as its fundamental categorical function. Is it a fair / reasonable distinction? That's for another debate.
This is not my parsing of the dogma the annoying transactivists are trying to push (unsuccessfully in the UK, even in left-wing circles, though by most of what I read on the internet they are succeeding in Blue America). If you take "gender identity" seriously then people don't get to choose their own gender identity - by the time you go through puberty your "gender identity" is an objective fact about you, and is fixed. The claim isn't "you can choose your own gender", it's "we should believe as a matter of course people who claim to have a gender that doesn't match their biological sex". Transactivists are comfortable with the idea that some people are trans (as a matter of objective fact about their "gender identity") and either don't know it yet or are lying about it due to closeting, and a few of them are even willing to admit that in principle a cis man could pretend to be a trans woman for nefarious purposes (Jonathan/Jessica Yaniv is widely suspected to be an example) - they just think that there are so few of them that letting them get away with it causes less harm than gatekeeping actual trans people.
You get to choose your own preferred pronoun. But transactivists who stop to think don't think agree that this isn't claiming a gender identity, it's just a pronoun. The easy case is that not everyone who is nonbinary uses they/them pronouns, and not everyone who uses they/them pronouns has the same non-binary gender identity. The harder case is that closet cases and trolls exist.
In this model, race, like gender identity, is an objective fact about people. The difference is that it is externally observable, so you don't need to trust people who claim to be black. Kicking Rachel Dolezal out of "Black" doesn't put the blackness of actual black-skinned black people into question in they way kicking Yaniv out of "Trans" or "Woman" puts the transwomanness of non-passing transwomen into question.
I agree "there is an objective fact about people that is completely unobservable externally and which ingroup never, ever lie about" is a silly thing to believe. But I think transactivists actually believe this - they don't believe that genders are clothes you can take on and put off. If you get an older transactivist drunk, they may even admit that they find tumblrgendered snowflakes annoying too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Black Trumpists/Republicans seem to skew younger but not enough resolution to say it's "the yutes" specifically.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link