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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   38364 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Liara Kaylee Tsai, a Trans Woman With “Incredibly Powerful Energy,” Found Dead in Minnesota.

First things first: this is an unspeakable tragedy, I feel terrible for this person's friends and family, and anyone cracking jokes about "their pronouns were was/were" is disgusting and should be ashamed of themselves.

This article is remarkably forthright, refusing even to lie by omission:

An autopsy determined that Tsai died from multiple sharp-force injuries, though it’s unclear when she died. Lewis, an acquaintance of Tsai’s who was visiting her from Boston, has been taken into custody in Olmstead County and charged with a felony count of interfering with a dead body and second degree murder, according to local outlet KTTC. Olmstead County Sheriff Kevin Torgerson told MPR that there was no indication that the killing was motivated by anti-trans bias, as Lewis is also trans.

I predict that this will go one of two ways:

  • It will immediately become widely known that Tsai was murdered by a fellow trans person, trans activists will figure it's not worth the trouble to use this to attempt to advance their agenda, and the story will vanish into the ether.
  • Other news outlets reporting on the case will be much less forthright than this one and darkly hint towards the murder being motivated by transphobia without explicitly saying so ("at a time when Republican administrations across the country are rolling out legislation designed to limit trans people's access to restrooms and lifesaving medical treatment, Tsai's death is a timely reminder of..."). There will be a steady stream of politicised candlelight vigils across the US. If you think trans activists wouldn't stoop so low as to use one trans person being murdered by another to promote a narrative of widespread transphobia - tell that to Brianna Ghey (and Matthew Shephard, by extension).

First things first: this is an unspeakable tragedy, I feel terrible for this person's friends and family, and anyone cracking jokes about "their pronouns were was/were" is disgusting and should be ashamed of themselves.

No, it's not an unspeakable tragedy. It's a murder. Gruesome surely, tragic for those close to her. But people have been making light of murder for, well, probably forever. Do kids still sing about Lizzie Borden giving her father 40 whacks? We did. If stabbings are unspeakable tragedies what do we make of Louis Armstrong doing Mack the Knife? Because that's an American songbook classic.

Making light of the macabre is a normal human response. It's not disgusting or evil. R/HermanCainAward? Good content. Was/were? That joke would honestly kill if it were told at a drag show. The gulag and the purges were unspeakable tragedies, yet the scene in Death of Stalin where periodic gunshots are heard in the NKVD hallway was hilarious.

A holocaust survivor dies of old age and goes to heaven. When he gets there he meets God and tells him a holocaust joke.

God says, “That’s not funny.”

And the man says, “I guess you had to be there. “

As for the PR possibilities of the murder, it'll probably just be sorted into a pile of "trans murders" and used in statistics. The reality based community will continue to note that trans women have a murder rate higher than natal women but well below that of the general male population; they will not succeed in persuading anyone.

R/HermanCainAward? Good content.

Revolting.

Was/were? That joke would honestly kill if it were told at a drag show.

A testament to how remedial drag humour is.

This is actually funny.

Really? For me this is indistinguishable from

Alice: Air travel is extremely safe.

Bob: Umm actually my second cousin's girlfriend's dad died in a plane crash fifty years ago so ur wrong lmao

The punch line here would be if Alice personally crashed her plane a few months after arguing with people about air safety on Twitter. Regardless of the statistical safety of air travel, that would be funny. I believe the term is ironic humor.

Not really relevant to the broader topic, but there's an incredibly on-point example of this: a reddit account (https://old.reddit.com/user/UR_WRONG_ABOUT_V22) whose sole purpose was correcting people who thought the V-22 Osprey was unsafe.

About 7 months ago, he died in a V-22 crash off the coast of Japan.

Wait, are you telling me he died and his account was taken over by his wife who is equally abrasive and obsessed with the honor of the V22?

My suspicions are aroused.

But what's the alternative? The guy whose entire thing is talking about how safe the V22 is faked his own death in a v22 crash to... undermine his own points?

I guess he could be trying to blunt the effect of the v22 crash by making it personal to the point that people can't bring it up, but... a single crash was going to destroy his argument so fully that he's committing to forever pretending to be his own wife (and having to repeatedly bring up the crash again and again in context) as a result of this? He can't just point out that "safe" is not "infinitely safe"?

The Internet's just weird.

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