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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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I wrote last week about how my circle was reacting poorly to the Trump win, but also how their reaction wasn't as bad as 2016. My latest update is, it's still pretty bad, probably worse than it was last week, but still not quite as bad as 2016. But I'm starting to get that feeling again like I'm the crazy one, simply on the basis that everyone I know in meatspace seems to think a complete disaster has befallen us. Furthermore, I think I need to retract my previous statement that my exposure to this strong sentiment is because I went to a very leftist college. I'm now seeing a lot more of this from people who I know outside of that school.

I have a number of people posting multiple times per day about some kind of issue du jour, ranging from high school boys chanting the Nick Fuentes thing, to screeds about how people will (literally) die due to Trump being in charge, for whatever reasons. And I spent the weekend with family and friends who wouldn't stop talking about it, also. It was a lot of signaling and complaining and without any real acknowledgement that over half of the country voted for Trump, including huge gains in lots of minority groups, and that maybe that means something.

So far, from a personal standpoint, this is not off to a good start, and I worry this next four years will be as personally trying as the previous four, with regards to my ability to keep my cool and not feel like a crazy person when surrounded by those in my life and their insistent attitude about Trump. Personally this is starting to make me want future Democrat wins, but not because I believe in the Democrats. If the dems win, my life mostly stays the same. If the Republicans win, my life gets worse just because people around me can't deal with it. But I also can't bring myself to really take these people's fears seriously, since I do feel like this chicken little routine happens every time a Republican gets elected (from my limited experience), without the Republicans even doing anything that bad.

Are other people also seeing an escalating level of this sentiment? It seems maybe like the anti Trump machine had some rusty gears and a slow start, but it's starting to get going again.

I (as a very liberal person who detests Trump but sometimes also find the reaction to him unhelpfully hysterical, or at least unfocused in how it's hysterical) found this post from George Saunders to be quite helpful: https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/a-slightly-altered-course

Quote:

I am, above all else, an artist. As an artist, I am trying to be interested in what has just happened. I am trying to maintain two ideas at once: 1) Most people who voted for Trump are nice people. (I know this because many close friends and family members voted for him and, well, more than half of voters did), and 2) Our democracy really may be in peril. Trump has repeatedly said things to indicate this and people who worked closely with him the first time have said this.

So, what I’m trying to figure out is: how do the people who voted for Trump, some of whom I love, not see what I see in him? And, also, importantly: what am I not seeing, about the way the world looks to them? I'm not saying that the way they see it is right – I feel very strongly otherwise - but I am saying, or accepting that, yes, it really does look that way to them.

This mirrors my reactions to the election and in its curiosity seems more constructive than just hysteria posting. Would it help to share it with your circle??

No one cares about democracy.

When I am Weaker Thn You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles.

Except no one is actually the principled party. Democrats will shit all over democracy if democracy goes against their ends just as fast as Republicans except as Republicans make abundantly clear and get mocked for WE DON'T LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY!

That is cynicism gone too far. People care about living in a democracy because democracy appears to work better than the alternatives. I'd rather live in a democracy than a dictatorship whose policies match my beliefs, because in the latter case, if the government changes, I'll have no recourse. Do you think that is so unusual as a position?

You also have no recourse in a democracy -- if Trump does in fact enact Gay-O-Caust in the next four years, there won't be anything you personally can do about it. If this turns out to be a popular policy, there won't be anything anyone can do about it.

What do you mean? I can vote against him and campaign against him. Maybe I'll stand for office, I think my 'Stop the Gay-o-Caust' messaging would be quite popular. That is all the recourse I am entitled to.

For real? If a plurality of Americans vote for a guy who is literally putting gay people in camps and gassing them, you wouldn't think that you were entitled to any further recourse than at the ballot box?

Fascinating.

Legally, yeah.

So since you have approximately no recourse either way, wouldn't a dictatorship that matches your beliefs be better for you? (probably other people too -- you seem compassionate and normal enough)

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Interesting because most people in my filter bubble would take- well not the gay-o-caust, but maybe door to door gun confiscations or serious infringements on the 1a or something like that- to mean the constitution has lost the mandate of heaven(they wouldn’t use those words) and therefore it becomes legal to open fire on government officials acting under orders because there’s no social contract anymore.

Would they actually do it? I dunno. Probably most wouldn’t. But equally, if the government actually did enact robust hate speech laws or something, they wouldn’t inform on people who did.

You also have no recourse in a democracy

There's a huge difference between tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of an actual tyrant. For one thing, the tyranny of the majority requires the majority of people to actually want these things. For another thing, it's a lot easier to change public opinion than it is to change one person's mind.

There's also, you know, a large number of legal systems that do ostensibly prevent Trump from just killing everyone who is gay - if he gave that order on his first day of office, I think people would just laugh nervously. Conversely, when Hitler said it, the Germans built concentration camps.

Even if people are pro Gay-o-Caust, a lot of them are going to be less enthusiastic about "dismantle our entire system of legal protections and install a dictator."

But supposing that we do get to the point that all of that happens... then I'm not living in a democracy. The worst possible failure state of a democracy is simply that we vote to stop having one. Maybe it's not quite so formal, but realistically the Gay-o-Caust can't happen until we're already living in a dictatorship.

You are confusing 'liberalist state with robust rule of law' with 'democracy' -- the two are pretty orthogonal, although in practice they are often seen together these days due to accidents of history.

To some degree - but the ability to sway popular opinion and thus affect the outcome of a vote is pure Democracy.

Yes, and those options are equally available to good and bad people alike -- indeed I suspect that Bad People are usually a little better at them.

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Democrats will shit all over democracy if democracy goes against their ends just as fast as Republicans except as Republicans

Well, the Democrats have a far better recent track record than the Republicans when it comes to accepting election results.

  • -11

If your time horizon is 7 years or less, yes.

I don't think the response of the Democrats to 2016 is equivalent to the Republican one of 2020.

Yeah, me too. I'd much prefer it if the Democrats' response to 2016 was equal to that of Republicans' to 2020.

Me as well. One riot with one death, and on the rioting side. And then the winning side ultimately gets to govern without bureacratic hamstringing.

Compared to years of rhetoric and investigation into "Russian collusion" that turn out to have been sourced to a document paid for by the opponent's political campaign. And then a whole summer of riots all around the country with billions in property damage and many more than one death.

What @ArjinFerman and @NewCharlesInCharge said -- Trump whined a lot, but there were more riots from the Democrats AND they interfered with the Trump Administration.

There were prominent calls for faithless in 2016. And 66% of polled Democrats thought Russia changed votes in the 2016 election

Trump is an election denier. He's in good company with many Democrats.

Can you steelman the "democracy in peril" argument? As far as I can tell, it's really the core scissor statement of the mainstream-left-versus-alt-right divide in Western countries. People on the left side seem to hold it to be so self-evidently true that you cannot disagree with it in good faith, while it is in equal measures self-evidently false to the point that good-faith agreement is inconceivable to those on the right. I personally always have figured myself broadly closer to the left than the right (if perhaps coping that the race/gender collectivism social justice movement is a temporary aberration), but with one's position on this statement now being treated as a shahada by both sides I find myself driven into the arms of the right wing simply because the left-wing position strikes me as too insane to accept. Unless "democracy" really is code for "whatever my allies want", how can you justify iterated statements that amount to "giving the majority what it keeps voting for is a threat to our democracy"?

If anything, it seems to me that the opposite sounds plausible: democracy as I understand it is threatened by political insiders collectively pulling all stops to prevent giving the majority what it wants, even if this requires wrecking a considerable amount of systems and societal machinery as collateral damage. What is actually the notion of democracy that is imperiled by the right, rather than the left?

(To forestall a possible line of argument, I do find it plausible at this point that, say, the German AfD, if it got into power, would engage in some sketchy reprisals against left-wing institutions, such as pulling funding from nonprofits. Even if on its own this would be a concerning move, I find it hard to put causal blame on them for this, given that the other parties were openly saying since day one that they would sooner ban the AfD than let them get into a position where they could implement their voters' preferences. Something like pointing a gun at someone and then saying that you were right about them being violent all along when they try to wrestle it from you.)

I don't know if I can do justice to this request right now but I'll try briefly to at least copperman the 'democracy in peril' argument. I think we have plenty of evidence that Trump admires dictators and wants to become one and will work towards becoming one. Will he do this systematically and openly? Well no, both for characterological reasons and because it would be self-undermining for him to be seen to be doing this. But if opportunities to take more power come along or can be engineered he won't hesitate to seize them, and he is in a position where he is likely to get these opportunities, especially as he has built a following who trust him above anyone or any organisation. I find it likely that – in the event he's still alive and energetic – he'll be the real power behind the throne of the next Republican candidate to an extent we've never seen before (Putin/Medvedev style). Most of his voters will actively want this arrangement.

I don't really want to get into evidencing all of this – I would be supplying tonnes of quotes of his, that you're likely familiar with already and that Trump's admirers can just choose to say are meant non-literally. To people like me and I suspect George Saunders, Trump comes across as a creature who is transparently knowable. There is no mystery. You can follow his thought processes and drives exactly and see where they'll take him, and you can observe that he's not subject to political norms that do hold other politicians back. (Now it's very interesting that at least lots of his voters appear to either not mind this, or to see something else in him, and does this fact give me pause? Sometimes, but ultimately 99% of people I esteem and respect in the field of ideas/politics/philosophy oppose Trump so this makes it pretty easy for me to conclude that his supporters are the ones with faulty judgement.)

An additional dimension is that 'democracy is in peril' is not only about elections. It's also about the ability of ideas to face off against one another in a somewhat mutually comprehended arena. Trump and/or his followers endanger this because they have special abilities to believe in lies (and I do see this as a collective and advantageous 'ability' rather than simply a failing). Of course people in this forum just think Dems lie more cunningly, whereas Trump's birtherism or election-denying is to them more honest, because less legalistic and more bald-faced. So again, I am not going to try to provide evidence, but this is the gist of my case.

I think we have plenty of evidence that Trump admires dictators and wants to become one and will work towards becoming one.

So why didn't he become a dictator during the first four years he was president? I've never heard a good response to this one. He was already president for four years, and yet we still have democracy. He's a known quantity.

Now it's very interesting that at least lots of his voters appear to either not mind this, or to see something else in him, and does this fact give me pause? Sometimes, but ultimately 99% of people I esteem and respect in the field of ideas/politics/philosophy oppose Trump so this makes it pretty easy for me to conclude that his supporters are the ones with faulty judgement.

Consider the following: I am a Trump supporter. Based on the above, I presume that you would thereby see my judgement as faulty. But the feeling is not mutual. I don't see your judgement to oppose Trump as incorrect; I just think you're a different type of person than me and you have different values, so of course you would think differently. You see me as faulty, whereas I just see you as different; and difference is not in itself a bad thing. Does this fact give you any pause?

An additional dimension is that 'democracy is in peril' is not only about elections. It's also about the ability of ideas to face off against one another in a somewhat mutually comprehended arena.

I think the left has had a profoundly more deleterious effect on intellectual discourse over the past 10+ years than anything Trump has ever done.

Of course people in this forum just think Dems lie more cunningly

I don't think the left is bad because they lie. In fact I don't think of them as being particularly untruthful at all, not anymore than the right is anyway. If I had to enumerate all my complaints with them, "lying" would not make the list. Rather, I think they're bad first and foremost because they can't tolerate dissent.

So why didn't he become a dictator during the first four years he was president? I've never heard a good response to this one. He was already president for four years, and yet we still have democracy. He's a known quantity.

A couple of things to this:

(1) It's hard to become a dictator in the US, would be one huge reason. When people are worried he's going to 'become a dictator' there are a lot of steps that would need to happen, only some of which he has any control over. The right war, the right resistance, the right economic resentments etc. He's not likely to declare himself dictator against the popular will, it's far more likely he'd subvert normal democratic norms and processes by consent. (2) When people find Trump's dictator-forward attitudes alarming, it's not only because they think there is a practical danger of him subverting democracy. It's that it feels like an offence against the office, akin to having a new vicar appointed who is loudly atheist. (Which actually I would like, but you get the analogy.)

Based on the above, I presume that you would thereby see my judgement as faulty. But the feeling is not mutual. I don't see your judgement to oppose Trump as incorrect; I just think you're a different type of person than me and you have different values, so of course you would think differently. You see me as faulty, whereas I just see you as different; and difference is not in itself a bad thing. Does this fact give you any pause?

I mean, yeah, correct, this is one difference between right and left. A huge part of the pain of this election is (a) feeling a degree of judgement towards the electorate, but then also (b) feeling terrible about this because it seems to confirm the right's stereotypes of the left as being judgemental.

I think the right's self image of being very tolerant of different opinions is massively exaggerated though: there are tonnes of people on the right who absolutely revel in liberal tears and obviously loathe their political opponents. You say you just see me as different but in the end our ideas are probably incommensurate so if you are going to impose your beliefs on mine (as is the right of those who win elections), how do you feel okay about it if you don't think your ideas are superior but just different? Do you just see it as a valid exercise of your tastes?

The right war, the right resistance, the right economic resentments etc

The right pandemic that resulted in people's rights being infringed upon all across the world?
I think if Trump didn't use covid to significantly expand his personal powers, he's pretty harmless.

I don't see how covid presented much of an opportunity for Trump to cement his power. It was a hot potato he had to handle and made life more difficult for him.

Why not? It was an emergency that people were willing to give up their individual liberties for. It'd be easy for a dictator to pull a Palpatine and grant himself emergency powers to do all types of mischief.

It's hard to become a dictator in the US, would be one huge reason. When people are worried he's going to 'become a dictator' there are a lot of steps that would need to happen, only some of which he has any control over.

Sure. But it seems like this is just bolstering my case. Yes, it is hard to turn the US into a dictatorship. That's why he wasn't able to do it in his first four years. We can extrapolate that he probably won't do it in his second four years either.

I think the right's self image of being very tolerant of different opinions is massively exaggerated though

I don't disagree. Especially if we take a broad historical view. Going back not only through the religious right of the 80s and 90s, but going all the way back, through the centuries of western political thought; if we polled most people who could at all be classified as "rightist" throughout history, "tolerance of dissent" would probably not rank highly as a political virtue for most of them. And the right is no stranger to moral judgement and condemnation, certainly. I don't deny any of that.

Ultimately the only person I can speak for is myself. The views I have expressed here are not universal among "my side", although they are not wholly unique to me either.

The terms "left" and "right", although convenient, may not be the most accurate terms for our current political context. Perhaps "woke" and "anti-woke" might be better?

there are tonnes of people on the right who absolutely revel in liberal tears and obviously loathe their political opponents.

Oh sure. Some amount of animus towards your political opponents is natural and unavoidable. I get angry at people, I find myself wondering why they have to be such NPCs. But I think all of that is still importantly different from thinking that your opponents are evil. Evil is harder to come back from; there's less chance of redemption. It seems unclear how one could sincerely wish for there to be any space for "evil" to flourish in the world. If possible, I'd like for my opponents to have a space in the world where they can be happy and live their lives according to the principles they believe in. I just want them to do it away from me.

You say you just see me as different but in the end our ideas are probably incommensurate so if you are going to impose your beliefs on mine (as is the right of those who win elections), how do you feel okay about it if you don't think your ideas are superior but just different?

I don't think there's much that can be said in the abstract here without a concrete example to work through (what am I imposing on you, by what mechanism, etc).

So why didn't he become a dictator during the first four years he was president? I've never heard a good response to this one.

Because his plot to overturn the 2020 election failed? Since the DoJ slow-walked the investigations, he's had four years to consolidate power and will have another four years before another presidential election. I don't see why the Republicans (probably not Trump, given his age, but who knows?) wouldn't try again or why anyone would be sure they'd fail.

The DOJ did not slow-walk their investigation into 2020 voter fraud; Bill Barr actually moved sufficiently faster than normal that it was, at the time, reasonable to consider this evidence of political pressure campaigns on the DOJ which called their impartiality into question.

I still think that the circumstance the investigations appear to have found nothing is only strong evidence of the investigation not having been conducted properly - based on my understanding of US election and vote-counting procedures I would estimate the probability of there being no voter fraud in any national election at a single-digit percentage (3%, maybe, with the probability mass dominated by scenarios in which I systematically underestimate the checks and balances?). It's just that I would expect fraud to exist benefitting either side (P(fraud only for one party|fraud) is low), and don't have a strong prior as to which side benefits from it more in a given election. My expectation is that the "investigating bodies" know that any truthful answer takes the form "we found abundant evidence of fraud, but no evidence that the number of fraudulent votes each party got isn't basically roughly the same", but they do not believe that making this common knowledge is something that the American electoral system could survive.

Because his plot to overturn the 2020 election failed?

I feel like that just goes one level deeper (insert Inception fog horn here), because not everyone agrees that such a plot existed to begin with.

But if opportunities to take more power come along or can be engineered he won't hesitate to seize them

Is Covid not dispositive here?

I agree that Trump is uniquely brazen (because that is the only kind of opponent that is immune to the "every Republican candidate is a racist misogynist" gambit, at least at the moment) and uniquely dismissive of the rules of decorum (because they have been weaponised against him and his platform). He may be in the 80th percentile for narcissism among top politicians but there are certainly others who surpass him. Is he uniquely powerhungry? I do not actually think so. And if we are taking all of these flaws into account, we also have to look at others: he is rather lazy and disorganized and doesn't actually like governing. And his narcissism also means he has a lot of turnover and has trouble keeping competent people around him. That makes the Orange Reich rather less likely.

And then we are in the sad position that the question we face is "is Trump a threat to democracy?" but rather "of the available options, is Trump the greatest threat to democracy?". The latter question is much, much harder to decide, given the mask-slip Trump induced in his political enemies.

As I’ve said before- ‘mos maiorum oppugnatus est ait Sulla et veritatem Dixit.’

In other words, democracy really is crumbling, but the people screeching about it do not have clean hands. Trying to jail Trump on pissant charges with legal theories that haven’t been used before after what should have been counted as a hung jury is just transparently a political operation, the sort of thing we see in second world hybrid regimes. Etc, etc.

Trump’s not a saint either, but democrats have actually declared their intent to do the things which hybrid regimes do, just the same. I back the potential illiberal democracy which stands up for the interests of social conservatives(no, not socially conservative interests, the interests of social conservatives), and not the one which announces its intent to persecute us. C’est la vie.

In other words, democracy really is crumbling, but the people screeching about it do not have clean hands

Worse, they are the primary perpetrators.

Can you steelman the "democracy in peril" argument?

The argument is pretty straightforward: Any democratic system of government relies upon the ruling party being willing to cede power when it loses an election, otherwise the elections would be meaningless (lemma: if any power existed that could force the ruling party to cede power, that entity would be the de facto ruling party). Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Donald Trump did not conced the election until after his schemes to change state vote counts, appoint fraudulent electors, and pressure Mike Pence to not count the electoral votes failed. Donald Trump's schemes failed because his underlings in the government were not willing to go along with his plans. Given the level of influence that Donald Trump has over the Republican Party, in his second term, he could appoint only underlings who he is sure will go along with his schemes next time.

Hm. This line of argument does not seem persuasive to me because (1) I see the same "threat to democracy" rhetoric, at the same level of intensity, being levelled against candidates and parties running on an anti-establishment line in other countries (Germany, Italy), where there has so far been no indication of them refusing to acknowledge official election outcomes, and started in 2016, not 2020; (2) given that Trump did in fact cede power, I find discussion of counterfactuals to be unproductive since it's not like there is a trusted neutral party that can provide us with particularly likely ones; (3) between the "faithless elector appeals" in the US of 2016 and cases such as the recent elections in Georgia (the country) where the same suspects are actually backing an opposition's refusal to accept election results and currently trying to instigate a violent overthrow in the name of "democracy", the idea that "democracy" and not contesting election results is correlated seems ill-supported.

I do recognize, though, that if you do not accept context from other countries, an argument about Trump on this basis seems more compelling - I guess you would only have to accept that the 2016 rhetoric about him being a threat was properly prophetic, as opposed to self-inflictedly so in the "claim someone is violent to coordinate provoking them into proving you right" way.

But I also can't bring myself to really take these people's fears seriously, since I do feel like this chicken little routine happens every time a Republican gets elected (from my limited experience), without the Republicans even doing anything that bad.

Ask them what tangible thing they predict and what concrete plans they have to mitigate it. Worked wonders the last time around when the "Trump (2016) is going to put the gays in camps!" hysteria was all the rage. You can even feign ignorance if that's more up your alley.

These are the biggest things I've seen them be afraid about:

  1. women's reproductive health
  2. immigrants getting deported
  3. tariffs messing with the economy, and in some cases their actual jobs
  4. losing health insurance and getting stuck with large bills

women's reproductive health

I never understood what people think the mechanism is that connects the re-election of Trump with worse access to abortion than is present in the status quo. These are the only things I can think of:

  • Going after interstate abortion tourism (unlikely that the agencies play ball, but at least that's a realistic fear)
  • Preventing the SCOTUS from being flipped back which ices any plans to conjure a new legal theory of why there is a constitutional right to abortion, actually
  • In the same vein, installing pro-life judges further up the pipeline
  • A federal abortion ban (not going to happen)
  • Blocking efforts to introduce a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion (Dems had decades to try this, they didn't)

A federal abortion ban (not going to happen)

I agree this almost certainly won't happen now because the margins in the Senate and House probably don't allow for it, but in the world in which Republicans made a more convincing sweep of both chambers it wasn't off the table, surely. Certainly, had a ban reached Trump's desk I doubt he'd have had the guts to defy most of the Republican party by vetoing it.

It really depends on whether Trump or the rest of the GOP is more willing to call the other’s bluff.

When I put it that way, you already know the answer. I suspect Trump would sign a 15 week abortion ban(he opposes late term abortions), but the Republican Party doesn’t defy trump well at all.

To steelman:

  • There's a Biden-era regulation holding EMTALA to cover abortion in emergency room case involving life or health of the mother, and under the supremacy clause, override states that ban abortion under those circumstances. A Trump administration is extremely likely to reduce this in scope to life or serious physical harm of the mother, if not rescind it wholesale.
  • While surgical interventions are almost entirely regulated at the state level, drugs are near-completely dominated by federal law. The Biden-era FDA took an unusually expansive approach toward availability of prescription abortificants (and some contraceptives), allowing levels of telemedicine and other issuance that was previously not accepted. I don't think a Trump admin cares about OTC birth control pills, but I think it both at least attempts to claw back things like the reading that states may not ban a drug that the FDA has permitted or the guidance that refusing to fill a reproductive health prescription is a violation of civil rights law.
  • The Comstock Act is still technically on the books, and while I don't think expansive interpretations focused on speech are likely to be used (and extremely unlikely to survive court scrutiny if used), there are a pretty wide variety of unenforced bits that would be highly sympathetic to bring to bear, and would make a lot of stuff that's illegal-but-you-can-do-it-anyway into hope you like federal prison if you attract the eye of sauron stuff.
  • Medi* funding is an absolute clusterfuck: by law, it's not supposed to support it, excepting a few cases where the spending is instead mandatory, but cash is fungible and there's a lot of places that aren't exactly great about paperwork. That's historically been papered over (largely because then-unsettled Constitutional law was a third rail), but if the Trump DoJ drops the Haim indictment and starts aggressively auditing or courting whistleblowers, even short of actual enforcement it will likely reduce availability as hospitals check their six consistently.
  • Direct defunding of groups like Planned Parenthood isn't possible without a law (and shouldn't be even with one, except the protections of the writs of attainder clause are pretty lackluster), but something like the ACORN path is possible, and there's questions about the extent regulation could create rules that had the same effect without needing a law. Even if new orgs grow in response, they will be disrupted in the meantime.
  • There's a lot of politics that's about building terrain for latter politics. There's a paranoid conspiracy theory about Project 2025 wanting a registry of every woman's pregnancy, but the actual policy proposal is :

Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion

And this is something that's not that objectionable, but it's also extremely likely to have a number of very unpleasant numbers reported by a government agency.

Great steelman, thanks! I am updating towards some of the panic being less unfounded than I previously thought.

Most people don’t know Jack about constitutional law. Many of them thought Roe was the only thing keeping abortion legal and that it would automatically become illegal everywhere the second it was overturned. They probably think Trump can and will ban abortion with an executive order.

"Women's reproductive health" paired with "threat to our democracy" were the core planks of the Harris campaign and she lost on them because they didn't hold up to reality.

Anyone who ranks those two "issues" as their top two is not seriously engaged with reality. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that. They probably function well in a day-to-day sense (hygiene, going to work, performing chores etc.) but their comprehension of American Federal and Constitutional Law, geopolitical realities, cultural currents, and a theory-of-mind for about 70m other Americans is zero.

I see a lot of political campaigning - "messaging" - as starting with a true but boring premise and then stacking a lot of vibes on top of it. Harris' true messaging core was "I am not Trump." This is plainly and obviously correct. But "I'm not the other candidate" isn't actually a campaign strategy, so you have to build something more substantial on top of it - or do you?

The Harris campaign decided to layer vibes-on-vibes. Abortion is now a loser of a topic because American's are (1) Very self-contradictory on how they feel about it and (2) As exit polls showed, American's are able to separate candidate-from-issue in regards to abortion. Trump won Missouri, and Missouri based state abortion protections.

The "threat to our democracy" narrative is a different loser. For those on the fence, it comes across as histrionic, overwrought, and hyperbolic. You can play doom-edited videos of January 6th all you want but the fact of the matter is it's old hat. It also begs the question - if Trump is such a threat to democracy are you, Kamala Harris, advocating for vigilante justice should you lose? Will you actually organize an armed resistance of some sort. No no, of course not. Peaceful transition of power and all that. For your own supports, it creates a sense of mission where the stakes are too high. If I'm a Harris support (haha, it's fun to laugh) and I truly believe the "threat to democracy" line ... how can I even have a conversation with a Trump supporter or someone still deciding?

So, if these are loser issues, why make them platform planks? Because a lot of politics comes down to ingroup / outgroup and it's easy to default to ingroup sloganeering and vibes. Much like the Hillary campaign, 50% of the Harris defeat is on the fact that she ran a dogshit campaign and made the worst VP pick in history (Sarah Palin no longer GOAT'ed). I'm starting to see some stories that Shapiro said no to Harris and not the other way around ("We didn't break up, I dumped you!") but I consider this to be ex post facto spinning.

But then again, I'm probably wrong. Trump's across the board win - Electoral, Popular, house, senate - paired with 95% (approx) of American counties drifting right compared to 2020 really does mean this is a realignment.

It also begs the question - if Trump is such a threat to democracy are you, Kamala Harris, advocating for vigilante justice should you lose? Will you actually organize an armed resistance of some sort. No no, of course not. Peaceful transition of power and all that.

I'm not sure why this begs that question. Thinking that Trump is a threat to democracy as well as that responding to his victory via armed resistance would be an even bigger threat to democracy are both compatible positions to hold.

I mostly just brag about how much money my portfolio is making. Oh? You believed all those economist that said the economy would be devastated if Trump won? Again?!

I'm already up $100,000 on my fairly modest holdings, and it's been less than a week. At the rate we're going I might retire early in 4 years.

I'm KICKING myself that I didn't think to slide more money into $TSLA in the leadup to the election.

It was obvious that a Trump win would benefit Elon directly and bounce Tesla higher. It's up over 40% since the election.

I didn't even do anything different, because I'm not a reactionary investor. I just let everything I normally do ride. Granted, I have significant holdings of BTC, COIN and NVDA, and BTC and COIN seem to be directly benefiting from Trump optimism. But even my safer index funds and blue chip stocks have done fantastic this week.

I had money on Ted Cruz winning, and I otherwise decided to let things ride, which has paid off too thus far.

But I'm also selling off the last of my Crypto holdings for the time being because I STRONGLY suspect the current leap is overoptimistic, and it'll correct by or before January. For reference, I originally bought a (small) position in Bitcoin in 2014.

Ultimately yeah. I avoid reacting to any one event. But there are still times when I wish I had been bolder on certain moves.

It's hard to imagine an administration as hostile to Crypto as the Biden admin with Gary Gensler. Trump could follow through on zero of his promises, and shit canning Gary would still be an enormous boon for crypto.

It still suffers from the problem of not having much you can do with it aside store it for the long term.

And ultimately that's why I'm pulling out, I got other things I want to do with the money.

I thought the stock market would go down if Trump won, so I was holding my money to buy stock after the election. Now the market is at an all-time high, so I'd feel dumb to buy now. Serves me right for listening to the media, I guess.

My existing portfolio is doing great, though.

Instead of gloating and waging the culture war, please be better and have some empathy for those who have been facing mental health struggles with the outcome of an election that impacts the lives of millions of Americans, especially women and minorities.

For example, I’ve been in a real dark place since Wednesday.

The aftermath of the election exacerbated the situation I was already facing due to this market bull run since 2023, where my leveraged equity ETF allocation has grown far too quickly. My effective leverage ratio is far higher than I would like.

I’ve already exhausted my rebalancing options in tax-advantaged accounts. Selling to further rebalance in non-tax-advantaged accounts would result in substantial realized capital gains that would reduce my accumulated capital losses from 2022 and prior. My net worth to income ratio is such that I’d be unable to make a material dent in this with future income for at least several months. Why don’t I just make more money; am I stupid?

I’ve been buying short-term US treasury ETFs with newly earned income to try and reduce my leverage ratio (buying vanilla unleveraged equity ETFs reduces my leverage ratio too slowly). However, this feelsbadman: I’m earning the risk-free on the treasuries, while paying risk-free plus a presumed spread and a management fee on the leveraged ETFs (which tends to be hefty for leveraged ETFs).

How could Trump-voters do this to me?

You can even feign ignorance if that's more up your alley.

Who's this Donald Trump guy? Wasn't he on the Apprentice or something?

As much as I hate remakes in most cases, I keep imagining a modern take on Back to the Future featuring a Cybertruck and an oblique reference like this to the "Who is the president in 1985?" "Ronald Reagan." "Ronald Reagan? The actor?" gag.

a modern take on Back to the Future featuring a Cybertruck

"The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with a complete lack of style?"

I've often dreaded the inevitable Back to the Future remake/reboot that Hollywood will jump on once the stubborn owners of the franchise die off. I just wonder how they'll manage the whole central plot line involving near-incest and a boy punching out another boy in order to protect a girl and win her heart.

Marty McFly will have to be a woman, likely black and gay/bi. Martina's equivalent-age father from the 90s being sexually aggressive towards her just isn't going to be as funny as the actual male Marty getting sexually assaulted by his equivalent-age mother from the 50s. Changing it to her mother could work for laughs and for the spectacle, but then the central plot being around getting her lesbian/bi/bi-curious mother to pair up with her father would probably not be acceptable to Hollywood.

A civil war you say? In Spain?

I unironically think probably the best way to get people to drop the histrionics and making politics their primary identity is to just lead a happy life and flamboyantly feign ignorance of anything political. Oh, I didn't vote. Or, I voted Trump, because Biden banned abortion.

You can't reason people out of something they didn't reason themselves into.

You know, that actor who played the bad guy in Two Weeks Notice

I thought he was in "Home Alone 2"?

To be fair, I did a gentler version of this with my now-ex and she said he was going to repeal Roe and the ACA. I told her there was no way they'd get Roe past the supreme court, and, well, we had insurance through work so the ACA wouldn't hit us. She ended up being fairly accurate...

My in laws are out of their damned minds. I saw a support thread for the subreddit in the region I moved away from. There was a thread where ladies were trying to find places to get their tubes tied.

I moved to a much more culturally tolerable area almost 4 years ago now. It's improved my quality of life by magnitudes. I highly recommend it. The private school we send our daughter to still has a lot of far lefties, because private school. But most people we run into, or other parents we meet at the park, are very culturally aligned with us.

I don't know how to deprogram people who uncritically believe every Democrat hoax from the last 8 years. They're in too deep at this point. My FIL was compulsively going off about how all the corporatist and oligarchs won, totally ignorant to the fact that Harris was the big money candidate with the most corporations and oligarchs behind her.

My in laws are out of their damned minds. I saw a support thread for the subreddit in the region I moved away from. There was a thread where ladies were trying to find places to get their tubes tied.

There is this infamous evolutionary just-so story from the manosphere days of yore titled War Brides. It is almost a 100% conjecture and goes like this:

Women possessing a more pronounced empathic capacity undoubtedly served our species in nurturing young and understanding tribal social dynamics, however it was also a liability with regards to a hostile change in her environment. Stockholm Syndrome is far more pronounced in female captives (the story of Jaycee Duguard comes to mind), why should that be? Because women’s peripheral environment dictated the need to develop psychological mechanisms to help them survive. It was the women who could make that emotional disconnect when the circumstances necessitated it who survived and lived to breed when their tribe was decimated by a superior force. This is also known as the War Bride dynamic; women develop an empathy with their conquerors by necessity.

Preposterous, right? And yet I cannot prevent me from thinking about this whenever I read another hysterical article about female Western journalists trying to make the 4b movement (essentially a Lysistrata-style boycott on sex and child bearing) happen in the West. Add to that a couple of social media posts about "not even my very progressive husband getting any for a long time" and a haphazard conclusion presents itself:

In the face of defeat, which woman in her right mind would mate with a member of the losing tribe?

In the face of defeat, which woman in her right mind would mate with a member of the losing tribe?

Given that, which man in his right mind would remain a member of the losing tribe, if he had the option of converting? The bulk of the Afghan National Army could figure out the answer to that one, why not Western men?

If Trump keeps on winning so much that his fans become tired of winning AND if men living in larger cities can keep prestige employment while not swearing fealty to Woke Inc., it's reasonable to assume that we will see an even larger shift in the political realignment of men than the one we observe now.

if men living in larger cities can keep prestige employment while not swearing fealty to Woke Inc.

They can borrow a page from Islam, and engage in taqiyya.

taqiyya

You say that as if it isn't already widespread practice.

(lays finger alongside nose)

Thanks for the reminder to rewatch The Sting.

If Trump keeps on winning so much

What has Trump actually won, really? What makes people — on both sides — think he's going to be any more "in charge" of the executive branch than Biden currently is?

I don't think he has. He has the track record of an unusually ineffective administrator.

But this is about perception and status. It's about who won the popularity contest, not about who's in charge of the bureau of boringness.

From that NPR link on 4b:

It calls for the refusal of dating men (biyeonae), sexual relationships with men (bisekseu), heterosexual marriage (bihon) and childbirth (bichulsan).

Koreans didn't have a word for sex until the West brought them one?!

Don't know how it happened in Korea, but a lot European countries ended up borrowing it too. The native word for sex often feels (extremely) vulgar, and the non-vulgar alternatives are either vague euphemisms, clinical multi-word phrases or compound words in languages like German. "Sex" by comparison is pretty handy - short and neutral.

Also seems to be a thing in Japan, if some media is to be taken as representative.

Interestingly (to me) another euphemism for sex is etchi or エッチ which is itself the pronunciation of the letter H, which in turn is a representation of the romanization of the word 変態 (hentai or perversion).

The term's arduous journey softens the tone from the original hentai meaning--エッチ really just is a noun for sexual intercourse --but it's one of those weird words in Japanese.

There is a term 性行為 or sēkoi which means sex, but it's a clinical term (think "intercourse"). Sēi means sex or gender, koi means "deed" or "behavior."

I think it just doesn't sound right otherwise. To match with the other terms, they need something that is short and not ambiguous. The standard term for the act of sex (sexual relations) is three syllables. They could shorten it to two, but then it would just mean "relationship".

There are also taboos about talking about sex, where even the common euphemisms and clinical terms are not uttered much in public. I guess using the English loanword is the most socially acceptable way to specify "act of sex" in print.

Also radfems seem to get their craziest ideas from their academic connections to the anglosphere, so they use loanwords more than the general public.

There was a thread where ladies were trying to find places to get their tubes tied

Take that, conservatives?

I do not know why there’s a progressive idea that pro-life laws exist to boost the white fertility rate by controlling women(no reasonable person thinks that they do this- pro-life advocates are well aware of the color of the women getting abortions). But it seems like they literally actually believe this?

Of course being a sterile woman is not a good idea if the based patriarchy actually comes about.

I do not know why there’s a progressive idea that pro-life laws exist to boost the white fertility rate by controlling women(no reasonable person thinks that they do this- pro-life advocates are well aware of the color of the women getting abortions). But it seems like they literally actually believe this?

I think some of this is a failure of theory of mind. I mean, I've seen plenty of examples, across both political and cultural divides, of people going "those people can't possibly believe what they say is their reason for doing this thing, so I need to figure out what their actual reason is." Nobody could actually believe a fetus is a human life, so therefore the pro-lifers must have some other, real reason for wanting to ban abortion, therefore…

Or an exchange about Hispanic votes in the election, which went something like:

L: how could so many Latinx voters vote for someone who wants to deport them

R: You know Hispanic voters are citizens, right? And it's illegal immigrants the Republicans want to deport?

L: Everyone knows that when the Republicans talk about "illegals," they don't actually mean undocumented migrants, they mean Latinx.

R: Really?

L: Yeah, nobody actually cares about immigrants' legal status, so when Republicans use the term "illegal immigrant," it's just a racist dogwhistle.

Or the Native woman I stood in line behind at the welfare office about a decade ago and the half of her cellphone conversation I overheard, about her brother's legal trouble and about how, even if white people believe plenty of stuff, not even they could actually believe the theory upon which her brother was being charged, and that clearly they're just pretending so as to add further humiliation when locking up innocent Native men.

I mean, calling them Latinx also didn’t help the democrats. I’m really not surprised that someone who used that term unironically has no theory of mind of Hispanics(or anyone else- ‘we’re inventing a new and difficult to pronounce term for you because you might be transgender’ is, uh, not a way to appeal to blue collar people. And yes, that -nks sound is quite difficult for a native Spanish speaker to pronounce, just like those Russian and German consonant clusters are to Americans.)

The native woman also doesn’t shock me; people tend to take personal tragedies as so obviously unjust that they’re evidence of malice from whoever imposed them.

It’s the whole white nationalist plot to enslave women that seems strange to believe. I can get my head around a few people in ivory towers believing unevidenced things that can plausibly be connected to some real rhetoric(there are people who will cite demographic change as a reason to oppose immigration, and great replacement theory is really a thing that republicans believe). But white nationalists tend to be mostly aware that the women seeking abortions are fairly black- and everyone else is too. It just seems strange.

The native woman also doesn’t shock me; people tend to take personal tragedies as so obviously unjust that they’re evidence of malice from whoever imposed them.

In that example, the thing that was so stupid not even white people could believe it? Well, she said things like "they'd been kissing," "she went into his bedroom," and that "everyone knows what happens after that" and that no human being on Earth could possibly believe a woman gets to "back out" once she's gone that far with a man, so charging him with sexual assault is just the White Man dunking on another innocent Native with a patently bogus "crime."

and everyone else is too.

That doesn't actually fit my experience. The times I've talked IRL to left-wingers of my acquaintance, they've been rather ignorant of the racial breakdown of abortion in America, and rather surprised when I've introduced them to the stats.

that no human being on Earth could possibly believe a woman gets to "back out" once she's gone that far with a man,

Really not difficult to believe someone could think the current conception of consent is fantastical and ridiculous. I 100% believe that woman had the right to back out at the last minute, but that right was granted by man, not nature. Some primitives finding it shocking isn’t a surprise, especially when they’re closely related to the man in trouble for it.

That doesn't actually fit my experience. The times I've talked IRL to left-wingers of my acquaintance, they've been rather ignorant of the racial breakdown of abortion in America, and rather surprised when I've introduced them to the stats.

Hmm. You seem to know more progressives than I do, although it seems like common knowledge.

Nobody could actually believe a fetus is a human life, so therefore the pro-lifers must have some other, real reason for wanting to ban abortion, therefore…

I mean, we can observe pro-lifers and find that many of them seem to value "enforced monogamy" a lot, but "lives for the sake of lives" not so much, and infer their actual motivation for banning abortion from that.

Based on how pro-lifers talk, I can see clearly how pro-choicers believe the conservatives don't care about the babies, they just want them to "take responsibility" and "not have casual sex".

Sure, it's not just "lives for the sake of lives", the child's innocence of any wrongdoing also enters the picture. Responsibility and the wisdom of having casual sex is mostly orthogonal to this issue.

Yeah, the Republican women in my life are having the same sort of confused reaction, going “wait, they think that them choosing not to have unprotected sex is some kind of strike against the pro-life movement?”

But the framing is that the point behind pro-life advocacy is the goal of controlling and impregnating women. Fuentes and the teenage boys doing teenage boy things aren’t helping. But the fact that there’s a significant part of the population that’s going “wow, Fuentes is really showing us what the right is really like” instead of realizing he’s a shock jock provocateur who’s intentionally trying to troll indicates just how ingrained this interpretation is on the left.

The challenge with striking against the pro-life movement is it's unclear what exactly the pro-life movement wants. Do they want more children or fewer?

Ditto on the 'moved out of a blue bubble' to a mixed area. It's remarkable how much chiller and more functional everything seems to be. I was just at my kid's Veteran's day pageant. Never once in my older child's school career (in Oak Park, IL) did they ever do anything Veteran related I ever knew about.

Anyway...that's the way Amerca works best: conservatives and liberals in neighborly competition trying to make difficult things work. I couldn't see it from within the Blue Bubble of Chicago.

My personal social circle is unhappy and distressed and posting lots of doomer posts, but mostly sane. They think the world is going to suck with Trump in charge, but they aren't threatening to leave the country or start underground railroads or join the 4B movement.

Online, it's hard to tell to what degree all the cataclysmic tweets and videos from leftists melting down hysterically and screaming that we're going to enter an era of plantation slavery and the Handmaid's Tale are nutpicking (the reason LibsOfTikTok is so popular is that Millenials and Zoomers so freely provide so much content) and to what degree they reflect a genuine widespread sentiment.

Online, it's hard to tell to what degree all the cataclysmic tweets and videos from leftists melting down hysterically and screaming that we're going to enter an era of plantation slavery and the Handmaid's Tale are nutpicking (the reason LibsOfTikTok is so popular is that Millenials and Zoomers so freely provide so much content) and to what degree they reflect a genuine widespread sentiment.

I know that Tumblr is very far from a representative sample, but the histrionic posts coming across my dash thanks to the #politics tag have been plentiful enough to exceed mere "nutpicking."

Well, "very far from a representative sample" indeed. If there is anywhere that I would expect 90% of the posts to be hysterical meltdowns, it's Tumblr.

Incidentally I'm kind of amazed that the word 'hysterical' hasn't gotten y'alled yet.

I'm not sure what "y'alled" means. Is this a reference to some feminists saying it's a "gendered" insult?

I'm not sure what "y'alled" means.

It's a reference to such sentiments as "Instead of saying 'you guys', which is etc., try something like 'y'all!'" A typical example of a larger pattern.

"Instead of saying 'you guys', which is etc., try something like 'y'all!'"

Oy. I do that at work all the time. I'm actually afraid to say "you guys" anymore.

My Dad said y'all. My Grandpa said y'all. His father probably said y'all.

I hope one day you may be find the courage and fortitude to return to "you guys", but in the mean time I'm giving you your y'all pass. No longer should you feel like a y'all carpet bagger. Y'all away. Y'all freely. Y'all without any shame, consideration, or fear.

Progressives want to claim it for themselves. Edgelords want to re-re-code it into oblivion. They can come and take it.

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This change is really weird to me, as someone from the heart of “you guys” territory. I had a lot of progressive friends in school who always said “you guys.” They didn’t think of it, it was just what people said, not something anyone needed to police.

They also weren’t the wokest of the woke I knew, so maybe the others were into it.

But if we’re going to pick a gender-neutral plural you, I nominate “you’uns”.

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I'm pretty sure it's a reference to Reddit moderators locking a thread with a stock phrase like "y'all can't behave".

It's /r/drama slang. Reddit mods saying "ya'll can't behave" before locking a thread/banning users turned discussion being shutdown into "getting yall'ed".

Reddit mods locking threads and deleting posts of wrongthink because "y'all can't control yourselves".

TitaniumButterfly wonders why 'hysterical' is not being treated like 'retarded'.

Likewise to @Amadan, I don't concretely know what "y'alled" means, but I'm assuming that you mean to express surprise that it's still acceptable to say "hysterical" given its origin.

I'll say, you're not allowed to say "hysterical" in the circles I run in without getting at least a remark about how we shouldn't use gendered and/or historically sexist/misogynistic language.

The thing is, 'hysterical' first and foremost described a gendered pattern of behavior. It's called what it is because women are much more prone to it than men, and always have been. So its 'origin' isn't even the problem, I think. And I think it's funny that people (not necessarily you) would have become so blinded to the realities of psychological and behavioral differences between the sexes that they'd parse 'hysterical' as not having anything to do with women except incidentally in its origin.

I'm certainly aware of the word's origins and why feminists object to it.

Whether or not hysteria is something women are more naturally susceptible to, though, I have seen enough hysterical men not to consider it to be a female-specific thing.

Yes; men can also behave in feminine ways. This doesn't make those behaviors masculine.

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It's called what it is because women are much more prone to it than men, and always have been.

Citation? You're making a factual claim that it's significantly more common in one sex here, not about how masculine/feminine the behavior is

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/its-catching/201703/why-are-females-prone-to-mass-hysteria

But honestly I'm at a loss as to how anyone could be so, uh, sheltered from the realities of differences between men and women that they'd ask for a citation. It's like asking whether boys or girls are more likely to throw knives at stuff for fun, and then demanding a citation when someone gives the obvious answer. There's a screamingly-loud pattern here that I'd think one has to be either extremely autistic or intensively propagandized in order to miss.

You're making a factual claim that it's significantly more common in one sex here, not about how masculine/feminine the behavior is

What a baffling statement.

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I think there’s some subset of people who at least unconsciously want these bizarre nightmare 1984 and literally Hitler and handmaid fantasies to be real. I say that because most of the people doing this seem to have similar profiles: almost invariably white, upper middle class, professional, college educated, and highly likely to be female as well. Which if you’re keeping track, is the one demographic, that even if the absolute worst nightmare scenario happens is going to be affected the least. It just doesn’t make sense that the people worried about an illegals roundup are the richest, whitest, best educated people in the country and who live in a bright blue state to boot.

Further, the “resistance” thus far, is the opposite of serious. The protesters in Hong Kong were seriously trying to protest the Chinese government crackdown. They weren’t doing things to make themselves easily identifiable, they weren’t posting about it on social media, they weren’t making videos of themselves #protesting. They did things like wear masks, carry cash and leave phones at home so as not to be tracked. They did things like black bloc does. Our #resistance is doing things like shaving their heads and wearing cute little blue bracelets they bought for $25 on Etsy. These actions as well as the constant posts, videos, selfies, etc., are absolutely not the actions of a people actually afraid that the government is going to go after them. I say that because if you’re afraid of being singled out, you’re probably going to try to blend in, and while they might protest, they’re not going to do so in ways they know can identify them.

Especially, it's trans people, or people with lots of trans relatives/friends, who are severely decompensating online and losing contact with reality (i.e., acting as if Trump's first act upon being inaugurated will be to round up all trans people and herd them into the gas chambers).

Trans people I’d kinda get, there’s a plausible explanation n the fact that the far right wants to delay transition until adulthood, as well as remove trans people from opposite sex changing areas, restrooms and women’s sports. That’s at least a cause. The women crying in their cars are none of that. Even if abortion were illegal, most women making cry TikTok’s could afford to fly to Toronto to get an abortion as needed.

No, the far right wants to ban transgenderism in adults. Centrists want to go delay transition to adulthood and remove trannies from women’s sports.

wants to ban transgenderism in adults

Not just adults, kids too. I'd also like to ban cancer in adults, or treat transgenderism as we do cancer.

Um. I think I might be misunderstanding your last clause there.

We treat cancer by cutting the diseased organ out, or killing it with radiation/toxins. This certainly describes the gender-transition model of dealing with gender dysphoria (with their conception of the diseased organ being the unwanted reproductive organs), but you appear to hold the other conception of the diseased organ (i.e. the brain), which would seem to suggest lobotomies or neurotoxins.

As noted, this seems kind of absurd, so if I'm misconstruing something please tell me what it is. I'd prefer not to bark up the wrong tree and unnecessarily accuse anyone of moral turpitude.

I would think that applying the gender-transition model to cancer would be for cancer patients to identify as a Cancer-person and advocating for Cancer-person pride.

In my mind applying the cancer model to gender dysphoria would be targeted treatment to realign the misperception of their gender with their anatomy. Restoring their natural anatomy to health.

Well, okay then. Sorry for the confusion.

the far right wants to delay transition until adulthood

Isn't it ironic how Democrats are constantly singing the praises of the European (specifically Scandinavian) ways of doing things? But when progressive European countries across the board are hitting pause on youth gender transition, Democrats stick their fingers in the ear and say that only the far-right wants to do that?

Isn't it ironic how Democrats are constantly singing the praises of the European (specifically Scandinavian) ways of doing things?

In my experience, that's often because they don't actually know that much about Europe, they just have a vague impression of it being more "enlightened" and left-wing than us. I've actually had fun bursting their bubbles on occasion by introducing them to things like European abortion laws, or how many still have established churches (or only just separated their "national church" from the government in the past couple of decades), or corporate tax rates, or how their unions differ from ours, or any number of cases where Europe differs from their idealized picture.

(The fallback position as to Europe's superiority over America usually ends up being socialized medicine, and fewer cars and guns — and don't bring up San Marino or Switzerland.)

the fact that the far right wants to delay transition until adulthood

I don't think that's specific to the far right.

Does Trump even care about trans people as long as they (or more likely their allies) don't make a huge amount of noise?

No, but he depends on people who do and he’s smart enough to realize that.