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As many of you know, I am not a Rationalist. My skepticism of Rationalism emerges in a variety of ways, but none are more striking than the feeling of bizarre disconnect when observing the Rationalist tendency to focus on systems, on rules, on formal structures as though they were some durable expression of baseline reality, as though they were dispositive in and of themselves. "well, this is the rule, so this should be the outcome".
This being the Culture War thread, a lot of what we discuss here orbits around questions of Law, procedure, or organizational norms. The problem is that law is not dispositive. It is not the motive power driving our society, or even the steering wheel. In some cases it is the bumper sticker, and in others it is the exhaust. In most ways relevant to our discussions here, it simply does not matter, and if you cannot wrap your head around this, I contend that you fundamentally misunderstand the Culture War itself.
Today's example, via the National Review:
Sing it with me, all together now: The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. From the Blue perspective, legally redefining Red Tribe parenting as child abuse is certainly a pretty good way to hurt the outgroup, and options for retaliation are limited and costly. The algorithm is working! And for those who might have concerns, never fear: Guzman's got you covered.
...I'd love to blame Blue ideology for that last paragraph's worth of mealy-mouthed horseshit, but honestly, I think we all can recognize that Normies shall inevitably Norm. Still, not great. I didn't bother to hunt down her full statement; let's tell ourselves she actually laid out a thoughtful argument about how society requires compromises and hard choices, gestured at trans suicide rates and some impeccably replicated studies showing that confirmed gender identity leads to better outcomes, and then the mean ol' National Review edited all that out to make her sound like a [DATA EXPUNGED] ...less ...persuasive person. Maybe that's even true! Let's not check.
...It bears mentioning that those student walkouts were almost certainly partisan political actions organized by public employees. Red Tribe doesn't get to do student activism in public schools, and it certainly doesn't get to use schoolchildren as political props. This is in fact a perfect example of why the actions they're protesting are needed... but I digress.
This proposed law doesn't matter. It doesn't matter even a little bit, and not just because it hasn't passed yet. It's very clearly a violation of religious freedom so it should be flatly unconstitutional, but of course the Constitution doesn't matter either. None of the surrounding legal, procedural, or policy questions matter. None of it matters. Not even a little bit. These things aren't the engine. They aren't the steering wheel. They're the bumper stickers, and they're the exhaust. They are the effect, not the cause. If this law is struck down, another will replace it. If this law passes, the core issue will not be resolved. The Constitution should prevent this, but it won't, nor would amendments help.
The cause is the Tribes, Blue and Red, and their manifestly incompatible values. Blues/Reds do not Like Reds/Blues. Contrary to arguments presented here for years, we do not share values, moral intuitions, a workable understanding of The Good. The Culture War is not about mistakes, and people are not going to come to their senses any minute now and realize all this was just a whole heap of silly goosery. The Culture War is a conflict. We cannot all get along, because we have lost the fundamental capacity to agree on what "getting along" consists of. We can't agree on what constitutes murder, rape, child abuse, spousal abuse, what constitutes crime, what constitutes Justice. These are not the sort of disagreements a society can have, long term. Something has to give, and probably a lot of somethings.
Laws, norms, procedures, all of those are well downstream of Culture, of social reality. You need everyone more or less on the same page before you can even attempt law; trying to keep law together in the face of mutual values incoherence is... well, it's real stupid, and it's never going to work even a little bit. If you can't get people to agree on central definitions of murder and child abuse, how the Sweet Satan do you expect to run a justice system, a legal system, an election system, much less adjudicate free speech?
This law isn't being proposed because it solves a problem. It's being proposed because Blues hate Reds and want to harm them. That tribal hatred, by no means unique in its character and very much reciprocated by Reds, wants to Do Something About The Bad People. If we held the population constant and completely replaced our entire political system, someone very like this woman would be proposing some action roughly analogous to this law, because that is how tribal hatred works. The hatred itself is what matters; the specific grooves and canals it is channeled through, the details of procedure and custom, norms and institutional traditions, codified policies and so on are irrelevant. This concentrated, willfully malignant essence of humanity, cannot be constrained by ink on paper or dusty tradition. It finds a way. You are not going to prevent that by asking it politely to please not.
This event is not surprising, and as some of you are no doubt aware, none of what I've written above is even close to novel. I and others were predicting shit like this as far back as early 2016. If you couldn't, and especially if you are one of the OG Blues or Moderates who scoffed or harrumphed when we predicted it, well, is this sufficient to demonstrate the point?
A brief coda, if you'll allow me. A month or two back, we had an excellent thread about drag, kids, and the slur "groomer". A lot of the blues and moderates argued that "groomer" means someone actually trying to prep a kid for sex with themselves or a specific other person, and so applying it to teachers and other authority figures was an instance of The Worst Argument in The World, and so should be frowned on.
I disagree. "Groomer", as I understand it, is a person who's making a covert attempt to directly modify a kid's sexuality in unhealthy ways. I understand that many people here disagree with this definition, but there's something you should understand in turn: when people like me use the term "groomer", we are not saying "I really don't like this person." We're saying that we consider the people so labeled, the officials supporting them, and the section of the public providing their ideology to be a direct, serious and immediate threat to our children.
Perhaps you find that irrational, inexplicable. After all, they're not breaking the law, right?
This is the equivalent of wokes using “white supremacy” to include timeliness, dress codes and objectivity. Maybe you feel turnabout is fair play, but it’s dishonest and is a transparent attempt to leverage conditioned emotional reactions to a different, narrower concept against a newly broadened category
I also really doubt any supporters of this would say its purpose is to punish reds as opposed to “protect trans kids.” I think it’s fair to ask whether “protect trans kids” or “hurt red tribers” is a model more predictive of actual behavior, but you have to actually ask that, because this law is consistent with both so far as I can tell.
False equivalency. Wokes using "white supremacy" to include anything they don't like about Red Tribe values is qualitatively distinct from using "groomer" to include behaviors that are, in fact, preparing children to be exploited or abused, and then exploiting or abusing them.
Here's how: "white supremacy" is fundamentally the idea that white groups or individuals are inherently superior to (at least some) non-white groups. To call, say, expectations of timeliness "white supremacy" is gobbledygook. If the claim is that non-whites can't be timely, then that claim is itself an assertion of white supremacy. If the claim is that timeliness is a "white value" but not a superior value, and that non-whites can be timely but rewarding timeliness or punish tardiness unfairly discounts non-white values, then it is also a claim that not rewarding timeliness, or even rewarding tardiness, unfairly discounts white values. You can't reasonably hold that timeliness is "white supremacy" without holding inconsistent ideas. (This is a frequent pattern in identitarian thinking: it is very often just self-refuting nonsense.)
By contrast, "grooming" describes the act of preparing a child to be abused or exploited, and some common known approaches to grooming are: asking children explicit questions about their sex and sexuality, exposing children to sexually explicit materials, and encouraging children to keep secrets or distance themselves from their parents. These are all things that wokes have demonstrably advocated for, from arguing for the inclusion of sexually explicit material in children's libraries, to keeping secrets from parents, to refusing to return runaway children to their parents. You might ask whether it counts as "grooming" if Party A is doing the grooming but Party B does the abuse, and whether it's still grooming if Party B never shows up to accomplish the abuse. I myself am comfortable with the idea that abusers can and do sometimes employ accomplices as groomers, as well as with the idea that a groomer who fails to follow through on abuse is still a groomer. This is not self-refuting, and so cannot be aptly compared with treating timeliness or objectivity as white supremacy.
And yes--you could certainly argue that the real abuse was families all along! Many on the left do believe this, and it is a genuine values dispute. Even DeBoer doesn't actually come out and say "families are good, actually"--his position appears to be something like "stop saying they're bad so we can win, maybe then we can actually abolish the horrid institution." But when the wokes are out there actually engaged in textbook grooming behaviors and passing laws to enable those behaviors, it's hardly a "dishonest" or "transparent attempt to leverage conditioned emotional reactions." It's more like calling a spade a spade. As I said in the linked discussion last time--if tabooing "groomer" seemed likely to reduce cases of actual abuse, I'd be all for it. But in the current debate, it seems like the desire to taboo "groomer" is just deliberate obfuscation of a real and serious political problem.
I think it’s a pretty good equivalency.
Yes, spurious claims of white supremacy are a different animal than substantiated claims of grooming. The correct comparison is what happens when it isn’t obviously, or even debatably, child abuse, but the label is applied anyway. You are looking at a biased sample and assuming it’s representative.
Look at @Tanista’s response. Child transition is probably a bad idea and definitely a moral hazard. It is understandable to apply the “groomer” label for adults recommending it. How much of that should apply to adults who would criminalize gender treatments for minors or investigate parents for child abuse? That’s 26% and 17% of Democrats, respectively (source); I’d expect higher rates for more nuanced polls. Those are people who should not be labeled groomers even if they vote for...inclusion in sports, or discrimination protection.
Both debates are over category membership rather than category existence. There are flagrant abusers who obviously belong in the category, and there are normal people who get lumped in. The right would very much like to have a weapon remotely comparable to accusations of white supremacy. Trans activists—especially the vast majority who aren’t pedophiles—would quite prefer to avoid this.
Do you think Libs of TikTok really cares about her false positive rate? “Groomer” doesn’t need to be taboo; it needs to be selective.
In my opinion no human, no matter their genitals or gender identity, should on these grounds be excluded from the open/mens category.
But demanding womens category be opened up to biological men, while claimining it is "exclusionary" to refuse to do so, is like calling discrimation that a person whose age-sex is 25 years, but who claims their age-gender is 14 years, isn't allowed to compete in a U15 tournament.
Similarly, claiming it is discriminatory to reward athletes in the open men's tournament better than athletes in the restricted women's category is like calling it discrimination that a 14-year old doesn't get the same rewards for winning a U15 tournament that a 25-year old gets for winning the open.
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