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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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You - and all other social conservatives - want to keep children away from sex education so they get pregnant young, maybe not consensually, and then deny them abortions to force them to have children.< / blockquote >

Obviously that's not true! At all! Some conservatives do dislike the current form of sex eduction, and some conservatives don't want minors to have abortions. A few even claim they don't want raped minors to have abortions. but they don't want ... all of that, above. Most of them would prefer the minor doesn't get pregnant young, in particular! You can do this for any controversial position. Democrats are RACIST and have JEWISH QUOTAS IN COLLEGES just like HITLER!

Similarly, trans activists would not say "i want to mutilate and sterilize children. and i'm jerking off as I type this. Hail Marx."

That is the terminal reality of living as trans. Being permanently medicalized, mutilated and sterilized

The point of charitability rules here is that people don't generally discuss 'children being sterilized and mutilated', or 'hitler jew segregation racism', in a particularly useful way. While I'd rather have a totally-freeze-peach style moderation where you can say whatever you want and get moderated if it's not useful, there's clearly a correlation between the two. What productive response do you expect your interlocutors to have to "you are literally mutilating children!" How does that work!

Ideally, the interlocutor would carefully investigate the meaning of that, referring to many irl examples, and figure out precisely what is happening to children, how it matters, how it relates to the traditional nature of sex and modernity or whatever. But, again, that doesn't usually happen when you call someone a "child mutilator".

The thing is, sometimes things as bad as "child mutilation" do happen. And trans may be even, in a broad sense, as bad as "child mutilation". So saying mean-sounding things can be useful, when they are happening. But saying 'child mutilation' doesn't help at all, it just says it's something bad ... happening ... to children. But the disagreement is if it's bad, if wearing girl underwear and getting euphoria <...>s are bad, if HRT and SRS are bad, etc. Both sides are aware that is happening to children. And it distracts from the fact that all of that is happening whether or not teachers push it, because people are coming across it on the internet and deciding to do it themselves. (even censoring the internet isn't a good option!)