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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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See, the thing I've been seeing about the blue checkmark is a lot of poorly-disguised sneering about "all it means is that the person's identity is verified (you clods who claim it's people with outsized influence being quoted as Gospel on progressive issues)".

That's all it is, and so it doesn't mean they get special treatment or quoted as authorities or anything. Just a means of verifying identity.

So that makes all the crying over "why should we have to pay for this?" sound hypocritical to me. Why do you want or need a blue checkmark? "So I know Professor Doctor Eat The Horse Paste is a trusted and reputable authority, instead of an unverified Doctor Professor Eat The Horse Paste!"

No, it's because you want to retweet and quote "ackshully The Science Says, you bigots, and here's a Real Scientist saying that there is no biological basis for sex".

If you want archaeologists and anthropologists to label skeletons as "who knows what this body was in life, they could have been a Brave and Stunning Valid Real Woman?", because forensic anthropology does not exist and there is no way to differentiate between a male or female skeleton so this six thousand year old set of dead bones could be trans you bigots, then you can damn well pay for the privilege of getting to finger-wag and lecture on social media as An Expert.

I get to shoot my mouth off on here for free, and nobody has to pay a straw's worth of attention to me. If you want to point to your blue check mark as "This is why you should take me seriously", then you can stump up for the licence to demand attention and credulity.

The problem here is that Twitter has rescinded the bluecheck as a form of punishment against users they disapprove of and seemingly denied it to many others for similar reasons.

I actually found the link interesting. Skeleton from the Corded Ware Bronze Age culture that was biologically male but buried in female tradition. (Head facing west, surrounded by jugs instead of weapons.)

They also point out rightly in the article that burial practices were incredibly strict and not something ancient cultures would change lightly. There are of course many other explanations and jumping to the idea that it’s trans for fame is a poor call, but it’s not the worst woke science I’ve seen by a long shot.

Yeah but question becomes exactly what the associated cultural rituals were.

It's one thing if the person opted into it of their own freewill/preference, but there's sufficient quasi-Eunuch 'trans' traditions that I wouldn't really consider to be anything like modern conceptions of free sexual identification

Couldn't it also have been a final "fuck you" to the buried person. Burry a man and political opponent as a woman to screw him in the afterlife.

I bet we could brainstorm a dozen possible alternative interpretations, and I'm not sure an insulting one is particularly likely ... but now you've got me picturing an updated version of one of those comedy articles where they make fun of archaeologists' interpretive skills by applying them to 20th century artifacts.

"By acknowledging that 'Bobby throws like a girl', these peers show sensitivity to Bobby's non-binary gender presentation. The sparse diary entries we have are enough to deduce that Bobby began receiving encouragement at an early stage of xir transition, because although xe still uses xir deadname, they encourage xim to answer to "Sissy", as well, a nickname traditionally given to a respected older sister."

Or the guy who ran from a fight.