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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37397 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Reuters:

Trump orders sweeping freeze for federal grants and loans

Trump order set to halt supply of HIV, malaria drugs to poor countries, sources say

Apparently based on this memo (pdf).

This seems very... crude. The question is if it's purposefully crude, if there's some structural reason it can't be better implemented, or if the person in charge is incompetent.

Also, impoundment? We'll see?

I can understand the logic of cutting off all funding first and then re-opening the spigot only to programs that reveal themselves as essential, so I will reserve judgement on this policy (if it even survives its first appearance in court) until we see how the second part is supposed to work. If it ends up taking long enough that most university and national lab research grinds to a halt and children in Africa start dying of AIDS because local workers are not allowed to hand over drugs that have been already been purchased and delivered, then I will consider it a grave blunder.

Are you counting malicious compliance in that assessment?

I mean, on other policies, we've already had pro DEI bureaucrats in the military claiming the executive order banning DEI prevents them from teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen. Pete Hegseth then told them to knock it off and keep teaching it. But it created another news cycle of "Oh my god, the Trump administration is trying to erase the Tuskegee Airmen from history!"

We saw it in Florida with the don't say gay bill, where a bunch of pro keeping pornography in schools teachers just got rid of all their books because "they were just so afraid of getting in trouble".

Arguably we've seen it repeatedly with pro-abortion doctors letting patients die, where the law clearly states that are allowed to treat them, because of abortion bans. Or maybe to be more charitable to the doctors, the patients make a lot of really dumb healthcare choices, and the press invents that story around it.

I've seen enough of it where I simply do not care. These people are going to throw temper tantrums, sociopathically let people come to harm despite the obvious reading of the order not requiring them to do, or even explicitly telling them not to, and they'll blame Trump. Every single day will be a new misleading headline characterizing every one of these bureaucratic tantrums as Trump's singular fault.

Honestly it's not all that different from when Biden pulled out of Afghanistan, and the generals did it in the shittiest most passive aggressive way possible to make him look like an idiot retard. Which... I mean we've since learned he may have been. Which I guess made the general's sabotage super effective. Supposedly that was the moment his popularity tanked and never recovered.

But that is these people's game. Malicious compliance, and crying to the media about unnecessary problems they created, which everyone spins to blame the executive who dared to give the bureaucrats a lawful order they didn't agree with. It's ok, you can tune them out. Or shoot them in the streets. I heard that's part of Project 2025.

But that is these people's game. Malicious compliance, and crying to the media about unnecessary problems they created, which everyone spins to blame the executive who dared to give the bureaucrats a lawful order they didn't agree with. It's ok, you can tune them out. Or shoot them in the streets. I heard that's part of Project 2025.

How are you sure this is malicious compliance, and not just a combination of chilling effects and most people not knowing the limits of new, unfamiliar laws?

For your teacher example, I could easily see a situation where they genuinely don't know whether books in their classroom library violate some part of the law (because, say, LGBT content wasn't among the things they screened for when buying the books in the first place), and thus found it easier to nuke the classroom library than it would be to comb through all of them and make sure they don't run afoul of the law.

And in the case of the doctors and anti-abortion laws, it really feels like you're doing the thing so many people do where they assume they live in the "most convenient world" for their worldview. Like, how convenient that anti-abortion laws would never lead to any negative outcomes ever, if not for malicious compliance on the part of doctors.

Just as police officers are not lawyers, and they deserve a little bit of charity when they misinterpret or misapply a law, doctors are not lawyers and it is not at all surprising to me that a new set of laws whose limits haven't fully been tested in the courts is leading them to fail to treat patients even when it might technically be permissible under the law. I suspect that once the dust is settled and doctors are less spooked by the threat of being charged under the new law, fewer women will die this way, but I don't think chalking it up to a "tantrum" is the most likely reading of the cases that have been making headlines.

they genuinely don't know whether books in their classroom library violate some part of the law (because, say, LGBT content wasn't among the things they screened for when buying the books in the first place)

They could have just kept the books from before 1990; that was safely before LGBTQ stuff started to get shoveled into everything.

They could have just kept the books from before 1990; that was safely before LGBTQ stuff started to get shoveled into everything.

You can't just go off of dates though. Lots of ancient Greek books are arguably suitable for children, but also contain LGBT content. Like, I could see a classroom having a copy of Plato's Symposium, which is super gay.

I mean, you could compromise by having the bowdlerized Victorian translations or something. But that doesn't help if you already have a modern translation.

But I remember reading A Rose for Emily in high school which is from 1930, and features a gay character (depicted as a bad or tragic thing though.) Even in eras where it isn't shoehorned in to everything, there will be a trickle of LGBT characters.

Even in eras where it isn't shoehorned in to everything, there will be a trickle of LGBT characters.

Yes, but the trick in the eras where they aren't shoehorned into everything is that they tend not to be introduced for homosupremacist reasons (much like how women are shoehorned into works in certain ways for gynosupremacist reasons).

It's not the homo- or gyno- that causes the problem, it's the -supremacy; and absent an inquisition Hays Code-style paragovernmental organization that "knows it when it sees it" there's no particularly logical way to go about erasing it.

Yes, but the trick in the eras where they aren't shoehorned into everything is that they tend not to be introduced for homosupremacist reasons (much like how women are shoehorned into works in certain ways for gynosupremacist reasons).

"Tend to" is doing a lot of work here. Plato's Symposium says that the ultimate love is the love between two men, and it includes the idea that the "offspring" of such heavenly love is art, statecraft and philosophical ideas.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘those who are pregnant in their bodies are more inclined towards women and are affected by love in this way, believing that they will secure immortality, fame and happiness for themselves for all time by begetting children. While as far as soul 209A is concerned,’ said she, ‘those who are pregnant in their souls, even more than in their bodies, conceive and bring forth what belongs to the soul. So, what belongs to the soul? Understanding and excellence in general are indeed begotten by all the poets and by any artificers who are regarded as creative. Yet the most extensive and most beautiful understanding, by far, is the setting in order of our cities and our households, and its name is sound-mindedness and justice.

What is more, when someone is pregnant with these in soul from a young age, 209B being divine, and reaching an age where he develops a desire to bring forth and beget, he then I presume, goes around searching for the beauty in which he may beget, for he will never beget in ugliness. Since the person is pregnant, he welcomes beautiful bodies rather than ugly ones, and should he also encounter a beautiful, noble and well-developed soul, he welcomes the twofold combination all the more. And towards this person he is immediately well-resourced with words about excellence, and what a good man 209C should be like, and how he should behave, and he sets about educating him.

For being in contact with the beautiful one, and consorting therewith, what was conceived in times past is brought forth and begotten when the beautiful one is present, and when he is absent but remembered. And he joins with that person in the shared nurture of what they have begotten, so that such people maintain a much greater communion with one another, and a more constant friendship than children would afford, since their communion involves children who are more beautiful and more immortal. And everyone would prefer to have such children as these rather than the human 209D kind and looking at Homer and Hesiod and the other good poets, they envy the offspring of themselves that these poets leave behind, which furnish the poets with immortal glory and fame, since that is what the offspring itself is like.

Or if you prefer,’ said she, ‘look at the sort of children Lycurgus left behind him in Sparta, saviours of Sparta and, in a sense, of Greece. Solon too is revered among yourselves as the begetter of your laws,[50] as are other men in many other places, 209E among Greeks and barbarians, for their display of so many noble deeds, and for begetting excellence of every kind. Many shrines have already been established for them because they had such children as these, but this has never yet happened because of human children.

(Paragraph breaks mine, mostly because this ended up being a big block of text.)

Homosupremacist thinking has a long history in Western culture.

You have to go a little bit earlier; "Heather Has Two Mommies" is the ur-example and is from 1989.

Or how about 1979, my last year in elementary school. If it was good enough for me, it's good enough for today's kids.

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