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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Haven't seen a thread yet on the gay bar shooting last weekend so I figured I would start it.

Sticking to facts in this post, opinion will go in reply.

  • The shooter killed 5 and injured 25

  • The shooter is a 22 year old, Anderson Lee Aldrich

  • The shooter previously was charged after he threatened his mother with homemade explosives and kidnapped her, but the charges were dropped

  • The shooter is the grandson of a prominent local Republican

  • The shooter was stopped by a drag queen combat veteran, who used his high heels to stomp him

Now for the opinion:

I believe that speech is powerful. Words are a means we use to convince other minds of beliefs about the world. Minds act upon those beliefs.

At present, there is a powerful right wing-meme that many people, some LGBT and some not, mostly democrats, are attempting to sexually confuse children for nefarious purposes. This is often described as "grooming" in order to equivocate with sexual abuse children.

Insofar as the reasonable man's reaction to a co-ordinated effort to sexually abuse children is not "I should vote about this and if I get outvoted, I should allow my children to be sexually abused", the actions of the shooter are completely predictable.

You should take care to think about the consequences of the speech you use. If someone were to be persuaded by your argument, what would that cause them to do?

You aren't reponsible for every nutcase or moron on your team. But you are responsible for the logical consequence of your ideas. I know of no society that believes they should be having free and open debates and votes about whether teachers should be permitted to sexually abuse children. If you really believe this, you should act the same as if they proposed legalizing Cannabalism. There is no debate with barbarians, only the sword.

The conflation of pedos and gays is deeply evil.

Its done primarily by pedos and gays and trans advocates themselves. It would be simple to tone back the gay pederasty and "hatching eggs" (and of course the pedos themselves have always tried, largely successfully) to incorporate themselves into the gay community. One of the sales pitches of gay marriage was this would normalize gays and create a schism between these communities, instead the opposite happened.

I can just as well say that the conflation of whites and racists is done primarily by whites, racists and white racists themselves. I suspect I would even find a few people here who would eagerly act as a case in point.

There is a massive gulf between the treatment of white supremacists by the white community and the treatment of pedos and pedas by the homosexual community. In the latter they are widely accepted and even celebrated (see, e.g. George Takei and Milo Yiabopolis descriptions of their first sexual acts).

There's definitely a discussion to be had about how the gay community seems to often accept things that we would not tolerate if they were homosexual, but it seems like the median gay wants no interaction with children(before puberty) in any way, whether sexual or not.

People do in fact conflate whites with racism because a prominent subset of whites openly and vociferously pushed racism for quite some time, and a smaller subset continue to do so to this day. If someone were to claim that white racism against blacks and other people of color was still an issue that needed to be addressed, would you disagree?

I can just as well say that the conflation of whites and racists is done primarily by whites, racists and white racists themselves.

That would be true, because the conflation is pushed primarily by self-hating white leftists. The self-hating racist is often the boldest of racists, because they feel that, as part of the target group, they have more authority to speak ill of the target and they feel the urge to do it in order to set themselves apart from the hated group.

Is it? To consider whites inherently racist codes more anti-racist to me. White anti-racist, but anti-racist nonetheless.

No, I mean in the sense of "those whites are acting racist and racists are acting in favor of whites, therefore conflating the labels" like the parent comment said about gay/trans people and pedos.

The accurate parallel would be if someone condemned "These Nazis marching in Skokie", and every Republican threw a fit about "this bigoted attack on all white people". At that point, it is more than fair to say "My dude, you are the one conflating Nazis and white people."