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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.
Well, it would help me to moderate if the meme wasn't so true.
You think it's true that there is a coordinated effort by millions of gay adults and teachers and community-leaders to manipulate children into acting trans and gay and then have sex with them? Obviously "the meme" could refer to a broad range of stuff - but I think that's the gist of it. That seems very outlandish to me. Do you have any evidence?
Certainly not. There's a coordinated effort by a very small number to do this. Think of them as the inner party.
There's an outer party - larger in number - who are happy to get positions of petty power where they push ideologically compliant stories and occasionally hide truthful information that might harm the party. Think: all the journalists/content moderators happy to hide what Kiwifarms/libsoftiktok/NY Post want to reveal, regardless of it's truth. As another example, consider the case of Loudon County covering up a rape because it was done by a transwoman, or the police covering up hundreds of rapes in the UK.
Most of these folks would certainly never rape children. But even if a few leftist drag queens do want to rape children, it's an isolated incident and it's best to cover it up to avoid getting conservatives elected.
And there's a much larger group of folks who believe whatever MSNBC and the NYT tells them, and also believe that if it isn't on MSNBC it didn't happen. These folks can be forgiven for not noticing the small correction the NYT made that Trump supporters never killed anyone on Jan 6, or the line casually buried in the 8'th paragraph that hate crimes the police solve in NYC almost never fit the stereotype of a right wing white guy. If it were important, it'd be on the front page, right?
This one isn't really a good example for the anti-trans side, is it?
The two students involved were fuck buddies and had met for liaisons several times in the school bathroom. At the time of the incident, they were meeting up, but the girl was intending to cut things off. This doesn't seem like the typical example people think of, when they think of the dangers of transwomen in women's bathrooms. Like, are women seriously scared that they'll arrange a meeting with a long-time, trans sexual partner in the bathroom, and that partner will react badly to them ending things and assault them in the bathroom? No, the fear is always that a stranger will assault them, and there's still very little evidence that this happens often enough to warrant the fear people have of it.
I thought there was also confusion as to whether the attacker was actually trans, or merely a GNC boy. Regardless of that, at the time didn't the school not have policies in place allowing trans students to use their preferred bathrooms? So, if lack of such policies is supposed to protect women, this case would tend to be a bad argument in favor of it.
Obviously, the school shouldn't have tried to cover the incident up. But that is sort of separate to whether it actually supports the anti-trans side.
Recall that I'm responding to this:
The point here is that the millions don't want to have sex with children but will participate in the cover up of child rapes anyway, at various levels.
At most thousands, probably less: people who actually want gay sex with trans children and will act on this.
Hundreds of thousands: Administrators/teachers/community-leaders/"journalists" who will cover up the rapes, or if they are publicized minimize them and make it socially and economically perilous to advocate for stopping them. These are the Loudon county school board folks who use violence against the father of a rape victim and directly cover things up. They are also the reddit/twitter mods who suppress the story, and the journalists who dowplay it when they grudgingly cover it.
Millions: regular folks who pay not very close attention to NYT/MSNBC and are happy to attribute politically inconvenient facts to Russian misinformation or whatever.
Perhaps Loudon county schools should have made that case instead of using violence (perpetrated by police) against the father of a crime victim.
I think the cover ups are a more general phenomenon. There's a reason why LGBT-friendly school districts and the Catholic church react in similar ways to a sex scandal - and a lot of it comes down to power and prestige, and the desire to maintain it. I agree this is a bad thing - all crimes should be aired and given sunlight, but there will always be incentives for institutions, especially highly respected ones in our society, to cover something up.
Our media environment is hardly ideal, but I do appreciate that thanks to tribalism, something like Fox News can occasionally report true negative things about one side of the political aisle. They did report on the story of Loudon, and I think that is a good thing, especially with the father being covered up and spoken over. The only issue is that because of that same tribalism, many people will never read a Fox News article about a bathroom scare and think about the implications of it, and those that do will come to entirely the wrong conclusions.
I agree. I in no way condone Loudon county schools for their actions. I wish they hadn't done the cover up, and I wish they had policies that would have prevented the boy from going on to assault a second victim.
I also don't think the story, as covered up, is actually a good match for the fears people have of transwomen in bathrooms. If people want to use the Loudon case to speak against censorship, then they go with my blessing. If they want to use it as a case for why tranwomen shouldn't use their preferred bathrooms, then it is a huge reach, in my opinion.
I do not disagree with this. Though I will suggest there is one big difference - the Catholic church hadn't developed the memeplex to get ordinary churchgoers to ignore it as "Protestant misinformation" or whatever. Unlike modern leftists, they were pretty horrified.
I used it as an example of how you can have a very small number of gay tranny pedos but a much larger number of people involved in the conspiracy to cover up their actions. I believe the old time feminists characterized this as "rape culture".
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And what about the second girl in a different school this gender-fluid kid assaulted? Were they fuck buddies too?
The amount of justification going on to protect the fuckwits on the school board is amazing. Victim-blaming the girl, blaming everyone except the activist group that exerted pressure on the school board to introduce such policies.
Hey, it was Trans Day of Remembrance recently when the list of "look at all the trans people who got murdered!" is regularly produced. By your logic, it was all their own fault for being murdered, yes? I mean, if a lot of them were sex workers or had fuck buddies, yeah? "Arranging meetings with long-term sexual partners" is their own fault!
Don't project opinions onto me. I already said that the school acted in an irresponsible way. I agree that schools with better policies would not have had a second or third victim after this.
I don't really blame the girl for what happened. Obviously, the moment she ended their relationship, the assailant should have accepted it with grace and left her alone. However, I also don't think it is advisable for teenage girls to have sex with guys in school bathrooms, and while "he might take it badly when you end things" isn't the first item on my list of reasons why, it could certainly serve as one pragmatic reason why.
Again, you assume too much of me. I don't victim blame, but I do accept pragmatically (not morally) that trans sex workers being at higher risk of being murdered is not the same thing as trans people in general being at higher risk of being murdered. I would prefer no one get murdered, period. But if people in risky professions get murdered, it is probably a sign that we should arrange society in such a way that either people don't feel compelled to go into those risky professions, or we limit the harm as far as possible of people entering those risky professions.
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Kids also aren't supposed to be fucking in the school bathroom in the first place. An example of a boy lying about being trans to gain sexual access to women-only areas is not exactly a glowing endorsement.
It has been a while since I've looked at the case in depth, but I don't believe that the boy was lying about anything of the sort, and certainly not just to get into the bathroom for consensual sexual encounters. He was just gender non-conforming and wearing a skirt. The skirt did not grant him access to the bathroom, since the school did not have policies allowing children to use their preferred toilet at the time. It was just two stupid kids engaging in risky behavior, until one of them took a rejection particularly badly.
I agree that ideally, schools should not be turning a blind eye to students having sex in the school bathroom, but I think this probably happens more often then most people expect, and in the vast majority it involves a boy and a girl with no pretense on either one's part of being GNC or trans. They're just blatantly breaking the rules.
This is... a little more complicated than it sounds at first glance: see the second half of this post
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