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Some what shocked there has not been a top level post about the Annunciation School Shooting yet given the obvious culture war angles and parallels to the Covenant School shooting of a few years back (religious school, trans shooter - though FtM vs MtF).
https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/annunciation-catholic-school-minneapolis-shooting-08-27-25
I had missed that the Covenant shooter was determined to have not acted out due to any real culture war stuff, but just due to your generic mass shooter mental illness + desire to be remembered cocktail.
I would guess that throwing in the Culture War angle makes it a lot more likely that the shooter's name and face get passed around, though in this case seems like he was just crazy more so than any particular niche of the political compass.
Presumably gun control will be in the news again a bit.
Going to keep my comments short since this is a well-trod culture war battlefield.
But its truly annoying to have to listen to the standard anti-gun positions trotted out once again without grappling with any of the other factors at play.
When only a couple months ago an attempted mass shooting at a church was stopped by at least TWO armed staff... and a guy with a truck.
Yes, it turns out that 'good guy with a gun' can be an effective counter to these threats.
So when the Dems once again trot out the gun control agenda I can only assume they're acting in bad faith because the only other explanation is having the memory of a goldfish.
Your example reminds me of this other example from a Church of Christ.
My Christian friends often wonder aloud with me what it'll take for us to again recognize an in-group cultural identity among ourselves (a conversation typically prompted by the construction of our brand new fuck-you enormously gargantuan Islamic cultural center), and my answer is always something that this is an example of: innocent Christians being persecuted.
And I wonder how many Christian children killed by trans gunmen will be enough. It's actually quite remarkable how much less sensitive than Jews Christians are to this kind of thing. Remember that Baptist hospital (now run by Episcopalians) that was bombed in the first few weeks of the war in Gaza? No?
Canada had an outbreak of church burnings over that Indian burials on schoolgrounds hoax, and not a word about it from any of my church staff. I'm not even sure if they were aware! NPR certainly kept quiet about it. Edit: NPR was not quiet about church burnings in 2006 and 2015, as long as you were a black church. I also briefly googled about the 2021 burnings and most forum discussion and coverage are contemporary, and they're taking the burial narrative at face value. Most sympathetic pieces are from very partisan sources.
Not closely related to what you just said, but it's something I think about more and more.
Are they really "Christian children" just because they're going to a christian school? I doubt many of them were given a choice in which school they were sent to.
It seems like the disproportionate number of shooters at these schools should also raise some questions. To me it seems obvious that subjecting kids to religious values is a bad idea.
Stop trolling.
Trolling? Are you implying that I don't sincerely believe this? I believe that raising kids under Christianity is harmful, just as raising them in radical Islam is harmful. In my liberal bubble this is not a controversial belief, at all.
As I understand it you are allowed to post this argument but you haven't put the requisite amount of effort into it.
That would be blatantly biased if true. People are allowed to post zero effort anti-trans posts where they assume consensus. I've never heard anyone here make an actual argument against transgenderism.
Yeah, you know what? You have a bit of a point there. I don't usually argue against transgenderism so much as point out that it's an utterly ridiculous premise that completely blows all common-sense fuses. How the hell would I even argue against it? "Men can be women" is so very obviously and blatantly and outright ridiculously false. And yes, I'm sure there are some verbal acrobatics and semantic games that perfectly reason why actually it can be, but that doesn't make the conclusions drawn from them any less false.
The fixed and unchangeable gender binary is, for all practical intents and purposes, a biological law of the universe. Attempts to dislodge it, or downgrade it to a social construct, or to artfully sidestep it while still trying to cherry-pick parts of it, may even sound sensible step-by-step, but when the end result is in denial of obvious reality it just collapses. Yes modernity is sick, humans suffer all kinds of ailments of the mind, and maybe you can get some of them to endure it better when you screw with their (quite possibly already screwed-up) hormones and they distract themselves with a funny new identity.
But it's not real. "Trans-Men" aren't men and "Trans-Women" aren't women. It's so extremely obviously not real. How could it? It's so very obviously a social contagion, a fashion, a delusion. Humans have always been men and women, and always will be, and whatver the hell is going on nowadays is very much smoke and mirrors, and not some true and honest third way hitherto hidden by malicious social convention.
It seems so brain-meltingly stupid. Quite on a level with flat-earthers, far beneath even creationists or anthoposophy or astrology, somewhere down there in the otherwise unplumbed depths of outrageous falsehood presented as soul-saving truth.
Or so it strongly seems to me. Obviously it does not do so to you. Obviously there are many people willing to modify and mutilate themselves for this belief, or at least to make themselves ridiculous for it. But also quite obviously, most if not all of them are mentally damaged, aligned with leftist-extremist politics, and otherwise not to be taken at their word. But obviously again, I would say that. "Obvious" does a lot of work here, and obviously "obvious" is not an arugment, no matter how obvious it may seemt o me.
Plese give me the actual argument for transgenderism. Or the strongest ones. I promise to try my damndest to take it seriously. Maybe you can wear me down over time. I might be wrong. I often am.
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I take personal exception to that, frankly.
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People do this all the time, I don't know why you would say this with a straight face. There are lots of arguments, like that the belief that someone can be a gender other than the one associated with their birth(if this formulation of gender as separate to physical sex is even reasonable) is entirely unfalsifiable even to the person supposedly experiencing it. If there isn't one single argument against "transgenderism" it's because there are something like at minimum two and probably more like a dozen different entirely incompatible ideas of what the transgender phenomenon is under the trench coat of the trans movement. Is being trans synonymous with experiencing gender dysphoria(a thing itself with myriad definitions) or is it a purely social, you're trans if you like to wear the opposite gender's traditional garb?
If I didn't know you had in fact participated in past debates on this site on this subject I might think you had just somehow managed to not stumble upon those threads but no, you have and are either experiencing extreme amnesia or are lying.
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Gender roles are important because society can do many bad things, but 'not work' isn't one of them. At a fundamental level people have to know their job in broader society and gender roles are a major part of figuring that out.
At the end of the day, a functioning society is based on the idea that 'sorry, you(personally) have a job to do. It doesn't really matter if you want to do it, that just makes you a bad person if you don't rather than making it not your job. Get it done. No, you don't have an unlimited say in the matter. Your sex, your age, your class- these all say what you're supposed to be doing. Much more of a say than you have. Keep the wheel of civilization turning even if it crushes you underneath it.' We should be very careful about allowing defections. People should conform to the wisdom of their elders because their own ideas are normally bad ones.
Trans undermines this whole memeplex by making gender roles a weird sex thing, not a fundamental attribute.
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