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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Are The Global Elites Coordinating to Push LGBT Acceptance And Gender Theory?

(1/2)

Last week @2rafa posted her comment about WEF conspiracy theories, concluding that the WEF is a mundane organization, pushing mostly boring neoliberal status quo stuff, to the extent they push anything at all. This post isn't necessarily a direct response to that thesis, but might be an interesting contrast to it.

I am a proud Deranged Conspiracy Theorist. It's a relatively new state of affairs for me, but some time ago I've tried the tinfoil hat on, and it seems to fit. This means when the WEF is in session, I browse their livestreams and videos, and if something catches my eye, I watch the whole thing. So when I saw the video titled Beyond the Rainbow: Advancing LGBTQI+ Rights, I knew I had to watch it.

It's a discussion panel featuring a diverse cast of LGBT (well, L and G as far as I can tell) speakers from around the world. We have

Ben Fajzullin, an Australian journalist currently working for the German Deutsche Welle

• Fahd Jamaleddine, a “global shaper” from Lebanon

Sarah Kate Ellis from GLAAD

Tirana Hassan from Human Rights Watch

Sharon Marcil from the Boston Consulting Group

This is in no particular order, to the extent there are themes in this discussion, they're rotated through the conversation, so going over it chronologically doesn't make a lot of sense.

The goal of the panel is to discuss success stories of the LGBT(QI+) community, and best practices on how to implement “this type of thinking”. They start off by bringing up how last year there were still 80 countries with sodomy laws on the books, and now we're down to 70. A reasonable point to start, if there's a steelman case for the global elites coordinating to push LGBT acceptance and gender theory, that would be it.

Would I have no objection if this was where the whole thing ended? I'm not sure, maybe @DaseIndustriesLtd made singletons sound too scary for me, maybe I watched too much Star Trek as a kid, and the idea of the Prime Directive ended up influencing me a bit too much, or maybe I just have an irrational fear of my elites betraying me for membership in a global club? Hard to say. During the Q&A someone in the audience brings up an example and example from the other side:

we can trace directly the sources the resourcing for homophobia in Ghana straight line to the U.S churches

I don't want to be Americanized by Evangelicals any more than I want to be Americanized by Progressives, so I find it just as wrong as Davos-aligned orgs going around the world and spreading their ideas. The only way I could hold my nose, and tolerate it, is if one side was clearly winning, and this was the only way of preserving some viewpoint diversity.

Either way, while the goal ending sodomy laws is something I agree with, Davos panels on how to accomplish that make me uncomfortable.

Singapore is one of the most recent examples that [has] decriminalized [being gay]. It's taking the legislation off the books but at the same time Singapore fortified the rules around same-sex marriage and so you know it's not always a win; and they did that because they were playing to the more conservative base which was agreeing to decriminalization.

This is still on the mundane side, because I also agree with gay marriage, but it raises red flags when you compare it to the western culture war. Many people already had their suspicions, but the pretty explicit “we'll get you next time” that the Singaporeans get to hear if they're paying attention, raises some interesting questions about the seamless transition from gay marriage to trans issues in the west, and about taking any future assurances about social reforms in good faith. Other then that, coming back to the point about singletons, even though I'm personally for gay marriage, different definitions of marriage are one of the central examples of what I think different cultures should be allowed to experiment with.

Later they make a point that this isn't something limited to the non-developed countries:

Marriage equality laws, all of these issues, are actually becoming signs of modernity. They are becoming signs of democracies and countries which respect rights for everyone, but we're seeing also that this has become a new battleground, and in particular this isn't something that happens in certain parts of the world and not others. Even in Europe we see Hungary and Poland who have really been using LGBT rights as a battleground, essentially to try and harness the support of the conservative elements of society, and the government using it to put themselves up as some sort of hero of protector of family values.

Originally they name drop Poland and Hungary, so it might sound like they are focusing on marriage laws, but “using LGBT rights as a battleground to try and harness the support of the conservative elements of society” is a fully generalized argument. Later on they describe the US in similar terms:

May I just say one thing on that, because that is a Battleground that we're facing in the United States right now. It's really tough, I'll be honest with you, they're putting it under parental rights. I'm a parent I'm married to a woman and I have two kids, so they're talking about some parental rights, and they're excluding us, and they're targeting us, and they're banning books at a rate that we've never seen before. They're conflating these conversations about bodily autonomy and trans youth, and it's a really tough moment right now in education in the United States. I'm absolutely sure it's being exported globally this kind of framework that they've come up with, that's been really effective over the past year. They're legislating against it as well.

This is Sarah Kate Ellis describing the state of the controversy in the US. Everything you've heard about trans women in sports, placement in prison based on self-ID, concerns about the standards for diagnosing dysphoria in kids, the reversibility of puberty blockers, and their side effects, minimal ages for surgeries, eunuch fetishists promoting their fetish via WPATH, schools hiding children transitioning from their parents, Drag Queen Story Hour, and putting Queer Theory in school material have been reduced to the above paragraph, and it's made clear these stances are being deliberately pushed back on.

Someone seeing the WEF as boring and benign should also meditate on how despite gathering people from all over the world, they somehow seem confident no one in the audience is going to give them any push-back. They're not worried an American might say “you've misrepresented everything that's been happening in our country”, let alone that someone from a more conservative part of the world might proudly assert their values.

And of course, the part where she says ***they*** are exporting their framework globally, as she's sitting at Davos, talking to an international audience of some of the most powerful people in the world, is just... *Chef's Kiss* (there will be more of those).

This is still on the mundane side, because I also agree with gay marriage, but it raises red flags when you compare it to the western culture war. Many people already had their suspicions, but the pretty explicit “we'll get you next time” that the Singaporeans get to hear if they're paying attention, raises some interesting questions about the seamless transition from gay marriage to trans issues in the west, and about taking any future assurances about social reforms in good faith. Other then that, coming back to the point about singletons, even though I'm personally for gay marriage, different definitions of marriage are one of the central examples of what I think different cultures should be allowed to experiment with.

I am confused by this paragraph. Is it surprising that people who think sodomy should be legal also think gay marriage should be legal? I'm not really seeing how there is an "explicit" "we'll get you next time" either. They're mentioning that they think its progress that Singapore has legalized sodomy but wished Singapore had gone farther and legalized gay marriage, or at least not added a constitutional amendment against it. Is it nefarious to express preferences about the laws and rules of other countries? On a panel dedicated to discussing exactly those kinds of rule and policy changes in other countries?

It's also not clear to me how Singapore was not "allowed to experiment with" laws against gay marriage or sodomy. As best I can tell there is no external actor coercing them to go one way or the other, it seems to me driven by changing sentiment within the country. Should countries be obliged to maintain laws they think are bad for the purpose of maintaining some kind of global viewpoint diversity? Is it wrong to try and convince countries to change their laws by reason and argument if not many countries have similar laws?

Perhaps the exercise where we pretend it's the opposite side doing it would be instructive. Imagine an Islamic council with exactly the same parameters but they're trying to, and succeeding in, pushing Sharia laws in all countries. In a talk about their efforts with 'sexual modesty' they talk about the success of a new law outlawing gay marriage but failure in getting the country to outlaw sodomy. You know because they say so that their ultimate goal is to have open stoning of gay men in every country in the world. They're using every method they have available to reach this aim, including back room deals against the general sentiment of the population. You're in a currently LGBT friendly country that just banned most pride marches for being obscene. As an LGBT person how concerned should you be? Is it a different level of concern than you'd have if this group didn't exist and you believe that the banning of pride marches was not predicated on actual anti-LGBT bigotry so much as general prudishness?

Edit: to explain a bit more why things like this kind of bother me despite supporting most LGBT initiatives(with some major reservations on the T). It takes local politics which should be ground up based on the national sense making and totally swamps that process. It makes the laws I am subject to less dependent on what I and my fellow countrymen see as best and more dependent on whether it's the LGBT group or Islamic group that happens to have more international influence. And I'm note confident at all that the ideas that are able to achieve this kind of international influence are selected particularly for correctness. A couple of historical flukes and the hypothetical Islamist order could literally be in the place of the WEF with the same influence. This seems to just be memetic colonialism.

As an LGBT person how concerned should you be?

Probably pretty concerned.

Is it a different level of concern than you'd have if this group didn't exist and you believe that the banning of pride marches was not predicated on actual anti-LGBT bigotry so much as general prudishness?

The groups existence would make me more concerned than if it didn't exist.

I would think the things the group is advocating for are bad and I would be concerned that society was moving in that direction but I would not want the state to punish people who had done nothing more than convince other people to agree with them.

ETA:

Strikethrough unconnected aside about state power.

Replying to your edit, if the external powers successfully convince the local political players to adopt their positions, how aren't subsequent developments of local policies determined by what your fellow countrymen see as best? It almost seems to me like there's some posited injunction against interfering in a communities moral development by adding arguments they may not have considered.

Replying to your edit, if the external powers successfully convince the local political players to adopt their positions, how aren't subsequent developments of local policies determined by what your fellow countrymen see as best? It almost seems to me like there's some posited injunction against interfering in a communities moral development by adding arguments they may not have considered.

I think that international elite organization are a bit like the proverbial AI in a box trying to get out and you're arguing that if the ai can convince me to let it out it must mean I want to let it out. The AI is going to be very convincing, supernaturally convincing beyond what any local community itself can possibly combat. But what it's optimizing for is not our well being but its own and we should be very skeptical about how those things align.

Even if that's true, how do you think current Saudis or whoever got their homophobic or otherwise fundamentalist views, by thinking about the issues really hard? However 'supernaturally convincing' Western efforts might be, they're certainly less so than simply inheriting an unquestioning acceptance of those views.

I think there is a large difference between learning by example and being actively subjected to propaganda. I don't think I implied local communities should just think really hard about issues/values. I think they should actively experiment and yes, look at what works elsewhere in as objective of a lens as possible. If these communities see western countries relaxing prohibition on gays and it seems like it is harmless and helps people, and I think this is a conclusion they will likely reach, they can choose to adopt those norms. But I don't like the evangelical model here, it doesn't optimize for global truth, it optimizes for repeating whichever pattern is favored by international elites, a tiny tiny subset of people which could just as easily be reprehensible as it could be admirable.