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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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The Midnight Society

Sanderson: haha no no you got it all wrong

Sanderson: I don’t personally hate gay people

Sanderson: I simply support an institution that wants to kill them

Sanderson: I think they’re neat

Sanderson: if it were up to me, they wouldn’t be exterminated at all

Sanderson: but jeez, guys, who am I to tell the Mormon church it’s wrong?

Sanderson: I really don’t have any choice here other than to keep tithing them millions of dollars

Sanderson: my hands are tied

Orson Scott Card: oh yeah totally very relatable

Barker: haha that sucks, man

Sanderson: look, I know you all think I’m some sort of bogeyman for giving millions of dollars to a church that wants to kill queer people

It's pretty sad that wokes are just about the only people who take religious commitments on their face (though I'm not sure if LDS doctrine specifically can be interpreted as demanding to kill all gays and queers, over basic Christianity, so it seems that what earns Mormons extra ire is having a functional Church this late into the game). Of course online wokes do it in bad faith (pun not intended), knowing well they won't ever be touched and just holding theists to task for their professed beliefs. And they succeed in wringing out apologies and clear signs of internal conflict and guilty conscience. This doesn't satisfy them, but this gives the lie to the notion that any theist beliefs which are seriously, consequentially divergent from the mainstream morality can be sustained. As a contemporary Christian, you cannot be in the world but not of it: your peers will recognize your seriousness as edgelord behavior, your children (if you find a partner) will cringe and apologize for their backward parent, and your faith will be reduced to a notional identity marker in a generation.

What goes around comes around. When, as a minority, you cast off the protective membrane of contempt for infidels, they dissolve you. The Haredim will prosper – in their unashamedly bigoted communities, under the umbrella of people bound to them by ethnic obligation. The Amish will survive as well, conditional on their continued legal recognition in the US. Everyone else...

In 1930, before marrying Marietta, von Neumann was baptized into the Catholic Church.[69] Von Neumann's father, Max, had died in 1929. None of the family had converted to Christianity while Max was alive, but all did afterward.[70]

Sanderson: I simply support an institution that wants to kill them

That's the thing that annoys me the most. The trans activists who shout that their enemies want to literally kill them. That they're being genocided. Tha the Trans Day of Remembrance is some sort of Holocaust memorial. When the murder rate of trans people is about the same as that for women, and the murders are often of sex workers (a profession already risky even for cis people) or might have been for other reasons (e.g. drug deals gone wrong). When they are getting more and more protection, support, laws, even the damn flag being shoehorned into the Pride flag.

"No no no if you don't tell us we're fantastic and give out puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery on the bare word of anyone who walks in and goes 'I want that' then it's genocide, literally a genocide!"

The trick is that when pressed, they say they're talking about suicide rates, and thus making a veiled threat to kill themselves. As a reminder, this is archetypal abuser behavior.

If a depressed person said if you deny us medication or therapy then more depressed people will kill themselves, is this making a veiled threat or recognizing (what they see to be) factual truth?

If a depressed person said if you deny us medication or therapy then more depressed people will kill themselves, is this making a veiled threat or recognizing (what they see to be) factual truth?

Unironically, I think it's valid as their interpretation of factual truth if and only if they acknowledge that they're mentally ill. Because without that acknowledgment, then they maintain agency for their actions, and their decision to commit suicide is entirely on their own moral ledger. People who aren't mentally ill can get mad that other people are making them unhappy, but crossing the rhetorical line from unhappiness to suicide is just an abusive tactic in that context.

Does it change the argument if I ( a non depressed person) say that I think depressed people are more likely to kill themselves if denied treatment?

There definitely is some kind of line where threats of suicide can be used abusively I agree, but I think in most examples like this it is being used as a guilt trip which can be (but is not necessarily) abusive. I guilt my kids into doing stuff all the time, because it is one of the social tools at our disposal. When it crosses the line into abusive is hard to define I think.

Does it change the argument if I ( a non depressed person) say that I think depressed people are more likely to kill themselves if denied treatment?

Again... this is okay if and only if we agree that depressed people are mentally ill.

There definitely is some kind of line where threats of suicide can be used abusively I agree, but I think in most examples like this it is being used as a guilt trip which can be (but is not necessarily) abusive. I guilt my kids into doing stuff all the time

If you tell your kids that you'll kill yourself if they don't eat their vegetables or whatever, you'd be way over the line into abuse. If you observe to them dispassionately that you are statistically more likely to kill yourself if they don't eat their vegetables, you haven't salvaged the situation. It isn't the guilt trip that (necessarily) puts you over the line, it's threatening suicide.

If you tell your kids that you'll kill yourself if they don't eat their vegetables or whatever, you'd be way over the line into abuse. If you observe to them dispassionately that you are statistically more likely to kill yourself if they don't eat their vegetables, you haven't salvaged the situation. It isn't the guilt trip that (necessarily) puts you over the line, it's threatening suicide.

Right because eating vegetables and suicide are not linked (I assume!). But depression and suicide are. If I tell them "If you don't eat your vegetables I will be disappointed you have chosen not to eat healthily" I am guilting them with a reasonable outcome on my behalf. If they were doing something that actually would increase my risk of death, then it becomes once more reasonable. Don't pretend to throw your brother off the roof, you'll give me a heart attack perhaps?

A heart attack is involuntary. What makes it a threat is that you are going to act if they don't do as you demand. The fact you are pinning actions you are going to take to hurt yourself on them makes it more abusive.

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