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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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I think you're too stuck on whether this is technically a threat or not. the metaphor to interpersonal threats of self harm is just a metaphor. There are two components to the objection I think people are making here. One is that the ask on the trans camp isn't for us to give them some neutral treatment, it's to validate truth claims that many of us find would make liars of us. And the practice used to demand these truth claims be validated is not argument but claims of harm, and not even just harm but self inflicted harm which to many people is a completely different category of harm that you don't seem to ever acknowledge as different. When you combine these things together you create a dynamic where reality gets defined by whichever group is most willing to harm itself to get its way. This is a dynamic that many of us viscerally reject, we cannot operate society this way. So in the end we're not really willing to weigh the 'costs' here because the costs are effectively infinite or the entirety of society breaking down. It genuinely matters more what is true than whether people will harm themselves if faced with reality.

it's to validate truth claims that many of us find would make liars of us.

Which is I think definitely is a reasonable objection to be clear.

My view is one of a bureaucrat, at societal level decisions, for example people smoke themselves to death or drink themselves to death and you still need to try and stop it happening as a government even though they are in some views responsible for their own problems. While balancing peoples rights to eat and inhale things. If you peel off self inflicted harms, it includes everything from weight to speeding, but that doesn't stop us putting in speed bumps and mandating better calorie labelling on food.

So society already operates in order to try and reduce self-inflicted harms while not removing freedoms entirely.

I hit go too early and tried to edit in a bit more before but you beat me to it. I don't think these costs can be so rationally weighed.