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As I mentioned back in July, every month in our office canteen, a member of the HR team hangs up posters on the noticeboard of notable days or commemorations which fall within that calendar month. A lot of these are harmless days and observations that no one could take exception to (World Friendship Day, World Chocolate Day etc.), but a significant number this month were of a more... strident nature. In descending order from the top of the notice board:
Numbers 1, 2, 4 and 5 are unobjectionable (curious if I'll hear the "ugh, every day is International Men's Day!" joke two weeks from today). With regard to #3, my immediate thought was "for God's sake, how many days do you people need?" But my primary reaction was a feeling that 3, 5 and 6 are all in tension with one another, and that anyone who thinks about this for long enough would realise how unstable the coalition is.
More than anything I'm reminded of Scott's evergreen post "Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle":
Were I to argue that male rapists with intact penises don't belong in women's prisons, I'd doubtless be accused of bringing politics into the workplace, but observing Trans Awareness Week is just being a decent person. Were I to point out the shockingly brutal acts of violence against women Hamas committed on October 7th, I'd doubtless be accused of bringing politics into the workplace*; but announcing that you "stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people" is just being a decent person.
I don't know. I'm frustrated. I'd have no problem with a "don't talk about politics in work" rule, provided it was applied consistently.
*Even if I prefaced it by saying that Israel's response was disproportionate, and acknowledging that Israel has also committed crimes against humanity.
Maybe I am typical minding too much but I think if you tried describing these "tensions" to people who support both the things you identify as in tension they would come off as non-sequiturs.
My impression is that most of the people celebrating something like "International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People" likely believe there is an ethnic cleansing, if not genocide, going on in the West Bank and Gaza. Carried out by some combination of the Israeli government and private settlers. I would be surprised if their objections to this state of affairs evaporated on learning that Palestinians were anti-trans or misogynistic. The two things do not seem connected to each other. I don't think people's objection to Israel's treatment of Palestinians is premised on those Palestinians having progressive politics, though I am open to being wrong about this.
When people are thinking of something like "Transgender Awareness Week" they are thinking about struggles trans people have accessing healthcare. Or discrimination they might face in employment in housing. Similarly when people are thinking of "International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women" they are probably thinking of the elimination of, like, intimate partner violence. Assault by strangers. "Male rapists claiming to be trans to access women in prison" are just not salient to either groups conception of what the events are about.
Why? Tens of thousands of people have been crowing for weeks that Charlie Kirk deserved to be murdered because of his "transphobic rhetoric" and/or his opposition to abortion. It's probably a safe bet that Kirk was less misogynistic and anti-LGBT than the modal Palestinian.
I don't think they are. I think they're primarily thinking about the main culture war flashpoints, almost all of which involve male people in women's spaces.
I agree that they aren't salient. My argument is that they should be. My argument is that it's incoherent to claim to oppose violence against women and yet support policies that put women at greater risk of physical harm for the benefit of men.
First, I think that you are exaggerating what the response was to Kirk's death amongst normies (I agree that there were terminally online people who actively celebrated it, but I am talking about "irl" woke people)
The leftists at my workplace (the kind of place where "Trump is [generally] bad" is just in the groundwater) were very unsympathetic to Kirk. But none of them actually celebrated his death, they (quietly) discussed how he was a bad person, and that he had sort of brought it upon himself (I'm given to understand this is because he was pro-guns) To cherrypick the very worst things said (I'm paraphrasing):
But everyone to my recollection affirmed that it is bad that a human being died. And this general direction of discussion was lightly shut down by another progressive.
But Charlie Kirk was an individual, who personally held the "misogynistic" and anti-LGBT beliefs of a "modal Charlie Kirk" - not all Palestinians share the sentiments (or crimes) of the mode. I'm not saying group punishment is axiomatically immoral, but it is clearly a gray area because it involves punishing innocents. I think it is much more straightforward morally to support punishing a bad person for personally doing a bad thing (I'm not saying Kirk / Muslims do a "bad thing" by holding these views, just addressing this particular line of inference you drew)
But the above is my own disagreement to your logic. If we are looking at the world through a progressive lens:
The bathroom stuff is only one of the flashpoints. Respecting pronouns, concerns about the growing anti-trans (or "transphobic", if we are pathologising it) sentiment, access to hormones, trans children, trans men, non-binary individuals - these are all pretty clearly "flashpoints", and none involve males in female spaces.
As I suspect you are aware, progressives assign a different meaning to the word "woman" and "man" than you do. It is a reference to one's gender identity, and can be unrelated to their chromosomes, sex organs, appearance, etc (i.e. "transgender")
None of these policies benefit men - they benefit (trans) women (at the expense of cis women) One can argue that this is a bad definition, but it is the definition used by progressives - it is what they mean when they say "man" and "woman". So there is absolutely nothing "incoherent" about being feminist and pro trans rights.
Also, on top of that, it's not even incoherent to oppose violence against AFABs and support trans rights. It is possible to have multiple moral goals, for those goals to come into conflict, and to have to choose one over the other:
None of my colleagues strike me as terminally online, and yet the day after his death I heard several of them listing off his "problematic" opinions about abortion and gun control, the clear implication being that he got what was coming to him.
I don't really understand the distinction between celebrating someone's death and saying that their death was "truly poetic".
Soft bigotry of low expectations strikes again.
How did Charlie Kirk cause harm to the LGBT community? Meanwhile, how many LGBT Palestinians have been executed (judicially or otherwise) because of their sexuality or gender identity?
Agreed on trans children. Several of the examples you listed (such as "non-binary people") do involve males in women's spaces. Others don't really strike me as "flashpoints" in the same way: for entirely understandable reasons, female people wanting to enter men's spaces doesn't inspire half as much ire as the converse. The main reason for this is that it doesn't really happen: trans men and non-binary female inmates are hardly clamouring to be housed in the male estate.
You're correct. I just wish that progressive people would acknowledge that conflicts and trade-offs between terminal goals like this exist, instead of loudly insisting that they don't and that anyone who claims they do is a crypto-conservative. That's what I meant when I said that "trans awareness" and "opposition to violence against women (or AFABs, if you must)" are "in tension": some of their goals sought by TRAs and by people who want to minimise violence against female people really are mutually exclusive, and this should be acknowledged and discussed openly instead of ignored.
As I conceded to @gattsuru, I was being unreasonably skeptical to your claims. I now believe that progressives (even in the UK) care more about the whole Kirk thing than I had thought.
Still, and maybe this is just nitpicking, I think there is a difference between thinking he was a bad person (who the world is better off without) and celebrating his death. In your own account, you say they call him out for his right-wing positions, but these "impliciations" are dicier and usually requires some level of psychologisation of your interlocutor.
I'm not trying to be willfully obtuse here - obviously what your coworkers are doing is exactly what someone who does support assassination of the outgroup would do. But it's also reasonable that they think he was a bad person, who didn't deserve to die, but still a bad person, and it's unfair for [insert members of progressive coalition] to let down on the criticism, lest the ideas he advanced be given undue legitimacy (an example of the kind of stance I am referring to)
Firstly it was said by a Russian person, so the language was a bit awkward. Maybe I misread their tone, but it sounded more like: "Due to pro-gun influencers like him, there have been so many pointless deaths, and now, ironically, he himself died as a result of what he preached (killed by a hateful right winger) It's all just so sad, why are humans like this?"
Thinking more on it, this is kind of a gray area. If we are being maximally charitable, progressives are just misinformed about what happened (given that the motive was "Kirk spread too much hate" and the shooter had a trans girlfriend, this was actually a left wing act of violence), and you could come to this conclusion by just consuming selected media outlets. But at what point does it just become willful ignorance? A meta-level "hack" where by maintaining ignorance, you can be allowed to support a violent act by your "side" but also not have to openly support violence against the outgroup.
Also the person who said it was a woman (in the normal sense of the word: an AFAB, uterus-haver, etc), so I'm more inclined to believe she wasn't celebrating death.
Well, the facts on the ground are that we should have low expectations from these kinds of people on a group-level. If even the maximally charitable "they are exactly like everyone else, it's just that everyone else treats them badly because [reasons]" counts as "bigotry", then I don't think it's possible to not be a bigot.
Broadly speaking, he was a popular political influencer who pubicly and proudly took an anti-LGBT stance. This helps shift public opinion to be more anti-LGBT. And this leads to things that make life materially worse for LGBT people (the general public is less accepting of them, anti-LGBT legislation is passed, pro-LGBT legislation isn't passed, etc)
Unlike a progressive, I concede this is a fully general argument that also means, e.g. Obama caused harm to White people. But I claim this argument is valid (and in particular, is valid in the Kirk x LGBT case)
The LGBT people harmed by the Palestinians are all in Palestine. It is pretty reasonable that LGBT (and their allies) in the West would focus on people who cause harm to Western LGBT people (even if said harm is a lot less than the harm caused by Palestinians in Palestine)
I echo @PutAHelmetOn. I assume that the smarter progressives (college professors, politicians, etc) are aware of these tensions in their own mind and internally make these tradeoffs. But they also know that, on an open political stage, it is unwise to admit these facts, because it gives legitimacy to people who actually just reject gender ideology wholesale.
But I agree it's an unecessary evil that normies who lack any influence choose to do this too. It would be nice if it were more normalised to "cordon off" these sorts of private interpersonal interactions, and just allow people to sort out the truth amongst themselves instead of having to speak "tactically" all the time.
One thing that helps you tell the difference between A and B here is that if the criticisms in B are made in bad faith, it's a lot more likely that someone really means A. And a lot of the B's here seem to be made in astonishingly bad faith.
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You are a bad person and the world would be better off if you were shot.
When you read that statement, does it feel like a calm acknowledgement of detached utilitarian calculus?
Or does it feel like a threat?
When I first read it (before I processed you were posing it as a hypothetical) it felt like a threat.
In this specific hypothetical, I personally (where to draw the line is a gray area) think the statement does count as a threat. "You are a bad person and the world would be better off from your absence" would be okay, but explicitly talking about killing, and a specific mode of execution on top of that, seems to cross the line into "directly inciting violence"
But in general, feeling viscerally attacked shouldn't be sufficient to make something a "threat". Often, harsh criticism can make a target feel threatened or even unsafe, since it indirectly encourages violence against the focus of the criticism (if X is bad, maybe we ought to do something about X?)
I don't think that statement counts as a threat, even meant seriously, in a legally actionable sort of way. I do think it colors in the difference between "thinking ill of someone" and "celebrating a death". And I think when you're at the point of quibbling over how much approval of the assassination of a debate bro counts as "celebrating" then it is past time for you to have the "Are we the baddies" conversation.
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Neither. It feels like (paraphrasing their view), "I am not going to harm someone but nor would I mourn one fewer asshole in the world." A threat means you are motivated to cause something to happen, this is either apathy for or emotional relief/positivity that one negative thing in your life has gone away. It's like the difference between being happy to find money laying on the street and stealing money.
The point is that there are implications to statements that go beyond their basic dictionary definition meaning. The fact that someone is choosing to explicitly say that carries weight, and informs the interpretation. You can make reasonable inferences about the character and beliefs of the person who chooses to go around saying that to aquaintences the day after a shocking murder.
Imagine a white man who, the day after the MLK assassination, went around loudly saying to all the neightbors "Well, sometimes things happen to people who won't stop running their mouths." Do you think that would be just some irrelevant banality that no black neighbors should use to further their understanding of the man in question?
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Having had it said to me by a communist in my social group IRL, I didn't feel exactly threatened in the moment but it certainly contributed to making my politics far less forgiving than they used to be.
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I understand you wish your enemies to be unpractical, but you obviously see why they behave the way they do, yeah? The only reason to notice and acknowledge that they are in tension is to try to break the coalition. Only conservatives want that (Who benefits?). Indeed, since progressive people understand this, the only thing they can do is say the goals are not in tension.
Is there no truth value in pointing out philosophical incoherence? Free pass on that, ends justify the means?
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