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In recent years when it became a cancelable offense in any non-explicitly right-wing institution to say, "transwomen are not women", it got me wondering when did majority elite opinion first require believing obviously insane things. There has always been crazy beliefs, but many of those crazy beliefs are at least plausible if you don't have firsthand experience and are just reading about it in the books. For instance, I believe in HBD, not blank slatism with regards to race, but unless you spend a lot of time interacting with a cross-section of each race, it's at least plausible to believe that it's just a matter of education or not getting a proper chance. But when did majority elite opinion become crazy in a way that required people to defy what they saw with their own eyes? My answer is allowing women in combat. Sex differences in size, strength, demeanor, interests, are just so great, the importance of women to childbearing is so obvious, that believing women have a right to be in combat is both crazy and crazy in a way that defies obvious common sense, defies what people see with their own eyes. A few years ago I happened to be watching the Ruth Bader Ginsberg documentary and they were praising her for the famous Citadel case where the Supreme Court acquiesced to an appeals court grant a constitutional right to a woman to attend a state funded military academy. RBG is praised for her brains, but to me, that signifies when elite opinion had totally gone off the rails.
Do they actually believe it? If their kid was in a burning building would they want a female or male firefighter to rescue their kid? Would they be equally comfortable with a transgender person in their daughter's gym changing room as they would be with a woman? Are the refugees welcome in their neighbourhood or in their kids schools? How many of these elites would want to to walk through harlem on a Sunday night after the police was de-funded?
These people want people to become generic interchangeable worker/consumers. Some narratives push the world in that direction, they believe in it to the same extent that Bush believed Iraq had nukes.
Yes.
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Elites weren’t captured by these ideas, they were the ones actively promulgating them for the longest time. The Russians understood this phenomenon for a long time:
“The fish rots from the head.”
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I think we're so many decades down from moral education that people believe at least some of it. Which seems to practically mean being forced to profess belief in all of it because you cannot deny bits and pieces of the blank slateism without being at risk of destruction.
People don't want female firefighters or Marines, but the inability to be honest without threatening the apple cart makes it impossible to check people who exploit the legal system to push us just one step further (unless something truly absurd happens like a Lia Thomas situation that cannot be ignored - but even in that case people are likely benefitting from Title IX being explicitly about sex so these attempted redefinitions can run into a hostile court).
Groups are actively leveraging this. It's very common with the trans stuff. There's constant claims that black women will suffer from going back to sexed bathrooms (yes, the new left wing take is that black women are so manly banning men will keep them out). Similarly, a common line of attack is that you're an essentialist and being essentialist is bad because what next? Race essentialism? If sex is real, why wouldn't someone argue race is real?
If they never believed in any of this none of this would have force. That poor professor who got fired for being frustrated at how badly her black students were doing wouldn't have been frustrated or have any cognitive dissonance at all.. You think Amy Wax is losing sleep over it?
That's why it's so difficult to dislodge this gender ideology stuff. Everyone is trapped in the same lie. No one can stand outside of it in the simplest, most expedient manner ("men are men and women are women and, frankly, the government shouldn't be involved") robs them of their own tools and stories.
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I think in context, the party line you should reference is "There is no war in Ba Sing Se."
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