This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Did you know that 10 people were killed by a (potentially transgender) school shooter in Canada yesterday?
There is hardly anything about this in the American media today. It’s the third-billed story at best, behind Nancy Guthrie kidnapping updates and the FAA closing airspace over El Paso. Right-wing influencers have mentioned it, but it almost seems as if they are going through the motions. It’s not even trending on Twitter. I don’t feel the raw anger and hatred from when the Catholic school in Minnesota was hit.
The only explanation I can think of is that the shooting happened in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, which is in the middle of nowhere. Nobody wants to send reporters to Yukon-lite in February, so we get no coverage.
No wonder Bezos laid these people off.
As a data point, in Australia this was top story on ABC news 7am radio broadcast, second story on the 8am broadcast. During the second broadbast they listed off the genders of all of the victims (which I found a bit weird) but pointedly avoided saying anything about the gender or identity of the shooter. Perhaps they were giving a Straussian hint.
I see the online article now names the shooter, refers to them as a woman and no hint of a trans identity.
That was what I saw at first. It appeared as breaking news on the ABC website. I was a little surprised for it to be Canada rather than America, as is far more common, and then a later update identified the shooter as a 'woman'. I admit I wondered if it was a trans woman if only because it's so unusual for women to be involved in mass shootings. Is there any confirmation on that either way?
Yes, they're trans.
The media has 2 choices- double down on "we need to ban guns to protect women from male mass shooters" and throw trans women under the bus, or double down on TWAW and throw "it's all men's fault" out.
I think they're still figuring out which one it's going to be, but TWAW's in the lead right now.
Third option: the fact that this person was driven to commit such a horrific crime is testament to how widespread transphobic bigotry is, even in an ostensible progressive utopia like Canada.
I'm sure the TRAs themselves are pushing this one on the backchannel. Trans cannot fail, they can only be failed.
Sure, "the victims deserved it" is always an option.
Unfortunately for the TRAs, this wasn't a Christian school.
"The mass shooter was female" is the best concession they're going to get. Because the truth- that this was violence the entire progressive political stack (by its own rules) is directly and solely responsible for- is an inconvenient one.
If anything the TRAs should be signal-boosting the couple of politicians who will inevitably shoot their mouth off too quickly in blaming trans people for this. They're completely dependent on progressive success for survival.
So far, I did not see any evidence that this was politically motivated. Presumably your hedging of 'by its own rules' means something like 'if a member of the outgroup does something bad, we can blame the outgroup for it', and I am sure you have some story of some Trump supporter having a psychotic episode and shooting up a shopping mall getting spun as MAGA violence.
If there is some indication of political motive, like the shooter planning to kill some TERF teachers, then blaming the SJ movement is still a bit silly but fair.
Otherwise, bad faith behavior does not become acceptable just because the other side does it occasionally, I am sure a SJ supporter would find many spins from MAGA which I would condemn them for emulating.
No, this one's a lot more systemic. If I recall correctly this guy was already convicted of a crime with multiple mental disorders, but let off easy. Can't imagine why that would be. Failing to punish crime properly has actual consequences that look shockingly like dead 12 year olds.
I mean, I have a story of some illegal gun owner who may or may not have been an RCMP informant shooting roughly 20 people and that getting spun as right-wing violence (and being banned and confiscated as a result), just like 2 million other people who have Canadian citizenship do.
Up until yesterday the dominant narrative in Canada was the notion that all mass shootings are straightwhitemen committing femicide against helpless women because Muh Patriarchy. That narrative is dead now, and ironically referring to the killer as a woman hurts it a lot more than admitting the killer was trans.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I find this issue somewhat ironic in that, IMO, Trans overrepresentation in this field is more about 'The sort of mildly-spectrumatic social misfits that would historically have been overrepresented as school shooters are now being nudged hard into transitioning' moreso than expressly 'it's the transness that does it'.
On the other hand, grabbing that particular demographic and ramming a bunch of random hormones down them plus giving them a persecution complex is probably not the absolute ideal way of handling the delicate subject of adolescent mental health.
It's funny to think that, if Columbine had happened today, the names that would have lived on in infamy would have been Erica Harris and – well, I suppose Dylan can be a girl's name too.
More options
Context Copy link
I peeped at the big canadian subs and predictably, any discussion regarding the killer's identity is being actively moderated. And the removed threads did acknowledge the bit of nuance you reference. Of course, now that it's confirmed they belong to an inconvenient demographic, I doubt we'd see much institutional bipartisan appetite for any exhaustive scrutiny. Because now the victims aren't just dead kids, but we gotta protect the kids transitioning. This individual reportedly surpassed Elliot Rodger in terms of casualties, yet it seems unlikely that we will witness a comparable level of sustained analysis of their background, motivations, or formative influences.
The recent shooting in Sydney, Australia had the same thing. Any attempt to bring up 'maybe there is some causatory factor here' getting immediate 'HOW DARE YOU NOT FOCUS ON THE VICTIMS AND IT'S THE GUNS' reactions, whilst you know if it were hypothetical Chudzilla there'd be absolutely no hesitation in making it a 'right wingers are gonna kill us all' story.
Even in Australia the lasting political impact seems to be negligible in terms of laws passed or anything that might actually hit Islamic radicalization. Instead massive upsurge in polling for the populist right party, death of the established middle-right party and gun control efforts.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, I tend to think it's a combination of 1) shooters being almost entirely male, and thus more likely to be trans women than cis women or trans men, and 2) both shooters and trans people having strong positive correlations with mental illness.
You can debate the reasons for trans correlation with mental illness, say that it's all because of bigotry against gender-non-conforming people if you like, but the observation itself seems to remain true. Shooters tend to be biologically male people with some sort of mental disorder, and trans women are biologically male people who frequently have some sort of (other than being trans) mental disorder.
It isn't an epidemic or anything. But if trans women are slightly more likely, statistically, to be shooters than other demographics, it wouldn't surprise me.
This seems very plausible. On the other hand, society is generally chill about most mass shooters carrying the Y chromosome, I am sure that the take 'you can prevent violence by aborting your male fetus' exists somewhere but I have not stumbled upon it.
This seems entirely fair, most men do not engage in horrific violence, after all.
However, then it seems also fair to apply similar standards to trans women -- sure, they may be over-represented compared to cis men in shootings, but the violent ones still form a tiny minority.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Strong chance that this demographic is also on SSRIs, so that hypothesis still has legs too, IMO.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's actually a very easy choice of "embrace individual responsibility" and stop blaming people for the actions of other just because they're in a tangentially related group. Most people of basically any demographic you can think of are law abiding citizens, even the black population with the highest rate still only has a third with a felony conviction of any kind, yet alone violent felonies.
Individual responsibility cuts both ways. Criminals should not be defended and forgiven because "oh but they're just poor" or "but society left them behind!", and innocents should not be blamed for the acts of criminals. Whether they be responsible gun owners who haven't inappropriately used their firearms or a trans person who hasn't committed violence.
That would be a solution I could get behind, if the last fifteen years hadn't featured a nonstop deluge of handwringing about the dangers of young white men becoming radicalised by far-right/incel content, and how this poses such a grave threat to our society that we need to suspend freedom of expression and browbeat young white men into submission with artfully produced agitprop about how loathsome and contemptible they are (which no less than the prime minister of the UK erroneously referred to as a "documentary" on two separate occasions).
If it's legitimate to speculate on the societal factors that led to Elliot Rodger, Nikolas Cruz etc. to commit their horrific crimes, it's legitimate to speculate on why this guy did so. If young white men are susceptible to radicalisation by social media echo chambers, I see no reason why young white trans-identified men couldn't be also. Being trans should not be a get out of jail free card.
More options
Context Copy link
LOL, this is like on Star Trek when they presented Nomad with an irresolvable paradox, except instead of making him get a higher-pitched voice and explode, it made him quote Ronald Reagan.
Not much Reagan has ever been wrong about. Well, maybe Iran Contra but that's really only because he subverted Congressional will. He was right that the US should be supporting anti communist forces, he just should have accepted it wasn't viable at the time. Maybe acknowledged the aids crisis a little faster too but really, what would even the best president on that have been able to do? I can't see much different, they're politicians not doctors and medical researchers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They don’t have to give any reasoning for banning guns other than “prevent shootings.” Also they can just ignore this shooting if it isn’t politically advantageous. I don’t think the left is losing sleep over this
It's Canada. They already have more gun control than they ever thought they were going to.
More options
Context Copy link
There aren't enough guns left to ban for that (they already blew their loads on this 4 and 2 and 1 year ago), and the lack of coverage about what the guns the shooter used (along with how fatal the attack was given the near-immediate response time) suggests they weren't special in any way- likely a bog-standard hunting rifle or shotgun.
It's going to get ignored for that reason. The gun-banning side will take an L, since most of the narrative is "u need to ban guns to protect wimminz", and this guy being [allowed to be] a woman damages that narrative- it's best for them it disappear.
Isn't Canada in the midst of a gun buyback? Seems like a buyback should override any concern over details like what kind of weapon was used. But, the Canadian public may be more discerning than Americans on gun control. Here the type of weapon used is a tertiary consideration, at best. It's a gift to advocates if a shooter uses a scary gun, but none have let a shooting go to waste because it doesn't line up with the bill that's already in the chamber.
Kind of. Half the country is in the midst of something that could charitably be called a buyback.
The Federal Government has zero credibility on the issue, and they haven't taken any of the obvious opportunities to improve. If you properly file for the buy"back", then they won't guarantee any money, nevermind guaranteeing a fair price. They capped the payouts at about $250M, planning for 136k guns (vs. industry estimates of 500k+).
I also heard (and subsequently debunked) that they were giving themselves two months to do the paperwork, not that they were giving gun owners two months to apply. That tells you something about the current state of affairs.
Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Yukon are all obstructing it to various amounts because Trudeau was disastrous to national unity, both with specific policies (like this) and with his general attitude.
More options
Context Copy link
Sure, but none of the perpetrators have been expressly, blatantly, inescapably representative of every Establishment failure.
This is part of why they want to call him a woman, but it forces the anti-gun side in particular to give up being able to use the superweapon of blaming men; conversely, allowing them to call him a man costs them credibility with the TRAs.
If the government can't protect against attacks like this, and the reason it can't protect against attacks like this is that it let an ugly/unpopular Progressive token minority off the hook while acting to punish everyone else (and in a way that directly led to their children being killed), at a time where the government can't even keep the fucking nation together?
Then yeah, I'd be trying to lay low too. The most rabid anti-gunners in Canada might be tempted to go full Twitter meltdown, but if they do their time as a political force in Canada will be over.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link