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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24268 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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As ever, misleading hyperbole is a tempting Faustian bargain when you're dealing with a problem that is widespread but not intense enough to spark much outrage if you stick to the facts. The same thing happened with rape-culture discourse - the real problem that made activists' blood boil was the staggering number of women who get socially pressured into sex they didn't really want, but calling that out for what it is is difficult without sounding either mealy-mouthed and unconvincing, or hysterical and overreacting. So they gesture at an epidemic of violent rape that just didn't exist to the degree they needed to, in an attempt to reconcile public feeling to how unbearable things felt to them.

I think this is exactly the devil's bargain trans activism has struck with these laughable statistical manipulations - trans people feel unsafe in a generalized, exhausting way, but by any rational accounting, outside of specific circumstances like sex work or prison, most of what they're feeling is inchoate intimidation, not an ongoing bloodbath. So people don't care and they feel they "have" to doll up the story in lurid claims about murder rates to get their emotional pain taken seriously. If it bleeds, it leads.

Unrelated:

Various US states have passed laws banning defendants from using the "trans panic" defense (i.e. the defendant was so shocked upon discovering that an object of their sexual desire was transgender that they lost control of their faculties) in murder trials, under the historically dubious claim that this defense has resulted in vastly reduced sentences or even outright acquittals.

I am a little confused as to how this fits into your argument. Surely this is a sound legal decision in the world where transphobic hate crimes aren't meaningfully a thing (so murderers shouldn't get to appeal to a supposed widespread, sympathetic understanding of "who among us would not feel compelled to strangle a tranny if we saw one up close?", because it's not true), just as it is in the world where transphobic hate crimes are widespread (and are thus a plague that needs to be stymyed by throwing the book at bigots).

But there’s two reasons for feeling widespread intimidation- either 1) a large portion of people are out to get you or 2) unjustifed paranoia.

This thread is evidence- albeit not a slam dunk- against the first hypothesis, and we already know transgenders have very poor mental health on average.

You say "but", but I didn't intend my comment to take a position one way or the other on whether the feeling of intimidation is justified - merely to put forward an explanation for why they feel compelled to engage in these statistical misrepresentations, other than cackling machiavellianism.

The intimidation being delusional is extremely relevant information.

I mean, I don't think it is delusional as such - I just think it's mistaken. But anyway, relevant to what? I think manipulating the murder statistics would be bad even if there were an actual plague of lower-scale trans violence. Indeed, it would probably be worse in that scenario, because recklessly doing evil in the name of a good cause oftentimes has worse long-term consequences than recklessly doing evil while tilting at windmills.

I don't think it is delusional as such - I just think it's mistaken.

What's the difference? A delusion is a false belief.

"Delusional" has mental-health-related connotations, and indeed, hydroacetylene explicitly linked the idea that it might be "delusional" to the claim that "transgenders have very poor mental health on average". I, on the other hand, suspect that their overblown fear of violence against them is much how any group of human beings might react under their circumstances, even if it's factually incorrect.

(To wit: I think that it short-circuits humans' evolved primate social instincts when they correctly perceive that a critical mass of other apes around them are only barely tolerating their presence and find them gross and obnoxious, even though their resulting gut feeling that they're about to get beaten up is off-target. That's civilization at work, and civilization wasn't in the training data. Argue all you want that the legal system works and most people just aren't going to jump from background antipathy to mob violence, the deep-rooted suspicion that the crowd of burly male apes giving you the stink-eye are definitely about to bash your face in is just not going to listen. I think this is a very common psychological dynamic in today's world, which lies behind a great number of persecution complexes.)

So they gesture at an epidemic of violent rape that just didn't exist to the degree they needed to, in an attempt to reconcile public feeling to how unbearable things felt to them.

And, in a case of pitch-black humor, as a vague coalition and surely many of the same individuals go on to later to ignore actual rape and actual rape culture. Fascinating, really.

Enjoy arbys.

I cannot find the origin or meaning of "enjoy arbys." I see eigenrobot say it a lot, and as far as I can tell, it means "you reap what you sow" or "this is how the world is now, deal with it." What is up with arby's?

Yeah, Gattsuru's got it and I'm borrowing it from Eigenrobot.

I'm a little more optimistic than the 'bot but when it comes to topics like the above, I enjoy the little flourish gesturing towards the absurdity. I suppose a Camus reference might be more accessible, though.

I don't know if it's the origin, but there's an on-and-off again Nihilist Arby twitter account that started over a decade ago. Eigenrobot and tpot tend to mutate it into 'this is how things are, and you're not changing it no matter what you do'.

women who get socially pressured into sex they didn't really want,

Yeah but so much of this is determined in hindsight and parsed through the the generally hot-cold lens of female attraction. If nonconsensual sex is equivocated to 'sex regretted at any point in the 6 months immediately proceeding it' then the whole of society just ceases to function.

I am a little confused as to how this fits into your argument. Surely this is a sound legal decision in the world where transphobic hate crimes aren't meaningfully a thing

If you pass a law saying that Jewish defendants are not permitted to use the excuse "I killed that child so I could drink his blood at Passover", that would be a sound legal decision in the sense that no Jew would use that excuse anyway. But the obvious effect of that is not on convictions, but as propaganda against Jews.

Are there many laws generally about the acceptable set of arguments you can put in front of a jury? "Ban the X Defense" IMO is usually trying to appeal to some sense that this was an affirmative defense (see self-defense law), not "you can't ask the jury to consider this". The only one I can think of offhand is that directly appealing to jury nullification is heavily frowned upon.

Are there many laws generally about the acceptable set of arguments you can put in front of a jury?

Some countries bar the admissibility of evidence that says "yes, I'm going to sleep with this guy and then cry rape, it'll be funny" after a famous case where that was indeed an affirmative defense.

It's very crooked.

Canada did that after a high-profile sexual assault case imploded during trial thanks to the defense catching the accusers lying and colluding behind the scenes to coordinate their testimony. The solution, to prevent such an embarrassment going forward, was to hold mandatory pre-trial hearings where the defense is forced to lay all their cards on the table ahead of time if they want records admitted as evidence, making it even easier for accusers to tailor their testimony.

Laws specifically are rare and generally tied to sex crimes. Court rules are more common, though, and will regularly block entire types of evidence, or even specific framings of arguments.

Also rape shield laws, which prevent a man from arguing a certain act was consensual using evidence that she had a history of consenting to such acts.

Famously a major plot point of the film Cape Fear:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Fear_(1991_film)

Where's @ymeskhout when you need him.

My understanding is that defendants have tried to use it, although it's not actually been used to successfully get away with murder in the way activists have tried to claim. If there were actually idiots with one Jewish great-great-grandmother who tried to get off on a religious-freedom technicality by repeating the blood libel, I think most actual Jews would be in favor of banning that line of argument, whether or not any judges had ever bought it. I agree things would be different if the defense only existed as a paranoid trans fantasy, but that doesn't seem to be true.

My understanding is trans panic has been used successfully for lesser charges, but not in a while, and never for murder.

Isn't the trans panic defence a mutation of the gay panic defence, which is no longer accepted? Same for the trans panic one, I imagine, but it is part of the debate around "should you or shouldn't you tell someone beforehand you're trans if you're going to have sex with them?" Those who say "yes" are trying to circumvent the 'trans panic' possibility (get out before anything can happen, if the guy turns violent once he finds out you're trans) and also to avoid 'rape by deception' accusations; those who say "no" are arguing "I am a real woman, it's not gay to have sex with me, why should I out myself for a one-night stand?"

I am a little confused as to how this fits into your argument.

Because it's a solution in search of a problem. Trans activists routinely claim that people have LITERALLY gotten away with murder by using this defense, and yet when pressed are unable to provide a single specific example of that happening.

Do you mean that the relevant states banned a defense that no one had actually used? Or a defense that had never been successful? If the latter, I still think it makes sense to ban it even if it hadn't historically bought its claimants as much leniency as the activists claim. More sense, even. No more time should be wasted on a legal strategy that rests on mistaken assumptions and doesn't even work. (See also "the Devil made me do it".)

To the best of my knowledge, the defense has never been used successfully in the manner trans activists claim (that is, a person is being tried for murder, admits they killed the victim, but uses the trans panic defense and thereby secures an acquittal) – at the very least, not in a Western country. The Wikipedia article lists the states that have banned using it as a defense, but doesn't specify whether anyone had ever tried it in the states in question, and only lists four examples of people trying to use it in murder trials (which took place in Massachusetts, California, Colorado and New York).

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