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Following up on an earlier post of mine, the Democratic National Convention has released their long-awaited "autopsy" report. Critics of the party will get some immediate schadenfreude upon opening the document: the default font, the hastily-added red addenda by a higher power, the missing sections and absent formatting. The sick pleasure continues upon the realization that neither Biden's senility nor the Israel-Gaza conflict (nor the associated hysteria) ever appear in the 100+ pages.
Digging deeper, CNN reports that the autopsy was compiled by "Democratic consultant Paul Rivera," a veteran of the Clinton administration and friend of DNC chair Ken Martin. Rivera's minuscule effort and misguided conclusions result in a paper with few citations, ignorant assessments, and a half-assed attempt at shielding the DNC from the worst of it.
Well, that's certainly backfired now. The DNC hasn't looked this incompetent at its highest levels of power since the scandals of 2016 (say, was anyone ever held accountable there?) and the oft-panicked-about "competence crisis" appears to have reached a high point.
There needs to be an autopsy on the autopsy report. I am 100% serious. Figuring out all the things that went wrong to allow this to happen would solve half of the party's problems. Reinterview witnesses. Reconstruct lines of thought and inquiry. Find the points of failure and conduct root-cause analysis.
The report is poorly written, unprofessional, and incomplete yes, but above all it is vapid. It doesn't even ask the questions that matter. The overwhelming majority of effort is focused on ad targeting and campaign spending.
Okay, what was the mistake then? What should be done differently next time around? Should the Vice President have changed her position or not? In fact, there is almost no discussion of issues in the report at all. A model of why anyone would want to vote for one party or the other is conspicuously absent.
I listened to the Pod Save America episode in which a few Harris campaign staffers were interviewed. They said that they tried to counter that ad, but the counter ads polled poorly with test groups. They were better off with generic ads about the economy.
Supposedly the "she's for they/them, Donald Trump is for you" ad is the mightiest ad in modern history. Around a 2% shift in voter sentiment; arguably election flipping if somehow that was very well targeted to likely voters in swing states.
I think an accurate autopsy would say to not stake out the most extreme and unpopular positions on culture war issues on camera. But they can't plainly state that so we get this report instead.
Being unable to articulate the most anodyne obvious solution means no lessons will ever be learnt. Those who know the deep histories will be forgotten to the sand of time and the textual history will just say "oh no wow the republicans were really mean to transgendered people!" without ever acknowledging the culpable role of tying oneself to such an insane position had in making such an attack land in the first place.
Most of the actual solutions are pretty well heresy for the left. There’s no backing down from the position of “support trans rights and the transition of anyone of any age who wants it” because this is the orthodox left liberal position. This is why that Trump ad was such a coup — the general public is not on board with the radical position of transgendering of children and only the most left-liberal people want transgender to be normalized in society. Trump or his team was able to win with the ad. She couldn’t respond in any way that undercut the effectiveness of the ad, as the far-left would reject her for anything other than full on support for trans rights. So the ad says “she’s into trans rights over the wants of regular people”, and she could only either keep silent or agree.
Sometimes I wonder if there's a cultural disconnect here. When I go into big blue cities and encounter transgender people, they're usually just awkward people trying to live their lives. When I encounter them out in the sticks, they're frequently weirdos who seem hellbent on making me a non-consensual participant in their fetish.
Is it possible the "transgender intolerance" of the right is a self reinforcing feedback loop? The sane transgender people move to the cities where they're more accepted, which makes them look better to the people there, but leaves the bad actors out in the country where they get off on making other people uncomfortable? Which in turn makes the people out in the country less tolerant?
That's the problem, and it's not easy to solve. If the activist groups would agree that "Okay, that is just a guy with a fetish and not really transgender", then most of the opposition would be cut off at the knees. But they can't say that, because (a) they don't want to be seen as throwing anyone under the bus (and I can sympathise there, it'd be nice if only the most acceptable people could be the poster children for the cause, but the awkward barely-passing types are valid too) and (b) the ideology has gone beyond "born in the wrong body" and on the extremes has spiralled into "smash the notion of gender completely" and "if you say you're a transfemme masc-presenting non-binary agender queer folx then only you can judge what you are" so the weirdoes and grifters happily take advantage of that.
Their only defence, when any individual case goes beyond the beyond, is "well that person was only faking being transgender" which is no good when they're simultaneously demanding "trans women don't owe you femininity" and self-identification with fifty labels slapped on is the only measure to go by. "This person with a beard and a penis wearing sparkly eyeshadow and stilettoes is a real trans woman, that person with a beard and a penis wearing sparkly eyeshadow and stilettoes is only faking it".
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I think you are running into an Activist vs Lay-folk difference. I'll grant that the Trans-movement as a disproportionate number of activists. The awkward people trying to live their lives are the lay-folk, the hellbent weirdos are the activists. What you are noticing is my theory that activists are essentially always "on" there is always a war to be fought, every space needs to be "decolonized from cis-heteronormative oppression". And when you are out in the sticks, to them this is the battlefield, sticks are generally more conservative, more "heteronormative". So like guerilla warriors they raid the commons. Trans-folk in big blue cities aren't behind enemy lines.
This is all from personal anecdotes because I used to live in a big blue city and now I live in a small purple city surrounded by red-sticksvilles. So sometime I encounter trans-activists, sometimes I encounter trans-folk. The activists are almost always from sticksvilles any they can't turn it off. It makes them very unpleasant to be around.
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Trans as a category is muddled beyond belief. Progs keep asking if normies wouldn't wanna fuck whatever heavily made up chiselled Jailey Bay fuckdoll gets plastered over the interwebs but in reality most trannies are awkward failed women or obnoxious Jessica Yaniv nonpassers. Blue city trans people are more likely just experimenting with labels and haven't gotten masectomies. Lets be real the big issue is men pretending to be women without having gone through the chop because male access to female spaces is rightfully suspect. A girl who wants to check out of the female presentation rat race can use "trans" or NB as convenient acceptable cover until she decides to abandon or commit. To pretend Angel Buck or Bailey Jay are representative of the trans community as a whole is pure definitional fuckery and every prog should be forced to watch the top of all time selection of reddits nonbinary subreddits selfies and really honestly say that they're all equally valid in whatever presentation they choose. Attach a motion sensor to their dick for proof.
You're a bit harsh, but I'd agree with the likes of restaurant guy being a clear scammer who is only looking for opportunities to be offended. The stock phrase about being misgendered as "a knife in the heart" and the performances picking on people clearly not native English speakers and demanding to see the manager demonstrate that. Doing it for social media clicks (and possibly hoping they can take a discrimination case against some restaurant or café to rake in some easy money).
That is someone who should be compelled to undergo mandatory sex reassignment surgery to become the woman they really are. Put up or shut up!
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The only openly trans person I have ever encountered IRL was a Cracker Barrel host(ess) in small-town Louisiana.
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Nope. Portraying the trans issue as being primarily about who gets to go to which bathroom, or some visceral "ick" factor, is at least 10 years out of date. The reaction to the trans issues comes from progressives seeing the provision of irreversible medical procedures to minors as an inalienable human right, that justifies nearly everything, including public school teachers transing children behind their parents' backs.
It also really doesn't help that trannies in particular are either clearly awkward women who needed better socializing early in their lives or creepy men who needed to be bullied early in their lives. The great win for gay marriage was that most gays really are just normal people and the chemsex degens are really an outlier, but for trans people the more people are exposed to them the less sympathetic they become. Progressives might as well have allied themselves with NAMBLA in this case, at least a decent south park episode came out that acronym
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The solution to this seems simple to me. As a leftist who grew up in a leftist enclave, me and my leftist-liberal millennial peers were taught that heresy was awesome and something worth celebrating all the time. So if something heretical is needed to accomplish our goals, it seems obvious to me that we should embrace it and celebrate it and push our movement/party/etc. towards that heresy.
Unfortunately, the past almost 1.5 decades has shown me that that doesn't work, so I'm out of ideas.
What enclaves tend to mean by “be a heretic” is “agree with us, but take it farther.” Right-liberals Don generally want you to be a heretic by being socially liberal, they want you to go farther, and thus Moldbug is their kind of heretic where Siskind is not because he’s probably less conservative than most right-liberals. Left liberals want their heretics to go further left, so Luigi shooting the CEO is a heretic, but their kind of heretic, zemdani is a heretic they like proposing state owned grocery stores, but they hate Fetterman because he isn’t heretical in a more left leaning way.
Im mostly Politically homeless. I get my ideas from Moldbug and Confucius and other weird places, so I don’t really fit modern politics.
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