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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32834 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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This is possibly only very vaguely Culture War, but it's an update on the Sam Brinton luggage stealing saga. Before I begin, I want to say that this is not to dunk on the Biden administration or even non-binary persons. It's simply because this story is so ridiculous it is laugh out loud funny.

Seems like (and I have no idea if this is really true, but if it isn't, it should be) our person is a three times thief - allegedly. A Tanzanian-born fashion designer has now come forward, claiming her suitcase went missing back in 2018 and that subsequent photos of Brinton in particular outfits were her clothes. Yes, it's the Daily Mail, but it's got the best gallery of photos of what the designer alleges are her clothes and then photos of Brinton in similar outfits.

That would seem to answer the question "What does he do with the clothing in the luggage he steals?" 😁

Two months ago when this was discussed I had some thoughts:

he has a fetish that he can’t control, probably related to the idea of stealing the identity of a woman and/or her clothes […] he has a fixation on stealing women’s luggage from the airport specifically. He would not have been able to make it this far in his career if he simply couldn’t control himself with stealing any random object. This perfectly mirrors his identity as a man that likes to dress and appear as a woman, and who likes to receive attention based on the strangeness of his doing so (his interviews, manner of speaking demonstrate this).

I do think this is a worthwhile angle to dwell on. Sam Brinton is a proclaimed non-binary person (NB, or enby). People outside of gender culture would call him a weirdo. It turns out he is a weirdo in the precise way that he transgresses his gender, ie he seems to get off (as a fetish) to wearing women’s clothes that he steals, and he also makes a big deal about being non-binary (as a man dressed like a woman). This, to me, strongly indicates a pathological genesis to his enby identity. The odds of being both “naturally” a man who dresses and expresses as a woman, and being a weirdo who loves to steal woman’s luggage to wear her clothes publicly, is unlikely to have incidental discrete etiologies. I think instead that Sam’s enby identity is the result of fetish or deviant behavior as a child, maybe getting off by going into his female family’s clothing. He repeats this high by dressing as a woman publicly, but the high is greatest when he dresses in stolen women’s clothes publicly. As such, Sam’s enby expression is not some natural gender orientation or whatever, it’s instead just being a weirdo, which proves conservative gender critics correct in at least this narrow instance. If this is so, progressives need to come up with some criteria for telling apart the weirdos from the naturals. Or they need to argue why normal people have to be a non-consenting party to weirdos getting off.

Yeah, I'll eat crow, here: I was willing to consider alternative-if-unlikely explanations, and that's pretty much blown out of the water. And I don't find the inevitable 'oh, Brinton's a creepy thief because of trauma' very compelling, at least at the level Brinton was operating.

That said, while I can't and don't want to speak for Movement Progressives, it seems like there's pretty good Schelling Points around people either stealing someone else's clothing. It'd be a little less creepy to publicly float wearing someone of the same gender's clothing that you stole, but not much, and there's some causes that overlap enough for it to be a thing! I don't think that the consent framework is the end-all be-all -- as evidenced by the 'do you need people to consent to see a man in his own dress' -- but it's pretty useful for this sorta problem, along with a variety of other related ones.

We speak often of Quokkas, but it seems to me that the Quokka-nature is not in the raw amount of charity, but in the rules that extend or withhold that charity. It does not seem like a mistake to ask, in any given situation, "what would the most charitable interpretation of the existing evidence be"? The problem comes when, having asked this question, one treats such a theory as the default assumption and acts accordingly. Recognizing that the alternatives may be unlikely is good evidence that one is on the right side of this line.

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