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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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Well I was referring to assaults which wouldn't have happened had the victim been normal.

Yes. That is called a hate crime.

This argument proves too much. Crazy people fighting on the street are assaults which wouldn't have happened had the victim been normal (to the extent you can identify one).

To the extent that sexuality and "gender identity" are malleable within individuals (and despite "born this way" rhetoric used to justify gay marriage, there seems to be at least some amount of this, particularly in women), queer advocacy can be considered as harming the people who would otherwise have had functional lives. For a concrete example, you could consider the promiscuity of gay culture, which allowed AIDS to devastate gay communities so badly that it was designated GRIDS, for gay-related immunodeficiency syndrome, when it was first detected. A more recent example might be the amount of unnecessary suffering Monkeypox caused. For trans, the social contagions seem even stronger and the harms more stark (due to hormonal/surgical intervention and the reduction of one's dating pool to epsilon). People on Discord posting under queer identities have me aware of what they called a "queer gap", where all the time spent "figuring yourself out" means that queer people hit social/romantic/life milestones later than straight people. This, too, is a harm. Are the benefits of the promised self-understanding and self-actualization worth it?

I saw a tweet once about the Millennial experience being something like "get told none of the rules apply, and that you get to reimagine new ones, only to reconstruct all of Grandma's wisdom from first principles in your 30's and scramble to apply them before it's too late". Defaults matter and are mostly good for most people. It seems to me that a lot of advocacy speaks as if the defaults work for maybe 5% of the population when it's rhetorically something more like 95%.