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Prelude: The Nashville school shooting is definitely peak toxoplasma, a day later: people cheering everyone who entered that school with a gun, both the shooter and the police. Aidan/Audrey’s acts are a near-perfect scissor statement.
The statement on the shooting by the Trans Resistance Network is particularly toxically tribal. It hearkens back to the days of trying to sympathize with the Columbine shooters, where the narrative is shaped solely by early reporting and people were asking “What made them do it?”
Tangent: drag shows. But the use of the word “genocide” in the TRN’s statement made me stop and ponder: the modern term “genocide” includes not only the actual killing of group X, but also the halting of cultural practices as a lead-in to the eventual rounding up and killing.
Here’s an odd little dynamic: halting drag activities in children's spaces is trans genocide for both sides, but in different ways!
For pro-trans activists, halting them is halting a ritual cultural activity, and hints at a wider cultural desire for eventual trans elimination through murders of the outed and the suicides of the closeted. It also removes an avenue for trans youths to discover their true gender and thus leaves them in a spiral of depression heading toward suicide.
For social-contagion theorists, halting the drag activities in children’s spaces is useful for preventing cis children from being memetically contaminated, and thus memetically sterilizing the trans community. Reasoning: since full transition includes sterilization (thus committing traditional genocide upon themselves rather effectively), trans people don’t breed genetically, but memetically.
I hope this isn't against the rules, but you yourself did outline the idea of "memocide," and I also outlined a similar idea even earlier in relation to the "trans genocide" topic.
I think we can admit that trying to put brakes on the transgender memeplex probably does amount to cultural/memetic violence, but I take the view that memetic violence is better than things spiraling out of control and devolving into actual physical violence.
I can see where this logic is coming from, but if you accept this definition, then New Athiesm is clearly an attempt at memocide of (primarily) Christianity. I don't think such a broad definition of "trying to convince people they are wrong" is viable as unacceptable behavior. But I can also see a reasonable place in which badgering, say, the Amish, to part with their longstanding cultural practices is probably not acceptable either, even if you do think their kids deserve the freedom to live their lives.
Right before New Atheism turned into Woke New Atheism, a man came into our church on a Sunday morning, wearing a Flying Spaghetti Monster T-shirt, pretending to be a seeker Just Asking Questions.
I made sure to try to make friends with him right away, because I was familiar with the FSM. Well, after a week or two of attendance, he started trying to debate Sunday school teachers, and even the pastor, during classes and services. The pastor asked him to leave the building, and he said, “Why are you asking me to leave? I’m just asking questions. You should be able to give me answers, or your faith and scholarship mean nothing.” He left under threat of being charged with trespass.
I asked him if he wanted to meet after church somewhere. We chose a nearby café and had a fascinating conversation. He had been a Christian, or rather, he had been raised as a Christian. At one point, he took the “atheist challenge,” which was to not pray or think about God for six months. After that, he was an atheist. (
He started meeting one on one with members of our congregation, trying to convince them individually that God does not exist, Jesus does not save, and the Holy Spirit cannot move you to acts of kindness and generosity. His goal was memocide, to strip away our congregants’ faith.
Our pastor had to do some research and consult our lawyer in order to find a way to not only bar him from the premises, but to keep him from meeting with congregants off-premises. That was when we had to institute a an actual membership roll, so everyone who considers themselves a member of our church could be listed, and referred to as a body legally. During their legal research, that was also when we found out he is the head of the largest atheist activist group in this part of New Mexico.
There’s a difference between trying to convince people they are wrong because you love them and want the best for them, and trying to convince people they are wrong because you want to break their relationship with someone or some group who has hurt you. The first is kindness, the second is literally what Satan did to Eve.
This idea seems blatantly unconstitutional.
It sure might, given solely the perspective of two adults talking to each other. However, Orders of Protection/Restraining Orders have a place in law and a history of being ruled constitutional. Something as simple as a heated conversation between an abused woman and her abuser in the supermarket can trigger law enforcement actions; there, the imbalance of power is obvious, and thus the interest of the government.
It’s not as obvious that an atheist, chief of an atheist organization, armed with a Gish gallop of Biblical imperfections, contradictions, and fantastical elements, is a danger to congregants of my church. While our congregation’s various teaching leaders do attempt to prepare the flock for the slings and arrows of the enemy, these are mostly people who aren’t primarily in the faith because of the philosophical grounding and theological intricacies of their faith tradition. (I’m a rare exception.) Some are people who came out of drug or abuse environments, others were raised by their families in a community of people (smaller than the Dunbar number) always willing to help each other. Some enjoy the songs and potlucks, others enjoy being around other people who have “cooperate” and “forgive” as their social defaults.
They thought they were being invited to “talk about their faith” over lunch or coffee, but they were ambushed by a well-prepared inverse evangelist seeking to find the root of their faith and uproot it, in an environment away from the leaders they trust with their emotional life and who they could turn to for answers to the conundrums he posed. (Keep in mind, this was a time when we couldn’t search the Internet in our pockets at a finger’s flick.) Their consent was obtained by deception, and that was enough for the situation to be considered harassment.
I stand by my claim that the government restraining this sort of thing at the behest of a third party is blatantly unconstitutional, and only accepted because of a friendly judge.
I assume his nuisance harassment on private property, which escalated to our board-recognized authority figure requesting he leave our property due to unwelcome trespassing, was the foundation of anything which followed.
I’m not privy to the details or the document, but that, at least, should constitute grounds for a restraining order for harassment of our members whether we’re a church, a private nonprofit shooting range, or a Toastmasters speech club. But it did spur us to have an official member list so that we could, for example, be listed in a restraining order as a class.
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I really doubt you can get restraining order against meeting whole class of hundreds of people, most of them you never met.
Most probably, the lawyer talked with this asshole, reminded him of possibility of legal action and it was sufficient to shut him down.
(the whole situation is surreal, what is the point of leaving Christianity and then doubling down on most stereotypically obnoxious Christian behavior - unwanted preaching, evangelizing and missionizing)
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I’m guessing this means writing a restraining order such that any member is covered.
Say some loon had a bone to pick with a daycare. Would every employee need their own restraining order, or could you write it so that new employees are automatically covered?
Are anti-abortion protestors given restraining orders if they stay in front of the clinic, try to talk to the women to persuade them to keep the baby and scream "murderer!" at the employees?
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I would expect every employee, otherwise the employer is effectively violating the free speech rights of both employee and loon. It's even worse when it's a church and you're implicating religion as well as speech. A prohibition on trying to convert congregants away from their religion is blatantly unconstitutional.
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Exactly, I think it's a bit of an extreme conclusion to reason that "limiting memes = doing violence = always bad," but I can understand where trans people may be coming from with this. It's hard to say where the balancing point should be on this, because one (trans)man's "grooming" can easily be another (trans)man's "helping someone else out of the closet."
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Agreed. I think calling something like this "memocide" or "memetic violence" just puts a different label on the basic concept of "arguing with words," which is no worse and no better for whatever label we put on it, even if it has "-cide" and "violence" on the label. I think it's akin to how "transphobia" has come to mean things like "believing that MTF transwomen are biological males," which don't gain some sort of irrational fear/hatred attached to it just because "phobia" is now part of the label, or how "racism" has come to mean things like "believing that differential racial outcomes aren't definitionally proof of bigotry," which don't gain some sort of bigotry attached to it just because "-ism" is now part of the label.
A rose by any other name and all that. And to quote another famous saying, this might not matter much, because the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent: the negative affect of these new labels could (and has) bulldoze plenty of plenty of innocent bystanders while the actual meaning of the terms flow through to all of society.
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