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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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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.

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.

On the contrary; spaces that are typically rabidly pro-trans are livid about the school shooting. Most media sources are geared towards stirring up outrage and are actively searching for the most inflammatory tweets and soundbytes to score points. The right will try to stir up outrage about mentally ill trans shooters/rapists, the left will make noises about assault weapons bans, normies will be disgusted by another school shooting and update diametrically away from everything the shooter claimed to stand for.

Like just about every other school shooting, this is a massive own-goal. Trans people look bad, Catholics and other religious folks are innocent victims and the cops undeniably come out looking like heroes.

Like just about every other school shooting, this is a massive own-goal. Trans people look bad, Catholics and other religious folks are innocent victims and the cops undeniably come out looking like heroes.

The cops didn't come out looking like heroes in the Uvalde shooting.

It didn’t involve trans or Catholic people either. The own-goal is the part that generalizes.

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They’re Calvinists. It’s gonna be a rough day for the religion teacher when classes resume (assuming anyone in a mainline Protestant denomination even believes that stuff anymore).

So, I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make. If it's "Calvinists believe in predestination, hence have no answer for the problem of evil", I have to say that's incorrect, to put it mildly. I mean, the first of the five points of Calvinism is "Total Depravity", essentially that man is so corrupted by original sin that he cannot choose any good apart from the grace of God.

If the point is "Religion claims that if you pray enough, bad things won't happen to you", I don't think that's a mainstream position among any Christian denominations.

If it’s “Calvinists believe in predestination, hence have no answer for the problem of evil”

Essentially this. “Total depravity” isn’t real answer to the problem of evil. It’s a fake answer. Why did God choose to make man totally depraved? To be fair, there is no monotheistic religion with a robust answer to the problem of evil, but the Catholic/Arminian “God decided that it was better to give mankind true free will, even if some men use it for evil,” answer could at least explain this. What are the Calvinists going to say? “Your friend Hallie died in a pool of her own blood so that God could demonstrate the need for his divine grace”?

Apparently Covenant Presbyterian Nashville is a PCA church, so they might actually teach some Calvinism. (The PCUSA is the "mainline" liberal demonination whose median member wouldn't know the first thing about predestination.)

In my experience it's not that they 'don't believe' it as much as they are not even familiar with concepts like predestination. Typically, they get angry and confused when you bring it up

Whoops.