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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.

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.

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."