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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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I think it’s good to make some accommodation for others’ worldviews. To gently prod at another preference, consider others’ religion/lack thereof. All but your own will seem laughably absurd. Yet if I was invited to dinner by devout Zoroastrians, I wouldn’t laugh in their faces when they suggested we say a prayer before dinner, nor would I immediately start attacking the holes in their holy book. When a belief seems delusional to you, but is important to someone else, then provided it isn’t causing any real harm, I think you can make accommodations. It’s pretty well impossible to have relationships with people otherwise.

On the other hand, maybe this kind of thinking has landed us in our current predicament? If we were all completely open about calling out what we see as insane, then maybe silly belief structures would find it harder to take root. It’d probably be a society with far more hatred and conflict, though, so I don’t know if the tradeoff is worth it.

There are gradations too, with acting around trans women. It’s one thing to accommodate saying ‘she’ and ‘her’, another to point-blank lie when asked “do you think I’m attractive,” and another entirely to agree to join them in the bedroom so as to maintain the fiction.

All up, provided a transwoman isn’t obnoxious about the whole thing, I feel it’s needlessly demeaning and rude not to do the bare minimum along with it. At the same time, there are limits to what I’ll do.