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Notes -
The Gays Destroyed The "No Politics" Rule
Pride month began, and the moderators of /r/Battletech enforced their "no politics" rule as they have through elections, wars, referedums, economic crisis, etc. A long standing rule fastidiously kept by most Battletech groups I frequent. It's preserved Battletech as one of my escapes for long years as every other hobby I had got overrun with far left politics. Alas, no longer.
In response, Catalyst games launched /r/OfficialBattletech, specifically calling out the "bigotry" of /r/Battletech, and announcing Battletech is a "safe space". They parachuted in a community leader with experience moderating "safe spaces". People began making the sorts of spurious claims against the mods of /r/Battletech you are used to seeing, calling them being fascist at best, literally "Heil Hitler" nazi's at worst on the most spurious of circumstantial evidence. The originator of /r/Battletech came out of nowhere and completely removed the mods of /r/Battletech to make damned sure /r/Battletech participates in Pride Month.
Because it's not political. It's just being a decent person.
So I guess Battletech is explicitly left wing now. You are no allowed to opt out of their politics.
Hobbies/Fandoms I'm allowed in
Video GamesBoard GamesScience FictionStar WarsStar TrekBattletechWoodworking
And I log into youtube to watch Stumpy Nubs tell me how to sharpen a chisel every day in fear some flashpoint will have occurred. That the Eye of Sauron finally noticed that woodworking is too white and must be destroyed. And suddenly every content creator I watch will be posting these mewling apology videos for not doing enough to foster diversity and inclusiveness in this important hobby. And the rest of the month ends up being pride themed woodworking content. Making your own buttplugs on a lathe or whatever. How to add glitter to a poly finish.
Gays destroyed the what now rule?
You don't have to look all that far back to remember days where the dynamic you see was, in fact, entirely upside down. DADT was implemented in the 1990's, and was replaced by gays being allowed to serve openly a cool two decades later. When my parents left high school and the male graduates applied at the draft office, the military still undertook serious effort to root out anyone gay - and I live in a nation that is friendlier to gay people than most of Europe is.
Talk about the vacation plans you and your (fellow gay) SO have been making in 1993? You're fired, do not pass go, do not collect $200. You don't get to marry that person, because of course people of the same sex don't get to do that. Local drunks will ambush you if you go for a drink and the police will cackle about this. If you bring any of this up, well, it's really not politics, is it? It's just being a decent person.
Yes, there's excesses in this: call it part of man's desire to have his culture be superior over others. So it goes. But accusing the gays of this uniquely? Please. Many of them well remember how they used to live, they can see places in their own nations where people still do, and they act accordingly. There's nothing odd or particularly wicked about these people, and we don't have to pretend otherwise.
If making hobbyist spaces aggressively pro-gay is a reaction to past abuse, wouldn't the people most in favor of this be older gay men? In my experience, the people most invested in this stuff either aren't gay at all or if they are, their age and class background makes it very unlikely they ever got fired or beaten up for it.
The staunchest pro-gay activists I personally know are people who had to cut ties with just-about their entire social circle on account of being gay. This is one reason, I think, LGBT activism has kept going so strong: the community gets an ever-present supply of people who hate those who'd oppress them with extreme zeal.
Does anyone actually check those stories, or is it the LGBT equivalent of a confessional narrative? Because I've known children of urban lefty professors who make such claims, and while I can't be sure they're false....
Yes, every community has liars and free riders. LGBT activists are human as much as anyone else. Indeed.
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Since the military has made gays openly serving a policy, how has their organization been doing? Have gays been rushing the fill the recruitment numbers? Or are they in a crisis to find anyone who even cares to join their organization?
Maybe there is a reason for this fence that has existed for thousands of years. Or you think you know better than all your ancestors?
I don't really think you can put the blame on declining military recruitment efforts on homosexuality. Race-based issues, COVID vaccination policies and the actual actions of the US military in combination with differing social attitudes among the population all seem like far more obvious causes for the decline than anything else, especially seeing as how we have successful historical examples of societies and militaries which didn't really care about homosexuality in the armed forces.
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There are in fact many things about which I know better than all my ancestors. The safety of lead plumbing, the causes and transmission of infectious diseases – the list goes on.
Anyway, how do you know the person you are replying to has no Greek ancestors?
A fun legend but of dubious factual basis
http://ancientheroes.net/blog//did-an-army-of-lovers-really-dominate-ancient-greece
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No differently than before, if the numbers are anything to go by; I see no dropoff in the slightest after 2011. Are the numbers wrong, or are you?
Your numbers lacks serious range, stopping around 2011 for some reason. I still can easily see a visual steep decline starting when “don’t ask don’t tell” was implemented, which actually helps prove my point.
https://warontherocks.com/2023/03/addressing-the-u-s-military-recruiting-crisis/
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Try looking at actual numbers, not just the first graphic from a web search. Active duty numbers are published yearly and it's public information, and if you're not poor statista will compile that into more parse-able charts. There is a noticeable drop from a local peak in 2010 to 2016 but that has halfway recovered since. Keeping in mind that in raw numbers it's a drop on the order of 100,000 members, with a recovery on the order of 40,000 and that in per capita terms that is a continuing decline.
One hundred thousand fewer people on active duty, in an army of over a million, the cause of which the statistics (obviously) won't tell us.
If that's it, I'm going to keep filing this under the non-issue drawer, yeah.
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The new sub removed a photo of some mechs painted up in police colors as police are hostile to pride and so posting that in pride month right after a pride related kerfuffle was considered unacceptable. There is nothing but excess in the way the pride people work and if it weren't for double standards they wouldn't have any standards at all.
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DADT was not a serious effort to root anyone gay out, it was a serious effort to keep them in. It's fair to say it was still unfair, too restrictive, and discriminatory, but it is extremely dishonest to claim that the goal was to get rid of gay people.
Even with this example in mind, it is pretty clear that progressives are explicitly destroying attempts to keep non-political spaces. Given that their protestations that they just want to be left alone quickly turned to bullying bakers, and promoting mastectomies for minors, it's fair to say their goal was never to keep anything apolitical.
The progressives disagree with you that these spaces were ever non-political, and frankly, I think they're right. I could talk at length about Dutch pillarisation and the funny consequences this had for society, but the people who bemoan politics being everywhere now are people who haven't been paying attention for all that long.
The victory I wanted was for everyone else to not care, too. Instead, I got LGBTQ2A+ climbing night at the local gym, corporations under the auspices of straight white women plastering rainbows on every surface, and “we believe love is love and kindness is everything” along with casual discussions on the internet of the moral imperative to punch my face.
We replaced homophobia with political enmity, not indifference. To me, the pride flag feels sorta akin to the confederate flag. Its not exactly a symbol of hate or exclusion for most of the people flying it, but it sure feels that way on this side of things.
The enmity is because the homophobia, to a large degree, remains. Many homophobes have grudgingly agreed (or been forced by law or social pressure) to not actively persecute homosexuals, but their position remains that homosexuals are not legitimate members of society and should be tolerated only on the condition that they keep it to themselves - don't express affection in public, don't "shove it in my face", don't
say gayacknowledge homosexuality. And, of course, many of them do persecute homosexuals.Indifference is reacting to two men kissing in public the same way you'd react to a man and a woman kissing in public, not tolerating private homosexuality.
Midwestern roots here- I don’t want to see any kissing in public or know anything of anyone’s sexual identity. It’s not my business and its quite impolite of you to make it so. So yeah, keep it to yourselves, everyone.
More seriously, I can’t quantify how many homophobes exist in the wild and the extent to which they make it known. I’d agree that homophobia remains, but I disagree it’s the cause for the political enmity. Hating across party lines is something new.
It feels like the implicit argument, to put words in your mouth, goes like this: the homophones, however many and however vocal, hate you and yours after all this time, so you are justified in hating them back, and twice as hard. There is no off ramp here.
Do you go around telling straight people to keep it to themselves? What about seeing a man and woman holding hands with prominent rings that indicate their marriage? Or are we going to say that straight isn't a sexual orientation? You may have some friends over at /r/GamingCirclejerk if you think that.
If you only ever raise issues with the identities of gay people publicly, how are you meaningfully going to differentiate yourself from those who just hate gay people?
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I'm not particularly approving of PDA either, but that's not the core of I'm talking about. It's merely an illustration. You have aggressive homophobes who actively lobby to oppress homosexuals (e.g. they want to roll back things like gay marriage), but you also have low-key homophobes. They grudgingly tolerate homosexuals on a day-to-day level, but they'd prefer they be excluded from public life, regard them as intrinsically suspect (see also: groomer discourse), and will support homophobic politicians and policies.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the enmity continues to exist because the war is still on. It's not like all the homophobes gave up and decided it was okay after all. Homophobia still has social and political power, even if it has fallen on hard times. As @Nantafiria notes, you still have children being disowned by their families for being homosexual. You still have anti-homosexual laws being proposed (and passed). It's not about justification, it's about acknowledging what is actually going on. As long as you have people trying to shove homosexuals back in the closet, homosexuals (and their allies) are going to shove back.
There might have been a compromise built around public institutional neutrality and pluralist tolerance, but that was never actually on the table. Instead we got attempts to entrench legal discrimination. Every concession to tolerance and legal recognition of homosexuality was, in effect, torn from the unwilling hands of people who want homosexuals to stay in the closet (or not exist). As long as that is the case, you're not going to get people to back down from ostentatious celebration and inclusion of homosexuality and hostility towards even mere disapproval. Though it almost certainly is no off ramp at this point - when total victory is in sight, there's no reason to settle for anything less than unconditional surrender.
Thank you for sharing your view on the matter from the other side. I’m sure I don’t notice much of what is going on because it’s not directed at me.
I do see quite a few anti-trans laws being passed in national news but I haven’t seen any anti-homosexual. Are you lumping the one in with the other or perhaps I just haven’t noticed? Would you mind providing an example or two?
The push for total victory is counter productive - it pushed me in the opposite direction and I’d guess I’m not alone. I got off the train when actual friends started unironically talking about literally bashing in the skulls of people with my political beliefs. I know I shouldn’t pin the beliefs of Bay Area radicalists on the movement at large, but I don’t know how to not do that, either.
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Correct. Homosexuality is fundamentally anti-social and anti-civilizational in a lot of ways. Merely being allowed to not be killed over it is a huge ask.
When you inevitable complain that homosexuality isn't anti-civilizational, consider that a civilization of homosexuals isn't possible. It will be gone within a human lifetime. Only a civilization that encourages self-reproduction is possible over timelines longer than a few decades.
Do you feel the same way about, say, monks or nuns? What is your criteria for anti-civilizational to a degree that deserves execution? It can't be "a civilization composed exclusively of X couldn't survive" because that's a criterion that would condemn, among others: men, women, the elderly, babies, doctors, etc...
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"We can't have a civilization if it's literally 100% X" doesn't imply "X is fundamentally anti-civilizational".
I find his universalization a bit hyperbolic, but if it isn't too much to ask would you say that acceptance of homosexuality is closer to being moral or immoral as it concerns moral duties and virtues?
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Correct. The right way to go about it though is to discourage both men and women kissing in public. Keep those to your bedroom, the rest of society doesn't need to see it. Until westerners grok this simple fact they should be treated to frequent public displays of gay men passionately kissing until it dawns upon them that a man and a woman kissing is indecent in the exact same way and to the exact same degree as two men kissing, it's just that their own oversexualised social mood makes them ignore the depravity of the former.
I think it's rather unfair to blame that one on the rank-and-file westerners. It wasn't that long ago when kissing in public was seen as indecent. The oversexualization came about through a massive amount of psyops, and arguably it was done specifically to pave the way for double mastectomies for minors, and whatever lies beyond.
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This makes no sense, there is massive political enmity aimed at people who are not homophobic, and who are saying homosexuals are legitimate members of society, and shouldn't be prohibited from expressing affection any more than straight people are.
There's been a bunch of these bills passed, so I can't vouch for every one, but "don't say gay" is mostly a lie. It's mostly "don't show porn to kids, and don't indoctrinate them with whacky pomo theories".
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For a while they were at the very least acting like all they wanted is apolitical treatment, if they never believed it, why should I take them at their word regarding anything?
That's flatly wrong. It was indeed possible to participate in hobby groups and focus on the hobby instead of any politics for many, many years prior to the awokening.
The standard response, and the correct one, is that the people who used to get them fired and beaten and marginalised are suddenly uncommonly invested in a tolerance they never believed in. Why should they believe anyone who talks about it when it never seems to have been on the table before?
Not for gay people, it wasn't. And lest you compare their fate to yours, they were in fact born that way in a way the people bemoaning anything rainbow-colored aren't.
Yes, it was, speaking as one. It's not relevant, why would I fucking bring it up? I participated in a load of internet forums during the good era of the internet and not once did it become necessary to announce what categories of people I was attracted to, or even my actual real life sex, age, or location.
Strange as it may seem these days, it is completely possible to NOT plaster all the details of your personal life all over the internet all the time. In fact, it used to be the norm to avoid doing that at all costs!
That was, coincidentally, the time when it was perfectly normal to call a game mechanic you were not fond of "gay".
It was indeed nice when people weren't perpetual offense-seeking fannies, yes. I wasn't offended by it, despite being a homosexualist. Toughen up.
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I, too, was around for that era of the internet - and I, too, miss it dearly. It died once the internet stopped being for nerds and started being for everyone. Neither of us are getting those days back.
We can have them back, those rules just need to be enforced instead of implicitly understood by everyone.
Enforced anonymity would do a lot to fix the internet, or small portions of it.
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That may be the standard response, but no honest person can claim it's correct. For example, you are not talking to a person who tried to get them fired, beaten, and marginalized, you are talking to a person who tried to protect the from getting fired, beaten, and marginalized, and tried talking extremely bigoted and aggressive people into acceptence.
The correct response is that people who were arguing for broad principles of acceptance and free speech are suddenly uncommonly invested in intolerance. I'm not going to say that they never believed in it, because it's starting to look like they always did, and were just hiding it.
Yes it was. No one cared what you were doing outside the hobby group.
You can do better than insist you're only talking to liars, and I'd appreciate if you did that rather than accuse me of lying to your face.
Because, for what it's worth, I'm sure those are the things you believe. And I'm also sure gay people are right to point out that these beliefs, today, are the ones of people who'd love to shove them back down the closet. Until there is a way to distinguish the likes of you from the likes of them, a good deal of them are going to take a dim view of people who bemoan a lost tolerance. A tolerance, I'll add, that they didn't see much of in the first place.
The workplace. The military. Public life in general.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. History didn't start off in the 2010s, and plenty of people cared about that just fine.
But there was a way to determine it, public people like James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghosian, the Weinstein Brothers, etc. have a track record. Private people like me also do, even though it may not be accessible by randos on the Internet, it was accessible to people in my immediate environment, who suddenly decided continue the march of progress and steamroll over all concerns.
Scroll back in the conversation, it was about hobby groups. You were claiming politically neutral spaces never existed, that's what I'm disputing. You might notice the issue people are raising isn't about taking politics out of public life - something that might very well be a contradiction - but about having some spaces were we can set aside intra-societal disputes, and focus on the things that we have in common.
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Frankly, this is bullshit. Name a single "non-political" internet space that ever had giant crosses plastered across it, and the rules updated to include "in this space we believe: there is no god but Jesus, all who do not praise him will be banned"
"There is no such thing as no-politics" is just used as an excuse to do whatever you want to people, claiming there are no standards of decency and pluralism that should stop you.
I refer to my original comment, where being known as gay would get you barred from the military or most any normal person's job, and where this was so pervasive it was the expectation. "There's no such thing as no-politics" indeed, because these gay people I've met and spoken to never had a choice.
"We never had a choice!" he screamed from atop a float shaped like a dick as it slowly trundled down the main thoroughfare during the second week of Pride Month.
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That might apply to some places. It doesn't apply to the hobby groups that are being discussed. You absolutely could participate in Battletech or video games without saying anything whatsoever about your private life.
I mean, you certainly couldn't play Counter-Strike without someone saying quite an awful lot about your private life. And your mom's private life, too, for that matter.
No, you couldn't pay Counter Strike without someone baselessly speculating about your private life. There were no consequences for what they said, because none of it was real, they were just fishing around for insults. There is so much difference between "anonymous person makes something up to annoy you" and "being known as gay would get you barred from the military or most any normal person's job" that it's a difference in kind, not degree.
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No, being known as gay would get you barred from high status jobs, which most normal people don’t have.
More to the point, the objection isn’t actually ‘gays should go into the closet’. There are people who believe that but it’s not the contention at issue. The contention at issue is whether a ‘no discussion of current events, period, with current events defined as anything after 1988’ rule should preclude 2023 pride month specific content. Which seems obvious.
I get why gay activists feel like they should have a special exception. I just don’t care. They got what they wanted.
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So? Why should I care about what an unrelated organization did? This is a hobby space ffs, not some government or public entity. You’re trying to justify totalitarianism based on some kind of collective blood libel that almost no one alive in the country has anything to do with.
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They absolutely had a choice. They made the choice to be gay, and not just homosexual, and that was a political act of their own free will.
Nah.
It would be better to just drop the conversation altogether rather than leaving comments like this.
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