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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38184 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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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?

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?

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.

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.

  • -19

Not for gay people, it wasn'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!

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.

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.

I am straight, so I ended up deferring to the homosexuals that insisted that was unacceptable behavior.

You made the mistake of simply listening to the loudest complainers in the room, then.

It's more like that article Scott had about halal food. When one group doesn't care if their meat is halal and the other does, the share of halal meat on the market will be larger than the share of Muslims. Since there are very few people that demand their meat isn't halal or that "gay" has to be used as a pejorative, the group that cares wins.

And you can see where that norm has gotten us -- a ruined internet.

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.

The word just is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Just do that, how?

Take over communities and enforce them, just like the leftists do.

The set of people who can and will do so, and the set of people with politics similar to yours, have extremely little overlap.

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.

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.

Not for gay people, it wasn't.

Yes it was. No one cared what you were doing outside the hobby group.

no honest person

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.

No one cared what you were doing outside the hobby group.

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.

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.

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.

The workplace. The military. Public life in general.

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.

Then, as an example we're both familiar with, I'll point to the Boy Scouts of America as a hobby group (which it effectively is) gay people couldn't openly be a part of.

Wasn't it an explicitly religious hobby group? I recall "reverent" being a part of the Scout's Oath or whatever.

I'm not familiar enough with the organisation to know. Wouldn't that make the 'no apolitical spaces for The Gays' case even stronger?

No? The existence of an explicitly religious space does not mean no space ever was apolitical and open for gay people.

I'll happily concede, and point out that my point was that apolitical spaces existed, not that all of them were apolitical, and that gay people eventually won enough sympathy to overturn these discriminatory rules in large part by appealing to the very principle of apoliticism you claim never existed.

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