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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Can someone steelman why “pride” is still necessary? Seems that you can be gay, bi or trans and it’s more than accepted - there’s a huge increase in kids claiming lgbt status so if there’s stigma it’s not apparent anymore. At what point does it make sense to call a moratorium for social movements that have lost their purpose? What are the “victory conditions” for what homophobia is considered no longer a major issue?

It needs to end so that it can begin again as it's just rainbow propaganda for the TQ+. LGB were sidelined long ago and the function of pride now is just authoritarian mind control.

OP is low effort and many of these responses illustrate why we moderate against that sort of thing. "Pride now is just authoritarian mind control" may even be true, but how would anyone become more informed about that possibility by reading your comment? You're signalling a view without elaborating on the details; you're participating in a conversation without actually contributing anything of substance to it. Please post with more effort than this.

Yes, agreed, very low effort. I'll update in this comment:

It needs to end so that it can begin again as it's just rainbow propaganda for the TQ+. LGB were sidelined long ago and the function of pride now is just authoritarian mind control.

It needs to end because it has been taken over. While many gay people are presumably still participating in the original pride intent, being out and openly gay in a spirit of community, the movement, its intents and symbology have been taken over.

Currently we have an open culture war around gender ideology and an activist movement that seeks social engineering over how we speak, the meaning of words and a challenge to the existing order of human rights. This has nothing to do with gay people, except that they are a convenient vehicle-Denton's playbook, a legal strategy that outlines the approach the trans lobby should take, explicitly states this.

This is about power, the power to get people to say things they don't believe and to accept ideas that aren't grounded in science or logic. The ability to make people say absurd things under group pressure is a standard marker of authoritarian tyranny.

So the rainbow flag, pride event is not about gay people any more, they are in fact definitionally undermined by the new gender ideas, and increasingly encouraged culturally to identify as trans rather than gay. It id about symbolic power and maintaining a cultural hegemony.