site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

We're trying to prevent abuse.

No, you aren't. Even granting your premise that transgenderism is real, 99.9999999% of adolescent cases are just psychosomatic angst best treated with a stern "honey, you're wrong about this. Go look at yourself naked in the bathroom mirror to check your gender" and the goal is to prevent that approach.

We're not talking about the average case, we're talking about the case where a child is begging their school not to tell their parents because they think they'll be abused, and the school finds this plausible enough to go along with them.

Do you think that in those rare cases, it's still more likely that the student is wrong and the best thing for the student is for their parent to know?

Yes. Kids are stupid, transgenderism is made up, and the definition of 'abuse' in this case is just "calling mentally ill teens on their bullshit instead of letting them seriously harm themselves".

'Among the demographic where parents are most likely to abuse their kids for coming out as trans, very few kids come out as trans' is maybe not the ringing endorsement of your position that you think it is.

Few among demographics that have real problems come out as trans, yes.

Your entire argument seems to be 'I reject all empirical observations and assert my ideological position as true no matter what', which isn't really an argument that can be engaged with.

I could spend a half hour writing a wall of text about what social constructs are and how the categories are made for man and so forth, but it's hard for me to imagine you are here and don't already know those things. It seems more likely that this is a case of visibly ignoring them in order to do ideological virtue signalling.

So, good luck with that I guess.

I could spend a half hour writing a wall of text about what social constructs are and how the categories are made for man and so forth

Could you, please?

Moreover, could you define 'gender' in a non-self-referential way that isn't just biological sex?

Every time I ask a prog in the wild what the word "woman" means they either define it as itself and pretend they don't know what circular logic is, or act like it's a ridiculous gotcha question nobody could possibly answer. It's an incoherent nonsense ideology.

Oh come on, surely you understand the game being played here.

There are many different things that we call 'definitions' of words, including intensional vs extensional definitions, ostensive vs. stipulative vs. analytical definitions, etc.

The 'what is a woman' meme is just a trick of equivocating between different types of definitions (usually ostensive and analytical), and then dismissing any explanations that try to take the time to explain this distinction as 'mental gymnastics'.

Most people without training in logic or linguistics are most familiar with ostensive definitions, like 'a bird is a small flying animal with wings and feathers' or 'a woman is an adult human female'. These are the natural 'definitions' that occur to them intuitively, it takes a lot of prompting for them to reach for something beyond that. But turning around and pretending that what they just gave is an analytical definition - ie, that penguins must not be birds and trans women must not be women, therefore - is just a dishonest rhetorical trick.

And, either way - the whole thing is just a semantic argument about the meanings of words, to begin with. Semantic arguments are a good way to waste time arguing about nothing, and can often make your opponents look dumb if you strictly control what your audience is allowed to see. But it doesn't actually mean anything substantive about the empirical reality of the question at hand.