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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35167 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Imagine you're out and about in the city, suddenly you hear a noise, you turn to see a truck heading right for you. Maybe you were too distracted, maybe the driver is drunk, either way you never had a chance.

Next thing you know, you wake up in a hospital, and the year is 2122. Turns out someone close to you signed you up to one of those cryonics experiments, where they unfreeze you when the state of medicine is advanced enough that they can help you. You grieve to loss of everyone you knew and loved, and given no other options, you move on with your life. You've made some friends, and one day as you're all chilling out, you find yourself in the middle of a discussion, reminiscent of the ones that happen on The Motte every once in a while: progressives always win... or do they? You hear your friends exchanging the usual arguments about whether or not eugenics was a progressive idea, when you realize you haven't really seen anything about trans issues, since you got revived. You bring it up, but no one knows what you're talking about. You check the current history books, and there's something about gay marriage, but nothing really about trans issues. You check Wikipedia, there's more details there, and while to coverage is not unsympathetic to the 21st century trans narrative, it's oddly terse. Your friends go "huh, the more you know..." and move on with the conversation, but you feel unsatisfied with being unable to show just how big the issue used to be.

There's a decent archive of the early 21st century. You can access articles in the NYT, the Atlantic, Washington Post, Vox, etc, and you can retrieve any academic paper from our current era. What would you try to use, to show how important the issue was in 2022?

I'd imagine the reverse would be true too. They'd be fascinated about things that seemed relatively minor in your day but which either presaged truly massive events or were just the current hot topic of the 22nd century.

"How did people at the time feel about president Biden's views on the Congo? He set things up masterfully for the 2050 pivot to Africa didn't he? Got well ahead of the poor Germans".

Search out the papers that pushed 'affirmation only care' on gender questioning teens and the laudable editorials on these topics in mainstream US media.

Puberty blockers are pretty nasty, early surgery ditto, surgeries performed on young women etc.

That'd get their attention, that such outrages were condoned in papers of records and allowed by the laws of the land.

Pointing out Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize doesn't get much of a reaction these days, is that the kind of thing you're talking about?

I expect you'd get similar disinterest in any future ideological position that had been quietly dropped and historically revised in the same way support for Stalin was.

Pointing out lobotomy does, so who knows..

Does it?

My impression is that the reaction is more "Haha, yeah that was weird! Good thing The Science progressed and we don't do these things anymore!"

Nah, usually it's more like 'they insane, kept doing it for decades'. E.g. see here.

I think greasing the skids under distressed teenage girls so they end up getting mutilated and castrated, by policy is going to rank up there with lobotomies.

A quick Google search suggests 50k lobotomies between 1949 and 1952, vs. "In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo's data analysis of insurance claims." That's a multiple-orders-of-magnitude difference, and the US population in 1949 was about half of what it is now.

What would you try to use, to show how important the issue was in 2022

social media - show how popular the topic is on many different platforms, getting lots of likes or whatever the metric is whether from politicians or generic popular figures.

Not that these are good examples, i just don't have a good way to search twitter. anyone have any recommendations, like pushshift but for twitter? Either a search thing like camas or an API. pushshift itself has a twitter API but it's private / researchers-only or something)

"Hey AI God computer, fetch me all the social media accounts that have a bio that returns a match for the following regular expression (he|she|they)\/(him|her|them)"

Then explain why the fuck where people even doing this.

Problem is bios are transient, hell entire accounts are. Go look for a controversial conversation from the past, and you'll probably find it looking like Swiss cheese. I'm a bit skeptical about how useful social media will be for historical research.

A couple weeks ago I dropped a couple of names on some people whose ages ranged between mid-30s and mid-60s and I was met with blank stares. Even after explaining who the people were, everyone was still drawing a blank. The names were Chandra Levy and Gary Condit. For those who are unaware, Chandra Levy was a US Department of Corrections employee who disappeared in the spring of 2001. Her disappearance made national news when it was revealed that she had previously been an intern for California Congressman Gary Condit, and there was evidence that they had had an affair. There was never anything approaching evidence that he was involved in her disappearance, but his continued denial of any intimate relationship in the face of nearly overwhelming evidence gave him the aura of a man who wasn't telling the truth, and speculation ensued.

If you're too young to remember the case, I'm bringing it up because it was huge at the time. The New York Times ran over 50 stories about it between May and September. To put this in context, the other big news stories during that period were the Microsoft antitrust suit, the Bush tax cuts, the Andrea Yates child-drowning case, and the president's monthlong August vacation. It's hard to gauge the coverage of most of these, but Yates merited fewer than 20 articles, and the rest of these weren't exactly corkers. The Levy disappearance was easily the biggest news story of that summer, until 9/11 pushed it off of the front page. Even then, it had enough staying power to remain in the background for years afterward, as new developments arose. Condit sought reelection but lost the primary in March. The body was found in May. A man who had previously been convicted of attacking other women in the area where the body was found was convicted in 2006, but was released ten years later after appeals revealed that the prosecution's case was terrible. As recently as last year, the Times was still following the case, this time about how the prosecutors are facing malicious prosecution charges.

It was a big story. It may have only dominated the public consciousness because it was the only interesting thing in an otherwise uninteresting time, but it dominated nonetheless. It's no longer front-page news, but developments still merit mention by the Newspaper of Record. And yet plenty of people who were certainly old enough to remember draw a blank 20 years later. The same is true of the 1979 Ogaden War, or the Bhopal disaster; it seems to have vanished from the collective consciousness, apart from the aforementioned updates and the occasional podcast dedicated to these sorts of things. Now imagine trying to explain to someone how big a news story was a hundred years after the fact. Are you familiar with the Hall-Mills murder? It was easily the biggest murder story in American history until the Lindbergh Kidnapping, and was much bigger than any popular crime story since the OJ Trial. Yet today it only gets a mention in true crime books and podcasts and such. If someone frozen in 1922 were to wake up today and asked about the resolution of the case, he may be incredulous to find out that no one has any idea what he's talking about. Even big political events barely merit discussion. Teapot Dome may be mentioned in every US history book, but good luck finding anyone who can explain what the scandal was (and it was one that jeopardized Harding's presidency, though he would die before it was resolved). So no, there's no one article you can point to that will fully express the magnitude of an issue to someone 100 years in the future.

Very true. Another data point: Very few people today know or care about the hot 1896 political question of bimetallism, which gave occasion to "the greatest political speeches in American history" that enraptured the DNC.

In one sense no, in another sense we care very much about monetary policy, international trade, the distribution of advantages between finance, industry, and agriculture. We don't talk about Gold vs Silver because it's irrelevant, we moved to fiat money, but we argue about all the issues that made Gold vs Silver important today. Not a political ad this year doesn't mention either inflation, trade, or big banks/pharma/business.

A man who had previously been convicted of attacking other women in the area where the body was found was convicted in 2006, but was released ten years later after appeals revealed that the prosecution's case was terrible.

Considering that this is an extensive writeup, I'm surprised that you omitted the fact that he was an illegal immigrant from El Salvador. I assume this is relevant, because it very likely prompted many normies to block the whole incident out so as to avoid wrongthink.

By the way, just to nitpick: the Ogaden War took place 1977-78. Was it ever extensively covered in Western media? I'd be surprised somewhat.

I doubt his immigration status was relevant to the story fading away. It was a liberal organization, the Washington Post, that led the charge to get the DC police to take a closer look at the guy. More importantly, though, when these things are done, they're done. When the FBI released their final report in the Gaby Petito investigation last January, it made the news, but the interest wasn't nearly as big as it had been last fall. The New York Times ran over ten stories about the Petito disappearance during September and October of last year, and the story of the FBI report is the only one they've run since then. That's not quite a 1 to 1 comparison because the Petito mystery was solved and the Levy mystery wasn't, but people move on from popular crime stories easily.

If liberals really couldn't cope with an illegal immigrant being the perp, they wouldn't have blocked it out, but focused on what a terrible case it was. The only real evidence the police had against the guy was the testimony of a jailhouse snitch who had a history of telling stories to curry favor with law enforcement. The initial story the informant gave police (back in 2001) was that Condit had paid the perp $25 grand as a hit job on Levy. The assertion is ridiculous for reasons I shouldn't have to explain, and the DC police rightly told the guy to pound sand until the Post started asking questions years later. When it was revealed post-conviction that the informant had perjured himself on the witness stand the prosecution was forced to drop the charges, since the guy had no credibility at this point and the rest of the case was garbage. Not that anyone could have known all of this in 2008, but cases that revolve around jailhouse informants and other questionable kinds of evidence are generally pretty shoddy.

As for the Ogaden War, I apologize for getting the year wrong; I knew it was the Carter Administration but whiffed on the exact date. Anyway, one year ago today we were in the midst of the Gabby Petito obsession and, as I alluded to earlier, the Times mentioned Petito's name in 16 articles, though some of these were bare mentions (e.g. "While most of us are obsessing over Gabby Petito, the Yankees are still in a pennant race", etc.) and others are only peripherally about her (e.g. articles about other missing people), so I'd say there were at least ten depending on what you count and as high as 18 if you count every article that mentioned her name, ever. In the first 2 months of the Ogden war, July and August 1977, the Times ran over 50 articles about the conflict. Granted, some of these were world news briefs, and the Times traditionally focuses more on hard news and less on popular crime stories, but the difference is still stark. I don't want to suggest that this war was on everyone's mind to the same extent the Petito case was (what the Times didn't provide was more than made up for by the tabloids), but it had serious Cold War implications and was certainly a big deal at the time.

When the FBI released their final report in the Gaby Petito investigation last January, it made the news, but the interest wasn't nearly as big as it had been last fall.

I suppose the report didn't reveal any further juicy details?

It was a liberal organization, the Washington Post, that led the charge to get the DC police to take a closer look at the guy.

I have to say that sounds genuinely surprising. Maybe his legal status was only confirmed by the authorities later?

By the way, just to nitpick: the Ogaden War took place 1977-78. Was it ever extensively covered in Western media? I'd be surprised somewhat.

I suggest Biafran war as a better example. Possibly millions died in famine; there was a dramatic airlift; the Médecins Sans Frontières was established as a direct response. Today? Some people have heard about MSF/Doctors Without Borders, probably nobody about Biafra.

Yeah. As far as I know, the Ogaden War was only ever brought up in Western media in the context of detente, as a Conservative talking point against it (due to the extensive Soviet airlift operation organized to assist Ethiopia).

Only Warren Zevon fans, mores the pity.

I was wearing an N95 working in a crawlspace all day today, and remembered that only last year there were people on the motte loudly exclaiming that they didn't even notice wearing two masks, and people who didn't want to jog masked were grandma-murdering moral defectives.

Of course, there were also people saying that wearing one for five minutes literally killed them (they got better), but after spending a miserable day in one I'm more sympathetic to them.

It's crazy how stuff like that just vanishes and everyone pretends their extreme opinions on it never happened. Or just honestly but conveniently forget all about it.

I have been wanting to do an effort post on the Culture War clashes of yesteryear that have since fizzled for various reasons. This is a couple of good examples, to which I might add turn-of-the-century hysteria over carpal tunnel disabling knowledge workers at keyboards and file sharing vs. the RIAA and MPAA.

I'm curious if anyone has any other battles-gone-cold they can remember.

I have been wanting to do an effort post on the Culture War clashes of yesteryear that have since fizzled for various reasons.

Some good ones I think of from time-to-time:

  • incandescent bulbs vs. fluorescent

  • Terri Schiavo

  • stem cells in general

  • Israel/Palestine (comes in waves; gets forgotten for five years then comes back)

  • creationism

incandescent bulbs vs. fluorescent

I guess we ended up side-stepping that, since LEDs took over.

This is probably a Metaphor For Something.

Yes, LEDs ended up being much better peformance-wise and were introduced shortly enough following fluorescents that the weird culture war element of it fizzled. But back in the day there were a lot of bizarre op-eds written about it

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especially related to the potential for mercury exposure

I get the feeling that the risk of mercury in general is far overstated.

Aside from that, did you ever experience other issues with CFLs? I know there were many people who claimed they caused headaches. The light seemed to always bother my eyes when they were first turned on. And they seemed like a really poor choice for rooms I was only in briefly, as they'd burn out after relatively few uses over the course of a year or so (storage room/pantry). And being from a household where we tended to turn off/on lights when leaving/entering a room, the lifespan seemed to be cut to the order of a few months.

CFLs were a waste.

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Their main problem was that they took anywhere from 10-120 seconds to reach their full brightness; more in the cold. So every time you'd turn the light on, you'd be disgusted by this dim, wan light until you gave it time to warm up.

The lumen per watt efficiency was quite good, so they were well-suited for fixtures where they would be left on for hours at a time. I had one in my basement that I just left on 24/7. Now LED lights equal them in efficiency and beat them in every other way.

They did? I still have CFLs from when they first got popular. They just keep going.

file sharing vs. the RIAA and MPAA

I guess people did just kinda forget. The RIAA just hasn't been quite that aggressive until recently (Twitch), and back then, almost no one thought of trying to get the hosting for pirate sites yoinked. I think the pirates have proven too hardy to exterminate, and the big media corporations have preferred the tactic of "retreat behind paywalls and requiring internet connections" thanks to the rise of digital distribution and content streaming.

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I've thought there would be a market for a newspaper that only reported 6 month ago's news. It would report the stories that were important half a year ago, and give us a good summary of where the story went, which facts people had wrong, etc. The "Breaking" story with the benefit of hindsight, would be very interesting to read. It would be a good way to see which stories were actually important when they broke, and which ones were just flashes in the pan.

I don't think "thing which people argue about" is by definition culture war. What makes it culture war is that there's no room for disagreement.

Carpal tunnel syndrome isn't culture war unless saying "I doubt that carpal tunnel syndrome is very common" is, not only thought to be wrong, but considered by the other side to condemn you as a person and to justify retaliation against you.

Carpal tunnel syndrome isn't culture war unless saying "I doubt that carpal tunnel syndrome is very common" is, not only thought to be wrong

This was specifically a reference to the battles over policies the late 2000 Clinton administration promulgated via OSHA, only to be reversed by the incoming Bush administration in 2001 [1] [2] [3]. In a quieter era, this was a reasonably sized political fight that was largely pushed aside by events in the fall of 2001.

Ultimately I feel like the Clinton policies (explicit focus on ergonomics) have largely won out on, if not by OSHA fiat, then economics: workplaces like assembly lines are typically designed to minimize short- and long-term injury risks and office workers can generally get standing desks and such. But we're not all using 2000s-vintage ergonomic keyboards either, nor are office workers on these newfangled "computers" getting benched with career-ending typing injuries regularly: rates of carpal tunnel have been largely flat.

I'd still say that it's not culture war for the reason I gave: You're not a bad person if you disagree over it.

Net Neutrality is a fun one. I'm not sure everyone have actually forgotten about it, like, if you mention it on reddit (where it was the subject of a bunch of all-time top posts) people just ignore you instead of asking what it was.

It's especially ironic in that Redditors have done a 180 and now are all for companies using their power to discriminate

Fight For The Future definitely still cares about it. There are people beating the drum to get Gigi Sohn confirmed for the FCC, but it seems like that has stalled.

turn-of-the-century hysteria over carpal tunnel disabling knowledge workers at keyboards

Uh, that one is real, it just turns out that for most people fixing your posture and keyboard setup to prevent carpel tunnel is trivial.

So no, there's no one article you can point to that will fully express the magnitude of an issue to someone 100 years in the future.

Now that's blackpilling. More or less what I subconsciously expected, but the sheer amount of your examples, and how foreign they all sound ("Ogaden War"? "Bhopal disaster"? Are you a visitor from a parallel universe?) blew my mind.

Still, there is some way you have learned all these were big stories. Or all they all from memory?

I remember Bhopal, I didn't know about the Ogaden War, the only mention I heard of that was lyrics in this song from 1985 (a one-hit wonder from Latin Quarter).

There's more tanks than food in the Ogaden

It looks like Moscow got it wrong again

It's always funny just what cross-section of history people know. Like, to me, the Bhopal Disaster is just a thing that happened. I don't know when I learned about it, I can't remember a time I didn't know about it. I could probably give a vaguely accurate summary of it without even checking Wikipedia. I don't understand how anyone could not know about it.

Never heard of the Ogaden War, though.

And I know I've heard the name Gary Condit before, but I don't remember anything about Chandra Levy.

Meanwhile, I bet there's some historical moment that you have deep knowledge about and that I have literally never even heard of.

I can thank the Yes Men for teaching me about the Bhopal disaster.

Torso murders!

Most of the things listed above may have vanished from the public consciousness, but they still have enormous impact within their own particular niche communities. You aren't a good chemical plant worker unless Bhopal is in the back of your mind every time you get the urge to neglect your daily scrubber monitoring paperwork. I suspect the same is true for congressmen with mistresses, African statesmen, and insanity defense lawyers with respect to their relevant now-forgotten events

Similarly, programmers tend to know about Therac-25.

Seconding Bhopal: I have to remind myself that it's not common knowledge outside of industrial safety or PlainlyDifficult followers, despite being the largest industrial disaster of the century by at least one and possibly two orders of magnitude.

((But then again, there's a lot of people who don't remember much about the Beruit explosion, and it rhymed with a couple other (distant) followers for big industrial accidents.))

Focusing too much on individual incidents can be tricky, though. Colgan Air 3407 has had a massive aviation impact and is part of the reason the commercial pilot shortage got so sharp so fast, but the reason it did and similar or larger incidents didn't. Is that because the action came about as a result of the multiple incidents all together? Or because the action had other, non-incident motivations? Does the distinction make sense in this case? If not, does it make sense in broader cases? Was Skyline Towers a warning for Willow Island, or were they two different aspects of a same underlying problem? Was Hyatt Regency uniquely dangerous, or just unusually obvious?

I've heard of all of these events apart from the Hall-Mills murder. However, all it takes to convince me that something called "Hall-Mills murder" was, indeed, a huge issue in 1922 consuming the newspapers at the same intensity as the OJ case did in 1995 is, indeed, some stranger on an Internet forum noting so, in this very post I'm replying to. I don't need to Google, I don't need to check the Wikipedia, I don't need to know who Hall or Mills were, assuming they are people - I'm ready to believe this any which way. I will do this after sending this post, but even before sending, I'm good to go.

There's an awful lot of Big Names and Sensational Cases from the past which we have forgotten, or never heard about. Just randomly reading old books will turn up references where it's assumed everyone knows what is meant, because it was the Current Affairs Hot Story of the time, but if you aren't familiar with the names then it's frustrating - who were these people? what was this event?

Just pulling from Chesterton, he mentions "Colonel Ingersoll's atheistical lectures". Who was Ingersoll? Pretty much the Richard Dawkins of his day:

Robert Green Ingersoll (August 11, 1833 – July 21, 1899), nicknamed "the Great Agnostic", was an American lawyer, writer, and orator during the Golden Age of Free Thought, who campaigned in defense of agnosticism.

Or, during his tour of America, there was a huge murder trial in Oklahoma in 1920, the Hamon murder trial which involved a very prominent politician:

Jacob Louis Hamon Sr. (June 5, 1873 – November 26, 1920) was an American attorney, oil millionaire, railway owner, and political figure. He was Chairman of the Oklahoma Republican National Committee, and after statehood, state chairman of the Republican National Committee. By 1920, he had become quite wealthy and an influential player in Republican Party politics. He allegedly swung enough Republican votes to assure Warren G. Harding would be the Republican candidate for President, and subsequently become the President-elect. It was rumored that Harding would name Hamon to an important post in the new administration. His murder, and the subsequent trial of his mistress, was national news in 1920.

So, how many people heard of this before? And yet this was a national sensation reaching up to involve even the president.

Let me quote some Chesterton to give a flavour of the publicity:

The posters in the paper-shop were placarded with the verdict in the Hamon trial; a cause célèbre which reached its crisis in Oklahoma while I was there. Senator Hamon had been shot by a girl whom he had wronged, and his widow demanded justice, or what might fairly be called vengeance. There was very great excitement culminating in the girl’s acquittal. Nor did the Hamon case appear to be entirely exceptional in that breezy borderland. The moment the town had received the news that Clara Smith was free, newsboys rushed down the street shouting, ‘Double stabbing outrage near Oklahoma,’ or ‘Banker’s throat cut on Main Street,’ or otherwise resuming their regular mode of life. It seemed as much as to say, ‘Do not imagine that our local energies are exhausted in shooting a Senator,’ or ‘Come, now, the world is young, even if Clara Smith is acquitted, and the enthusiasm of Oklahoma is not yet cold.’

Mr. Hamon was presumably a member of the Upper Ten, if there is such a thing. He was a member of the Senate or Upper House in the American Parliament; he was a millionaire and a pillar of the Republican party, which might be called the respectable party; he is said to have been mentioned as a possible President. And the speeches of Clara Smith’s counsel, who was known by the delightfully Oklahomite title of Wild Bill McLean, were wild enough in all conscience; but they left very little of my friend’s illusion that members of the Upper Ten could not be accused of crimes. Nero and Borgia were quite presentable people compared with Senator Hamon when Wild Bill McLean had done with him.

My first suspicion is that in a world with cryonics, this means body modification is sufficiently good that people can transition fully and convincingly without too much trouble. I suspect that in such a world the 2022 discussion is going to sound weird and anachronistic. I'd probably give up on trying to convince anyone that it was an important issue, since this would suggest that it was a publicly salient issue for only long enough to be a footnote before becoming technologically and culturally resolved to whatever the 2122 status quo is.

My first suspicion is that in a world with cryonics, this means body modification is sufficiently good that people can transition fully and convincingly without too much trouble.

I've actually got a game idea that, for complicated reasons, plays really well with homosexual/bisexual relationships, plays really badly with 2020s trans sensibilities, but is completely compatible with super scifi medical technology.

So I'm planning to just not have "trans people" as such, and if anyone asks, I'll say "oh yeah, medical science is really good, if you want to change your body you just go to the doctor. Takes like an hour of filling out paperwork, then you show up for a shot every week for a few months. Totally normal, nobody cares."

I know some people are going to get bent out of shape anyway, but, hey, fuck 'em.

If you casually established that some character(s) are trans in that way via some minor background detail, like an item description or document hidden in a drawer, people on the left would be pretty ecstatic. Celeste got a ton of positive press coverage and cheering because the main character is established to be trans by some very minor background details in one room in a DLC. (Of course, by the same token, this will piss off some people on the right...)

In this case it wouldn't really work; the general game loop is that you're trapped in a haunted mansion with a few other people, and you're supposed to figure out who the bad people are. Everything can be a clue, so for example, if you find yourself in a mansion with a lot of wooden stakes and mirrors and one female character and the rest male then this might be the Vampire Queen's Harem event. (Or it might not! Could be werewolves; did you notice the silver swords?)

But this means that anything that I call attention to has to potentially be a clue. And it's hard to come up with grade-B-horror plots that center around trans people.

it's hard to come up with grade-B-horror plots that center around trans people.

It's not difficult to come up with them, but it's hard for any to beat the landmark "or else it gets the hose again."

TBF you could do so much with that. Vampire that identifies as human, everyone's sympathetic until the skin peelers come out, etc.

Ah, interesting premise!

I can think of a few horror plots that "this person's family photos show a child that's the opposite gender instead of them" could be a clue for, off the top of my head. And at least a couple for "this person has a mysterious drug that they inject/take regularly" (which has other mundane explanations, of course).

"So we get to the coroner and he tells us something we already know: it wasn't wolves that killed him, it was an elf blade. Okay, he doesn't say that, but it definitely wasn't wolves." - Ross Scott.

Would this game essentially be Clue, but more supernatural?

It's based more directly off Betrayal At House On The Hill, except because it's got a computer backing it up, "figuring out which event you're in" is important; there isn't a hard shift between "exploring" and "the haunting". It's not really an investigative process, but I'm aiming for more triage; you're trying to deal with an upcoming supernatural menace without really knowing which supernatural menace, so you're kinda trying to cover all the reasonable bases.

Except with the guarantee that the bases can be covered - no werewolves without a ready supply of silver, for example.

"Clue but supernatural" seems to fit Phasmophobia well enough.

Hm, I would probably collect all political posts on Facebook and Twitter, then run an algorithm to see how often transgender issues are mentioned relative to other issues. This gives us good information on the cares of the average citizen. Of course there may also be polling down on how much citizens care about transgender issues. Then I’d consult the relative readership of transgender news stories relative to other issues in major news websites. If I needed immediate proof of its importance I would show clips of Joe Rogan, whose influence dwarfs the big papers.

Hm, I would probably collect all political posts on Facebook and Twitter, then run an algorithm to see how often transgender issues are mentioned relative to other issues.

Hm, I think someone ran an analysis like that on the NYT (not necessarily only about gender stuff, also comparing the frequency of terms like "duty" vs "right"). An interesting idea, but I wonder how persistent social media posts will prove to be. For example here's Roko's compilation of epidemiologists' posts about covid in early 2020. It's only been 2 years, and most of them are already gone. He screenshotted some of them, but you have to already know what to look for to find them.

I would first check whether is there some significant taboo. And what is the reason for "it's oddly terse".

If somehow cryonic magic is real, check whether they have resources for recreated people. Maybe written by someone before you.

I would assume with that level of medical technology they would have a simple and effective cure for any kind of dysphoria.

I would first check whether is there some significant taboo.

There doesn't seem to be any. Let's just say that for an unknown reason, people's opinion on the issue reverted to the one pre-awokening, except they're more compassionate to people with dysphoria.

And what is the reason for "it's oddly terse".

How do you check that? For example, here's an article about compulsory sterilization in Sweden. You can find out that it happened. You can see the line go up. There's even an explanation for it going up: "When, from January 1976, permission was no longer needed, the number of sterilisations grew considerably." But wait, doesn't the line show compulsory sterilizations to begin with? Why does the chart end on 1979? Did they just stop? Why? How?

If somehow cryonic magic is real, check whether they have resources for recreated people. Maybe written by someone before you.

They figured the Internet has you covered.

Let's just say that for an unknown reason

Your research eventually pays off, and you learn that the foundational event that made trans issues a non-starter in the future was the Canadian Woodwork Teacher. Everyone on all sides of the argument agreed to never, ever, discuss anything to do with this ever again.

Warning: Before you click on the link, NSFW, not safe for life, not safe for your sanity. There are live-action clips of this person operating a table saw in class on Twitter and Youtube if you really need 'em as proof, but you're on your own there, pal.

What would you try to use, to show how important the issue was in 2022?

The first step would be to figure out what happened and what's the status of the issue right now. What happens in 2122 when a dude wants to be a dudette or vice versa? What if a dude wants to bang other dudes while remaining a dude? Is everybody ok with this? Do they get arrested by the cyberpunk inquisition? Perhaps this never happens because those tendencies have been genetically engineered out of the population.

Your hypothetical doesn't explain this, but I think it would be important to know when planning out a culture war history lesson. (Or maybe deciding to shut up about the subject altogether, if it turns out that the cyberpunk inquisition is real.)

I can elaborate on the story, but I don't see how what exactly happened is relevant to how do you prove how big the topic is now.

What happens in 2122 when a dude wants to be a dudette or vice versa? What if a dude wants to bang other dudes while remaining a dude? Is everybody ok with this? Do they get arrested by the cyberpunk inquisition? Perhaps this never happens because those tendencies have been genetically engineered out of the population.

All of that is allowed, it's just that transitioning is nowhere near as popular as it used to be. Some people still do it, it's seen the same way as cutting, or anorexia nowadays. There's no inquisition, and no evidence of mass scale genetic engineering. It's hard to find out what happened to change people's mind, because hardly anyone even knows about that episode in history.

it's seen the same way as cutting, or anorexia nowadays.

These are still massive deals, you're just not a teenager anymore. I might be wrong but I'd even guess there's more of both now that social media has subsumed much of teenage socializing.

Assuming that 100 years has not improved how well transitioning works and transitioning is no better than it is today, the current status as of 2122 still matters because much of the trans controversy is directly related to how you are required to act towards other people. Does 2122 think those requirements are still requirements? If yes, but nobody minds the requirements, the left won. If no, the left lost, and you can tell your friends "imagine that you had to use trans pronouns and let trans women onto women's sporting teams and..." Since your friends don't do those things, they should have no trouble understanding why forcing people to do them results in controversy.

Let me ask you this–if you were to walk into a bar and someone was wearing MC colors, how do you think society would require you to act toward them?

The question is whether my friends in 2122 would understand why it's controversial. If I said "you need to obey what the trans activists tell you or they beat you up", I'm pretty sure they would understand why that's controversial. Even if the things demanded by the trans activists were things nobody demanded in 2122, they would still understand it.

(Of course, the activists get you fired rather than literally bashing you over the head.)

Like they were a potentially dangerous unleashed animal? Our society at least. But maybe in 100 years the panopticon is actually effective and you could be an unmitigated dick with no fear of consequences? Or maybe in a hundred years we will be celebrating the quinquagenary of our victory in the Sino American war, where motorcycle clubs provided the last line of defence against the invasion, and society expects you to treat them with deference and respect.

Then I think the model would be something like recovered memories and you'd want to emphasize the scale of the issue. This isn't really the type of thing contemporary articles are good at doing, so maybe some of the more dubious modern 'studies' that show some preposterous number of individuals being some form of 'genderqueer'. It's difficult t get it all in one article because you'd also want to capture how suppressed opposing speech is. I think the money article is probably yet to come out, maybe in the 2024 election if this issue is still as salient as it currently is, and I expect it to be, we'll have an article clarifying what the Democrat nominee's position is on it and that seems like it would be an ideal time capsule.

Since you brought up the subject... I'm vaguely aware of recovered memories, I think some Skeptics I used to follow would bring them up, but how big were they?

I can't say I was alive at the time to provide a first hand but this survey suggests around 18.5 million Americans at least discussed the idea with their therapist. There are more contemporary accounts that seem to indicate that the concept had some hold on the nation being discussed widely on TV and taken seriously by the law and professional clinicians.

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