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Notes -
The gender ideology movement sort of feels out of the news cycle where I live, but remains very top of mind for me.
As I see it, the whole umbrella is actually multiple, almost unrelated strands, queerying category activists, social engineering progressives, AGPs, internet cults, all underpinned by unthinking legal activism and of course corporate profiteering. Did I mention an overtly political and enabling media environment bereft of any journalistic values?
I am fascinated by all these things but mainly I want to talk about the social mania aspect. I'm very interested in how smart people, who would inevitably class themselves as above-average in rationality and morality, are able to brush off child-safeguarding concerns, discarding the previous medical ethics consensus (first do no harm, evidence based medicine) in favour of ideas that barely existed even 15-20 years ago.
I have been looking into previous social manias such as the satanic panic and the child care workers given wrongful convictions and it's shocking how difficult it is to reverse the tide of mania once it's begun. Parents, police, the justice system, and media all fall into lockstep and condemn innocent people to terrible fates they and their families bear in almost total isolation, with only a few supporters able to parse the information in front of them and figure out what is going on.
I mean this is just human behaviour - we make movies about the Salem witch trials, we are modern people and have access to perspectives of humans across evolutionary time. Is it really true that people still don't know who we are, how we behave in herds?
I understand apathy, I understand things moving out of the news cycles, but I can't understand how people can maintain a neutral view on unnecessary surgeries on minors. When institutions such as medical bodies fail in their basic safeguarding responsibilities, suppressing dissent within their ranks, it is not hard to work out what is going on. How many manias does history need to present before people learn what we are?
A failure of courage I understand in any given context but the neutral middle doesn't even seem curious in private.
Can anybody enlighten me why people aren't more curious, why they're happy for children to be groomed into lifelong medicalisation, with their life choices pre-emptively narrowed before they even understand what consent means? The true-believers I understand, it's supposedly smart, moral people that aren't engaged that I'm confused about. Are they secretly true believers but just don't want to say?
Plain old cognitive dissonance?
The one thing that unites everyone I know, ranging from the most hardcore SJWs to alt-right RETVRN types, is that nobody cares about children at all, especially not more than our respective political convictions, and especially not the abstract children of others. If you come from a genuinely more old-fashioned or natalist bubble, you may underestimate just how insignificant children have become in younger elite circles; on a gut-feeling level it is genuinely difficult for me to imagine how someone would pretend to care about children for any reason other than as a mysterious ancestral ritual that may score points against the outgroup.
(It may not be surprising that birthrates in my mid-30s cohort are very low, and the few people who did reproduce have largely dropped out socially - not, as far as I can tell, to socialise with other people, but to be alone.)
Well that's sad to me but I sense it, and it becomes reinforcing- as less people are having children society seems to have also become less accommodating of having children. I have to say it's a stressful business in the current age.
How much is fear of global catastrophe? I wonder if all the environmentalism has curbed the instinct, or is it that we've become more online and less physically connected.
American society is 50/50 on things like "12 year olds shouldn't be permitted outside the home unsupervised". 100 years ago, they'd be walking home from their jobs; clearly, modern children are defective and deserve how we treat them.
So that's the room temperature. It is not a surprise any adult would refuse to make themselves vulnerable- to subject themselves and their kids to an increasingly insane society, one where one's neighbors (and their collective corporate arm, called "government and bureaucracy") have basically totalitarian control should they deign to exercise it.
Just like a mass shooting, when you get the news of one kid arrested off their front lawn for the crime of existing in a place they had a right to be, you impose an utterly massive outsized chilling effect on everyone else.
Same thing with the Satanic Panic, which I'd argue should be more properly seen as a coup d'etat, where the
matriarchybureaucracy would proceed to depose and replace thepatriarchymeritocracy that came before. Anyone having children after that time does not know peace from the mostly-invisible civil war; any child does not know what came before nor are they encouraged, nay, permitted to develop into a proper adult until the time for development has long passed (and their growth and standards permanently stunted as a result).More options
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