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I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election. However, I feel this way for a slightly different reason than your average person, and probably closer to the average Mottezian.
I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.
However, I find this state of affairs to be very irritating. It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years. I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.
Scott said this back in 2016:
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out. But what option does this leave the non leftists with? If the Democrat wins, then the currents move left. We get leftism enshrined into law over the next 4 years, because to the victor go the spoils. If the Republican wins, then the undercurrents move left, and more and more people get radicalized towards the left.
Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left? Or is Trump just uniquely bad at making that happen? I'm tempted to say that this is just the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, but at the same time, all the leftists I know scream bloody murder whenever a Republican is in command. They were infantile under George W Bush. And though I wasn't around then, I know many people who are still salty over Reagan and act like he was the worst.
If you live most of your life surrounded by leftists and consuming leftist media, then of course leftist whining is the type of whining that is most annoying to you.
As someone with Republican relatives and in-laws, I assure you that rightist whining over the last four years has been both intolerable and often scary. I can't imagine what it's like to live in right-leaning communities at a time when most believe the election was stolen and they're living under the equivalent on an anti-pope.
4 years of Biden has not particularly enshrined leftist values into law, as far as I'm aware? Some of the massive infrastructure spending was earmarked towards renewable energy, I guess, but that's not exactly super-radicalized social justice leftism. As far as I can tell, the law has moved to the right significantly during Biden's term, because of Republicans owning the Supreme Court and most state legislatures.
Honestly, I think that the way to make things move right without backlash is to give in on the tiny culture war sticking points while persuading people on the underlying conservative norms.
Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids. Conservatives had to give up on oppressing gay people, but managed to bring them largely into the tent of traditional marriage and neoliberal economics and so forth.
So do it again. Say fine, trans women are women, and they should be modest and wear makeup and stay at home to raise the adopted kids. Say sure, diversity is a strength, so lets hire some black CEOs who align with our mission to crush unions, roll back regulations, and lobby for tax cuts for the rich.
Basically, assimilation. It's actually true that the basic conservative values are appealing to a lot of people, and a comfortable default for a lot more. A lot of people will happily fall back into those values without thinking about it, if you just stop doing things that look explicitly bigoted or unjust or cruel in ways that get them mad and turn them against you.
I don't know what gave you this impression. It bears no resemblance to the gay world I live in. Very few gays are getting married and having kids. Most remain "counter-culture outsiders" ("counter-culture insiders," I might suggest) who "want to challenge the nuclear family". (That might be putting it too strongly, I would characterize the spectrum of gay responses to the nuclear family as critical, but not entirely in opposition.)
I mean, genuinely, I'm not trying to shut you down here. This is just so different from my gay experience, that I'm not sure what information you are considering. In my experience, the vast, vast majority of gay men are dating casually and sleeping around. Gay marriage has been positive for the small minority of gay men in stable relationships who want to have kids. For the rest, I'd say it's basically had no effect at all. The organizing around the fight for gay marriage was much more important than the actual final result.
For what it's worth as an over-50, nearly all of the gay men and lesbians I know (from work, from high school, from college, from my military years) are with long-term partners or married. The few who aren't are partiers/drinkers/a bit nuts, like a fair number of the single/divorced straight people I know in this cohort.
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As far as I can tell from googling, it's something like 38% of gay/lesbian adults married or cohabiting with a long-term partner, vs about 62% for straight adults (with the caveat that the LGBT community skews young right now, so those rates might be higher if you looked at adults 30+, but I can't find that data).
That's definitely a gap, but 38% of people in traditional pair-bonded relationships (vs a baserate of 62%, so like 28/62=61% conversion rate) is nothing to sneeze at from a conservative family values viewpoint.
If you are talking about your personal experiences, I'd guess that this has a lot to do with selection effects; married people tend to disappear from a lot of communities, especially those based around dating and hookups, and of course this is hugely correlated with age.
40% is a shocking number to me, that doesn't match with my experience in the remotest. I would need to see a lot more to believe that's anywhere close to normal. If you throw in "cohabiting with a long-term partner," then maybe that gets up to 40%. Googling around I casually see 1/10 "LGBT" are married, but I'd really need to see that split out between gay/lesbian and bisexual. (Would be easy otherwise to conflate bisexuals in heterosexual marriages with gay marriages.)
I also want to add that, from experience, a lot of these "traditional" relationships in the gay community are open. I would not assume every cohabiting same-sex couple is automatically "traditional". A significant fraction of gay male relationships would not be. (I couldn't begin to estimate how many -- one-fifth? One-fourth?) I would imagine lesbian relationships to be much more monogamous, but I wouldn't be surprised if the baseline of polygamy was still higher than for the heterosexual population.
Could be, could always be, but I still really doubt ~40%. I've known a lot of gay men in various stages of life. I can think, off the top of my head, of five married couples. (1) just had their first kid via surrogate. (2) is planning to. (3) seemingly is not. (4) was happily married until one died of a freak condition. (5) got married to celebrate gay marriage getting legalized, immediately proceeded to celebrate the honeymoon with an orgy (with (1)), and divorced a year or so later when the relationship wasn't fun anymore.
There's probably a lot more I could dig into here, and I don't want to just dump all of this on you. But I would theorize that, generally, there are some gays who match your earlier description of "radical counter-culture outsiders," and some who match your earlier description of "respectability-politics-first normies". And I think these two groups are basically distinct, and always have been, and the balance between them shifts like political parties in a democracy, and there's not much of a pipeline. Gay marriage changed a lot of different dynamics, but I'm highly skeptical that it really induced gays who would not have formed stable relationships to form them.
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Ah, but then those would be the wrong kind of black people. In fact, not really black at all. Uncle Toms or Oreos. See the comments about Clarence Thomas.
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I think your point is probably right that that would reduce tension, though in all likelihood that would just shift elsewhere (e.g. economic policy). But I think your specific policy suggestions are pretty bad.
I'm definitely more sympathetic to this than many other conservatives, at least in the sense that I do think that taking cross-sex hormones has appreciable effects putting people into something of a tertium quid. But I don't think this is good policy. The trans movement on the whole seems pretty clearly deleterious to people: giving people costly treatments, making them dependent on hormones for the rest of their lives, now they probably can't fit in with either gender too well, can't have children, they have higher rates of suicide, etc. Since it seems clearly to be the case that it's in part a social contagion, that's a really bad contagion to have and normalize. It's possible that normalizing it could decrease rates of trans-ness—not sure that I have an opinion on that—but I think it should be unequivocally the case that we should want fewer people to transition. So because I think this has fairly large social harms, I think it might be a mistake to just let it be.
Moreover, I think this is something that seems weirder to many normies than gay marriage does.
I think the current affirmative action regime is bad in a whole bunch of ways. For one, it's the product in a bunch of cases of regulations: the disparate impact standard makes everything possibly illegal, because nothing you do will be without an impact, so you have to play by the rules the agency in question sets, as well as that all government contractors, which is a quarter of the economy, have to follow rules that are definitely (ha!) not quotas. This sort of regulation seems clearly bad to me, and is one thing that I'd want to roll back. It's bad because I don't think that the skill distribution matches the racial distribution, meaning it distorts things away from what's economically efficient. It also leads to attacks on meritocracy, because any attempt at choosing better employees has to be racially equitable if you don't want to be sued, and ability is not evenly distributed across the buckets that the US government tracks. I also think the principle of colorblindness and individualism is admirable, and don't like the identitarianism.
Because efficiency results in racial gaps, and we're trying to adjust everything to fix racial gaps (at least, at some levels of society), we lose out on much of the efficiency.
I have no problem with black CEOs, I just want them to be the most capable man for their job.
Further, racial discrimination is not something that's popular, and is something that's already prohibited by the statutes if people would just interpret them in the manner that they were obviously intended to be interpreted, so it seems like a fairly low-cost, high-reward thing to try to fix.
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That doesn't work, because "trans women are women" means treating them as women for the purpose of sports, prisons, bathrooms, etc. Treating gay people as married doesn't mean letting them do any controversial things. And having your child decide one day that they're trans is a lot bigger problem than having your child decide one day that they're gay.
If you loosen the requirement to "CEOs are social justice allies but can be any skin color", we're already getting that. We just end up with CEOs who crush unions, roll back regulations, lobby for tax cuts for the rich, and still promote their ideology in everything they can get their hands on that doesn't personally disadvantage themselves. The guy in charge of Google Gemini may not literally be a CEO, but he's a person in charge of a project at a big corporation, and I'm sure he's not going to start a campaign in support of unions at Google, but the project itself was DEI enough that even regular media can notice.
Eh, I remember a lot of dumb opinion pieces in media about how gay marriage would finally break heterosexual marriage, and that was from those who thought this was a good thing, because traditional marriage was so patriarchal and heteronormative and oppressive, and the 'monogamish' version of fidelity that gay spouses had would mean that open marriages would be more acceptable for the straights, and sexual jealousy and all the fuss around affairs would relax and finally disappear.
Much the same as the current push on poly and how it's going to be so much better once everyone learns how to be open and flexible. Some numbskulls are always going to use Current Fad to push for Old Things Bad.
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There's been a lot of (recent!) debates about the appropriateness (and funding sources) of IVF, surrogacy, adoption, and so on for married gay couples, for one low-hanging example. It's not the only matter. Not got as many or as obvious ramifications that you see as much, but policy seldom exists in a vacuum.
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Bad phrasing. Don't do this. If you see someone else doing it report them, don't imitate them and start a flame war.
You have this tendency to only respond to and then imitate the maximally offensive or most rule skirting of right wing viewpoint posts. This makes your value as a "counter-viewpoint" poster very minimal. This is a forum for discussion, and there are network effects. Our best users provide unique viewpoints, follow the rules of discussion, and participate often in a positive manner. I rarely see you engage with these users. SSCReader and Walterodim have some nuanced and careful takes in this thread, you responded to neither. Both users have long mod notes of just AAQCs. Instead you respond to ArjinFerman who has long mod notes of warnings and short bans.
Your net-effect seems to be to create flame-wars here, and only engage in discussion with our more troublesome users.
Some people think we give you leniency because you have a unique viewpoint. I just want to nix those complaints right now. We provide standard leniency to guesswho. And guesswho does not provide value to most of the users we care about, so there is no reason for us to provide extra leniency anyways. As far as I can tell guesswho upsets a bunch of people because he basically holds up a mirror, but seems intent on only holding up that mirror in front of uggos. The lovely looking users that might appreciate a mirror get nothing.
Pretty damn funny to me that OP who introduced this topic using that same terminology gets a one-line 'please phrase this better', and I responding using the exact same language get a four paragraph 'you are awful, you are terrible, I'm informing everyone else reading this that you're worthless' tirade. It might look less like a double-standard if you made one post modding the actual behavior that violates the rules, and a separate post with the personal attacks?
If no one should engage with posts like the one I'm replying to, why aren't the other 10 people who have done so getting a warning?
It's bad to engage with things that are egregiously wrong or offensive, because that draws more attention to them? That's a central tenant of cancel culture, surprised to see it endorsed here.
I literally (did)[https://www.themotte.org/post/882/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/188688?context=8#context] reply to Walterodim already, maybe you should look at my posts outside the report queue before confidently declaring what my posting tendencies are like?
And the only post I see by SCCReader is the reply to my own comment, I considered replying with 'Yeah of course you're right and the real answer here is that OP's premise is wrong and they're just being histrionic', but I thought that would be more rude and confrontational and not worth getting into!
OP is getting their first warning ever, and most of their engagement in this thread was not rule-violating. You are on your 8th, and you are actively flaunting the rules in another comment. OP's response to modhat: 'oh sorry, didn't mean to do that'. Your response: 'i did nothing wrong'
It is possible to engage with a post that does things badly, without also doing those same bad things. Or at least it seems possible for other posters.
That comment wasn't loaded when I was looking through the thread, so I missed it. Sorry for accusing you, but in this case I do feel like it holds up my general point. Your posting is like a mirror to those you speak with. Your response to walterodim is measured, reasonable, and without any level of flaming. If you only responded to our top quality posters you'd probably be considered a top quality poster yourself, instead of a troubled case that constantly causes us headaches.
You are assuming a level of equivalence there that SCCReader and others might disagree with. And the point can easily be made in a non-confrontational way. "I agree with you, but I think the point you are making that rightists mostly just go about living their lives is also true for leftists. {optional addition if you want to make a good post:} For example [x complaint about leftists is mirrored by rightists doing y](repeat for two or three different values of x and y)"
Yes, this is true. I'm pretty autistic and don't understand tone and norms very well, I ussually get by through mirroring.
I would try harder to avoid doing this if I thought it was more wrong to do so, but... I don't see why people should get away with being rude or antagonistic without getting the same in kind?
And more importantly, given that most of this board is anti-leftist/anti-woke in ideology, I don't see why one side of that conflict should get to use rude and antagonistic tactics, but the other side shouldn't get to use them back? That seems like it creates a clear double-standard that pushes the board in one direction only.
It's not that I don't understand your point, having rudeness met with rudeness does create more total rudeness on the board in a way that decreases the overall quality of the average post. And I know a lot of teachers, I understand the logic of 'I don't care who started it, fighting is not allowed and you're both in trouble'.
But I do think that if that's going to be the standard you hold people to, it creates a greater responsibility for you to clean up the people starting things even when they don't degenerate into fights. You're correct that my interactions with Arjin are often suboptimal on both sides, but they reply to so many of my comments in ways that seem confrontational or ridiculous, how long am i supposed to just ignore them (especially when I've received lots of critiques at other times about 'not answering my critics and dancing away when I get challenged')?
I'm confused, didn't SSCReader already basically say that in their last paragraph?
Given the ratio, you're inevitably going to draw more reports, so this is a bad game for you to play.
I'd recommend rather to just try to defend your positions/show yourself right sufficiently clearly. (Yeah, that's hard when people don't want to listen to you.)
I sometimes feel like I'm too confrontational, and I'm definitely less confrontational than average (where average is defined by the possibly highly biased measure of what I notice).
Maybe point out the lack of civility, and then respond more levelheadedly? But you're often fairly levelheaded anyway, from what I've seen. (I'll gesture back at the comment about what I notice.)
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Well this helps explain some things and makes me less frustrated with you, thank you for that.
I'd just suggest picking better people to mirror. If you have some basic negative emotional reaction to a comment I'd try just reporting it and not responding.
I think there is a reporting bias but not an enforcement bias. When I see reports there is definitely bias towards more reporting of leftists, but when I get to the thread I have to go through and read the whole thing, and I'm gonna hand out warnings and bans based on my assessment of people's behavior, not just on who is reported.
I think the bias I'm talking is more of a structural network effects thing rather than something anyone is doing actively. Like...
Toy model, a board is 90% anti-X, 10% pro-X, and has 100 people who are willing to engage in name-calling (90 anti, 10 pro). Each name-caller makes one post per week. All name-callers have a 10% chance to respond to each name-calling post on the other side with a name-calling reply. Each participant in such an interaction has a 10% chance of getting banned for it.
(I'm going to switch to A and P as name-callers on each side, and 'bad post' for name-calling post)
Week 1 has 10 bad P posts. Each of the 90 A posters responds to an average of 1 bad P post, meaning each A poster gets about 9 bad P replies. From these interactions, every P poster has a 10% chance of getting banned this week, and every A poster has a 90% chance of getting banned this week.
Week 1 has 90 bad A posts. Each of the 10 P posters responds to an average of 9 bad A posts, meaning each P poster gets about 1 bad A reply. From these interactions, again, each P poster has a 10% chance of getting banned this week, and every A poster has a 90% chance of getting banned this week.
Taking those two chances together, next week we expect to have about 81 A posters left, and we have a 10% chance of one A poster surviving.
The end result is the same if you start at 51% vs 49%, and if the reply rates and ban rates are 1% instead of 10%. It just takes longer.
You can try to decrease the rate at which people make bad posts, and the rate at which people reply to bad posts. But again, that just takes longer.
You can try to ban people for bad posts even if no one replies to them. But I'm pretty sure that again just takes longer, as long as you're hitting both sides a proportionally equal amount I don't think it changes the long-term trend.
As long as your policy is to not care who started it and punish both people in the exchange, you will long-term converge towards whichever side has the larger starting population ending up with complete domination.
They will at some point become the only side making any bad posts at all, and you will have an ideological echo chamber at least on the fringes.
And once that's established, new people making bad posts on the dominant side can join and not get punished because there's no one to reply to them and trigger moderation. So the number of bad posters on that side can swell ad infinitum.
And new entrants making bad posts on the non-dominant side are especially screwed. As the numbers are so lop-sided, they're very likely to disappear immediately, so that side can never build up more numbers to challenge the existing dominance.
From a structural perspective, I only see two simple ways out of this.
1 is to ban people for making bad posts before people make bad replies to them, and remove those posts so people can't make replies. I don't think you can/should have to respond that fast, and I think it goes against the ethos here to remove the posts.
2 is to respond initial bad posts more strongly than bad responses. It's galling and may feel like a double-standard from one perspective, given that both did the same behavior in the abstract. But I think it's the only policy that doesn't a priori lead to one side dominating over time.
Or, you can just accept that one side is going to dominate as an inevitable result of your policy, and accept that as better than the other consequences of changing your policy. That may well be the best you can do.
But if you're doing it, then it's kind of disingenuous to claim that you're not an A-leaning board, that your moderation does not favor A posters. If you know that your policies, enforced fairly and regularly, will lead to a board with lots of egregiously bad and antagonistic and aggressive A posts, and few to none on the P side, then own that consequence and talk openly about how it is an outcome you are accepting in your moderation policy and vision for the board, even if only as an unfortunate but necessary evil.
(and of course, it's not really that there are posters who are 100% and others who are 100% bad, it's that each poster has some percentage chance of each post being bad, with wide variance. In the very long run, any A with a non-zero chance of making a bad post ever will be eliminated by the same structural network dynamics above, eventually creating a complete echo chamber across the whole spectrum of post quality)
These are all things we are aware of.
We don't remove posts that have been publicly visible at any point for any reason. (there are extreme exceptions to this rule that have not yet been triggered, such as doxxing, or things that are illegal to share)
We do respond to stuff as soon as we see them, and part of bringing on new mods was to increase response time. We can get through the modqueue every couple of days with just two or three active mods. But with about 5 active mods, someone will get through it every day.
We do have a policy that top level stuff gets judged most harshly on multiple dimensions. Especially on low-effort posting, but also on culture-warring and antagonism.
I think the reason things do not totally devolve in practice is that neither side is monolithic. You have a pet example and the math checks out, but people don't always fit perfectly into the ideological boxes. I disagree with you on woke/progressive topics, but I'm also probably more in favor of open borders than you are. And that topic gets me dogpilled around here. And I certainly get some amount of downvotes that might make me come out net negative in those threads, but the report volume is generally very low or non-existent.
Ymeshkout also manages to make semi-regular posts about the 2020 election, and is consistently defending a minority viewpoint around here. But again, rarely any reports, and their behavior is great despite lots of disagreement and downvotes.
I'm aware enough of being a minority viewpoint that I even tried to write some helpful advice for people that get ratioed on themotte. That was before you created your account, so if you weren't lurking you likely missed it.
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I know I ain't no [insert latest hunk the ladies are swooning over], but this is bordering on abuse!
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So if everybody got respectable, why was there all the complaining over how Mayor Pete was the wrong kind of gay?
And kink should be at Pride, it's gotten too family-friendly?
And why can't my non-binary queer friends get dates?
We've already rehashed the Drag Queen Story Hour, but now "if you don't bring your minor kids to strip clubs for drag events, you're a bigot"?
Yeah, that sure is respectability-first normie quiet surburban life!
First of all, most of that is very niche online-only stuff that most people haven't heard of. It's not on the same level as the fight over gay marriage and everything that went along with it.
Second of all, half of those are about trans stuff, which proves my point? Trans people are forced into counter-culture, and the trans culture war brings all kinds of weirdness to the front of the Overton Window, including stuff about drag queens who aren't even trans. That's what you can take out of the Overton Window by just not fighitng about trans people anymore.
And for that matter, the first two which are largely about gay people also prove my point? Gay people who are normie and straight-passing become nationally important politicians, gay events like Pride become family-friendly and wholesome, and the people who have a problem with that are relegated to writing think pieces in dying old-media outlets.
Third, see the second half of my reply here, I was talking about the immediate decade-or-so aftermath of the gay marriage fight ending. Yes there will eventually be new fights, you can't win everything forever, but that's doesn't negate the huge wins you actually got at the time.
Let me insert here that although I disagree with you, I appreciate your persistence in offering counterpoint and I am not among the downvoters. While I do downvote unnecessarily antagonistic and low-effort posts (including yours at times) I don't think this is either.
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Okay, so trans stuff is counter-culture, so please do explain: how did it go from "event hosted in libraries where nobody is forcing you to bring your kids to see it" to "it's in school for kindergarten onwards and you can't opt out"?
'You can take the heat out of this dispute by just giving in, shutting up, and letting the other side do what the hell they want in public spaces that are supposed to be for all' is one solution, certainly, but not one I'm very inclined towards. "Sure, nobody likes slavery, but why are you going on protests about it? Just stay quiet and all this fighting will stop and then it'll be fine!"
It didn't.
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Do you have any video of these? I don't know that I've seen any pride events I'd view as wholesome, but I'll accept they may exist somewhere.
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Uh, aren't pride parades still full of public nudity and kink and all that jazz, right out on main street?
I mean the example I am responding to here is OP saying that that pride has become too family friendly and people are complaining about that. You can reject that premise if you disagree, but then OP loses it as an example in their own argument, which supports my original position.
They’re not mutually exclusive. You can have a festival of filth and degeneracy that some members of the lgbt community think is still too family friendly. Do I know that this is the case? No, I don’t have much evidence either way- it could be that pride parades are toned down from back in the day, it could be that they aren’t, the complainers could be a fringe view, they could be mainstream. But writing off the possibility out of hand seems like a lack of rigour.
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My political positions are ... on the same side as conservatism, at least. I think you're right, at least, that the 'culture war sticking points' aren't really moving anyone towards conservative norms - banning drag queens, not allowing gay marriage, banning abortions for poor black women, this doesn't really move us towards a more conservative society.
I think it's bad, on an individual level, for anyone who transitions. Meaningful desires aligned with their outcomes (desire for sex/romantic relationship that produces kids) are replaced with confused simulacra. And actual children (pretty important! whether you're a radical inegalitarian or a sum of hedonic state utilitarian, more people existing is good) fail to be produced.
But if you actually try to consistently pursue the underlying values that generate something like 'trans is bad', the harm actually has to come from 'not having children' - and 'trans people being .2% of the population' is simply 50x less of an issue than many people not settling down into families, or those that do deciding to have 2 children. I do think that conservatives should focus on the latter, and not the former.
Unfortunately, I'm not having a rational conversation with "conservatives", the conservative movement is a huge mass of a hundred million people that hypes itself up about a whole bunch of nonsense. Just like progressives. So, idk. Maybe the only way to change things is elite persuasion, even more likely there's just not enough time to change things too much until AGI is too big of an issue.
The degree that this and other culture war issues are inserted into public schools increases the burden on conservative families with children that now feel they need to homeschool to avoid the indoctrination.
I think I've expressed my opinions on 'trans in schools' enough here (tldr for kids who decide to be trans they see <.1% of the trans content they see at school, they get it from the internet, the school plays almost zero causal role in them deciding to transition).
But even if schools were pivotal in causing every single trans kid to be trans, that's still less important than TFR being under replacement by a solid system of values imo. Trans is bad, sure, but there are a lot of bad things - disease, obesity, being born with low IQ, crime, popular consumer media - all of those have negative aggregate impact either on the same order of magnitude as trans or much higher. And "people not having kids, especially smart people" is just way higher.
Like, if you have an extra kid and that kid has a 5% chance of going trans, and let's do some absurd but illustrative math and say that if someone becomes trans it's not only better for them not to exist, but for a whole other perfectly good person to also not exist because being trans is just THAT bad - in expected value it's still much more important to have the kid. Kid also has a 5% chance of having some weird disease, disability, personality disorder, or whatever.
I think the worry is not necessarily that the school starts it, it's that the school enables it by their policies. Schools allowing children to socially transition, keeping information from the parents, etc. could be a lot more influential than just seeing content.
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It's not even that there's a risk the school is going to make the kids trans. It's that it's presented in school at all as anything other than mental illness.
I don't think this argument is going to go anywhere unless I write a 5000 word effortpost with a dozen tiktok, reddit, and discord screenshots each to actually convey the understanding of what it's like to be a 'trans kid' and why the school isn't relevant. And the time for that was a year or two ago anyway.
So instead, I'll go back to the above argument - put the mental effort into having an extra kid (or two, or ...) instead. Even heavily discounted, it's more important.
Or I guess working on AI or something. It probably seems like an odd tic that I keep bringing that up, but all of our moral philosophies depend on and don't make sense outside of the indefinite continuation of human life and civilization and power, and that is very much in question! If you're having a kid who will themselves have kids who will ... and so on and so on, I can see that as a divine duty of infinite importance, an unbroken chain - or, really, an unbroken interwoven net of sexual reproduction tiling the whole of your nation - of intergenerational devotion. If you have two kids who each have three kids who all starve to death because we're now to silicon as horses were to us ...
I largely don't care, what it's like to be a 'trans kid' or an anorexic, or a spaz.
I have 4 children. We may have had more if we were able to send them to a non-globohomo school. Our culture pays outsized attention to people that won't or shouldn't have children.
I've no specific fear of the earth running out of people, only running out of people competent to run and administrator modern civilization.
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I will say that one outcome of normalizing trans people that I would love to see, and find plausible to expect, is more effort put into helping trans people have kids.
For MtF you can freeze sperm before beginning treatment, and help pay for IVF. For FtM you can normalize a focus on top surgery and social transition in the early years. For everyone you can further normalize the use of sperm donors and make access to IVF and adoption easier.
Same-sex couples raise kids at around 56% the rate of straight couples, which is a large difference, but is not an order of magnitude different nor 'impossible' which I feel like some conservative arguments seem to imply. And for lesbian relationships it's more like 80% the rate of straight couples.
Honestly as time passes and things get more normalized, I would expect the rates of same-sex and trans-including couples having kids to converge on those for cis straight relationships. There's no a priori reason those people would want kids less, and a mixture of IVF and adoption and various other social maneuvers can make it possible. The only barrier is cost and access to those things, and taboos against them, all of which we can work to remove.
I mean, the a priori reason is that straight sex naturally creates children and gay/lesbian/trans sex (usually) doesn't. Not in a 'natural morality' sense, just it's a lot easier to have a 'happy accident' than to have a series of medical appointments over a year. I doubt it'll converge. (I mean, in principle, future technological developments make predicting the future on current trends ... questionable)
I was saying there's no a priori reason they would want kids less, not no a priori reason we would expect them to have less kids.
I guess my point can be restated as 'I would expect all types of couples to want the same number of kids on average, and I would expect the number of kids a couple have to converge towards the number they want over time as technology and society improves and barriers to having kids/accidental ways of getting kids are removed/mitigated.'
Also this is 'converging in the infinite limit', not making a confident claim about how fast they will converge because yeah, this is partially an argument based on extrapolating future technology and social change, which is hard/impossible.
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90% of straight couples in that sample are married only 50% of same sex couples are. You are also using the married stats without saying so. I was confused by your post at first since the survey you cited shows same sex couples having much lower rates of child rearing than what you claimed.
Yeah, I meant among married couples since this was a discussion about gay marriage, but you're right it would have been better for me to say that explicitly.
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Which should be "okay, majority rules, you get basic decent treatment but you don't get to have screaming fits in public about being a real woman/real man" but instead we get Trans Day of Visibility, remember all the trans murder victims who were murdered for being trans (and not for being sex workers, which is already a hazardous occupation, or murdered in domestic violence incidents just like cis people, no it's because they were trans and no other reason).
Declare that you are a woman, with no effort at transitioning, and the 99.8% rest of us have to pretend we believe you and behave as if that's true.
Yes I agree that all of that is dumb, and I think all but .2% of the people who use this site do too, so we don't really need to be reminded, because it doesn't directly impact the more substantial discussion above.
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That's not on offer and never has been. If it was, it would probably undermine the more radical trans activists in much the same way that the normiefication of homosexuality undermined the weirdest and most radical elements of the gay rights movement. However, until trans Bismarck comes along and sabotages the trans left by offering a compromise that aspiring transnormies can tolerate, trans activism is likely to continue to be defined by the angriest and most radical voices.
It complicates things that, as far as I understand, a trans normie probably does HRT later/not at all and thus passes worse than a radical.
See, the thing is, I think there are a lot of trans normies who just want to go about living their lives as best they can. Maybe they don't 100% pass, but they don't march around demanding that "I have a dick and a beard and I'm a woman!", so the bargain of civil treatment can be made: you don't make it impossible for me to ignore that this is not your natal sex, I'll treat you as your legal sex.
It's the weirdoes and edge cases who make the most noise and get the most attention, and nobody is willing to slap them down because "oh no, we can't do that, that would be giving in to the bigots". So the crazies get their way, and the reason people make a fuss about guys with working reproductive systems getting into women's prisons and impregnating the inmates is not because there are a large number of such cases, but because such a thing should never happen in the first place. But somebody takes a test case, a judge makes a ruling, and now the Department of Corrections have to let George (now going by Georgina) into the women's prison even though the only effort George has made is to change his name and put ribbons in his hair.
If people on the progressive side were willing to give in on "Okay, George goes to the men's prison", there would be a lot more willingness to compromise on "Okay, Sally is not the most female woman you'll ever meet, but she tries her best, so let's all get along". At least from my side of the fence; I don't care what equipment you've got in your knickers if you're using the ladies' loo, I do care about the fetishists who fantasise online about periods and tampons and accosting women in public bathrooms with such intrusive questions.
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Isn't the root of this that we're not able to treat them as we would when someone with another type of mental illness did this?
Treat them with the same compassion as someone with delusions or hallucinations, who are sometimes loud and unpleasant in public. Your not expected to endorse or validate in any real sense their claims, generally the public avoids these individuals when possible. I'm not going to try and argue them out of whatever their experiencing either.
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@cjet79, I disagree with this point and think it's pretty bad, but am I allowed to reply and say why I think it's wrong, or would that be starting a flame war?
(and yes, I'm kind of being a shit about this, but I'm trying to demonstrate why I find your reasoning here really egregious and dangerous)
Not cjet, but I’d recommend against it.
It is absolutely possible to deliver a tactful, rule-abiding response to @FarNearEverywhere. Perhaps
You could do it. I’ve seen you take a measured approach, and it’s one of the things I appreciate most about your posts. But I assume it would not be your first reaction, both because you’re already under a lot of pressure, and because FNE has opened with her
infamoussignature flair for the dramatic. If you mirrored her style, I would expect it to stoke the flames.Before you ask, yes, I would like to ask FNE to cool down as well before she starts any more fights. I know this is a sensitive topic.
I am an International
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No, we do not, and significantly more than .2% of the population refuses to go along with the stupid charade.
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Is this how you remember the sequencing? As someone that was vigorously in favor of legalizing gay marriage, I recall the path being inverted from this, where the respectability politics had already happened and the big selling point was that our gay and lesbian friends are not degenerate weirdos, they're totally normal and just want the same thing that straight couples have. This was a pretty good selling point! It convinced me handily, and I certainly see couples that live exactly like that now. The problem is that the aftermath of that win was not declaring victory and slapping a Mission Accomplished sticker on the Pride flag, it was moving onto trans politics, leading up to the modern day "trans kids", trans "women" in women's sports, and so on. At this point, I've basically been convinced that I was wrong, the slippery slope people were completely right, and that simply winning on the one cause and then moving on with normalcy was never an option.
What was that all about? Gay people always had exactly the same right to marry somebody of the opposite sex as straight people.
As for adopting children, why not make them? I don't know the exact cost of adoption these days, but even heterosexual couples spend a lot on fertility treatments, surely there are sex workers available for a cheaper price to get your own biological child.
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Can we actually draw that thread though? Are the advocates for gay marriage, exactly the same advocates as for trans rights? (which is pretty nebulous itself). Is the slope slippery or are there multiple overlapping staircases, such that gay marriage could be rolled back tomorrow and that we would have trans advocates focusing on their issues and gay marriage advocates focusing on their issues?
The Progressive alliance is basically a mish-mash of groups that were (or perceived themselves to be) marginalized and mistreated under older more conservative social conventions. The average black person is not all that on board with homosexuality (compared to white progressives) so it certainly isn't homogenous.
Is what you are seeing with trans issues the result of a somewhat successful gay campaign OR a symptom of the amount of power that the conservative stack lost, such that even the smaller groups in the progressive stack can punch above their weight, such that rolling back gay marriage in and of itself would have no impact on that debate (other than as a symptom of the regrowth of conservative power).
See my reply here. I don't know.
Absolutely a reasonable position. Personally I think its a "rising tide lifts all boats situation" when one side is doing better all the various causes and clusters of causes have a better chance, but if you remove one boat, its not likely that the situation changes much.
The thing for me is that, by that analogy, the thing that conservatives of yesteryear were fighting against was that rising tide that was lifting the one boat called "gay marriage" and claiming that by raising the tide to lift that one boat, we'll also inevitably lift other boats that we don't want lifted. Accompanied with the argument was that you can't just install hover jets onto that one boat and lifting that boat inevitably requires raising the tide (i.e. the argument that eliding any boundary between gay and straight marriage necessarily pushes social norms away from people taking responsibility to do their duty to keep human society running and existing and more towards self-discovery and liberation).
There are arguments to be made on whether or not the current trans movement is a good thing or a bad thing. But in my view, all the conservatives whose slippery slope arguments I poo-poo-ed back in the day have every right to say "I told you so" to my face now, as their slippery slope did come true. We could try to draw a thread from gay marriage to the current trans movement, and I'd bet we could even do it pretty well, but my view is that that's largely irrelevant. Because the point was never about gay marriage specifically, it was about the principles underlying - and necessarily implied by - the push for gay marriage.
And that is reasonable! But it isn't a slippery slope. If coalition A wins it will do coalition A things is a separate problem, than if Issue 1 from coalition A wins then Issue 2 from coalition A will casually follow.
For example Coalition B could carry out issue 1, which says nothing about whether issue 2 will happen.
Because the boats can move to different sides of the harbor. Just as happened with white rural working class voters over the last decade or more.
Practically does it make a difference? If you are a politician yes, because you may be able to beat your opponent to the jump, and get a pragmativ "win". I would agree that practically to the average person who doesn't like gay marriage or trans "rights" then it is mostly a moot point. But it is a distinction we should look at from an analysis pov if we are trying to be accurate.
The way I see it, the point that the conservatives can rub in my face, i.e. the slippery slope in this situation, is that these coalitions aren't arbitrary. It's that Issue 1 necessarily implies something similar to Coalition A, because of the principles encoded into Issue 1. This doesn't necessarily imply that Issue 2 will causally follow, but it does imply that some Coalition similar to Coalition A that wants Issue 2 (more accurately, Issue X, since we can't determine beforehand that it will be Issue 2 specifically) will gain greater credibility and more ability to get that Issue 2 implemented.
That is, the conservatives who were telling me, "Sure, those boats could move to different sides of the harbor. But they won't. And here's why," can rub it into my face. It's probably not much of a consolation, but I suppose they can at least enjoy having company in their misery.
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They used the thread to sew new stripes on the rainbow flag. Maybe if they were evicted from the rainbow I'd have an easier time not thinking one led to the other.
Well thats the nature of a coalition. It still doesn't mean that gay marriage led to trans rights. Like if evangelical Christians and neo-liberal free marketeers are in the same Republican coalition it doesn't mean that financial deregulation leads to an abortion ban.
You have to actually be able to draw the line directly. I think thete are fractures bmbetween the LGB and the T that are being somewhat hidden by the fact of perceived right wing antipathy towards both.
I'll point out in the UK, a Conservative government explicitly legalized gay marriage and there is some significant anti trans (from their pov) headwinds. Some of that could be attributed to loss of support as parts of the coalition get what they want explicitly codified in law by a right wing government, rather than getting it through the Supreme Court (and therefore being more tenuous).
If thats the case legalizing gay marriage might be the opposite of a slippery slope. Depending on how and by whom it is done.
Perhaps to the right of Labor or the LibDems (are they still a thing) A right wing government would probably not have passed gay marriage.
Many free-market Republicans talk openly about a compromise position on abortion, typically accepting upto viability.
I've seen the TERF distance themselves from the T, the LGB still seem to invite them to all their events and platforms.
If your coalitions purpose was bank robbery and another member of the coalition shoots and kills a guard, your still up for felony murder even if your part of the coalition only wanted the money.
I understand your claim that gay marriage didn't lead to trans. People will judge you by the company you keep.
The company you keep is an entirely different claim than a causal one though. And i'm not sure from the point of political coalition how useful it even is. It is when you look at things personally of course.
I understand that the average neo-liberal Republican is probably not too worried about abortion, but because of the way their coalition is built the evangelical Christian wing is.
But if i oppose banning abortion, pragmatically my best option might be to peel that coalition apart. Not force it closer together. Horse trading is the life blood of politics. Maybe you aren't exactly in favor of gay marriage, but if it guts the support of a coalition opposing you, then if you think its going to happen anyway you might as well get the credit.
The next Labour government with a reasonable majority was going to legalize gay marriage. Just a matter of time. This way, the Conservatives get to claim that forever. Now if you really hate the idea of gay marriage maybe that isn't worth it. But pragmatically taking credit for something that was going to happen anyway can be one way to defang your enemies.
Politically in the US, if Republicans could pass a gay marriage bill in exchange for robbing momentum (through a whole bunch of activists no longer worrying about it), for further change and in exchange for getting say 8 years of dominance it doesn't matter about the company those activists kept until then. Exploit the weakness in the coalition.
Of course if you don't think that will work, or it will lose you more than you gain then don't do it, but don't let thinking about coalitions like individuals cloud your judgement. Political coalitions aren't friends, they are alliances of convenience and those can be changed. Japan once sided with Nazi Germany, now it is a close US ally. White rust belt Americans used to skew Democrat. By your lights should their change not be accepted because of the company they used to keep?
They're adjacent with some overlap, and the line of responsibility / credit is clear to many if not you. Having had some success the LGB brought the T inside the tent. If the LGB were still fighting for marriage state by state would T be in the tent? The pedos still want to be in the tent too but that's still too far for many of the LGBT. If I lend you my pirate crew and pirate ship to commit piracy that makes me the pirate king. You're going to tell the pirate king he's not causing piracy? Did Fagin not cause pickpocketing? You're view of 'causal' seems conveniently narrow. How proximate must the antecedent be for you to accept 'cause'?
Reasonable mainstream conservatives should view abortion as an issue best handeled by the state legislatures not the federal government, we're a republic. The issue is emotional for many, they're frequently blind to less emotive arguments. The MSM presentation doesn't help. Baby murdering sluts vs. Liberated Women is a framing that only serves to divide and cedes ground to the crazies.
This only works until actual conservative voters have somewhere else to go. You can see this in the rise of conservative populism. I'm not sure the UK conservatives owning gay marriage is the win for them they think it is. CINO isn't as good as RINO. Uniparty is the descriptor I prefer. Who was defanged? The perception by many is the fangs just moved on to T. Do the activists ever go home after their win? There are always some new downtrodden to elevate. Were people sure at the time that gay marriage would lead to trans, probably not, trans was even smaller then. I recall suggestions that bestiality, pedos or polygamy would be next. Furries, T and polyamory would be near enough for many. The machine built for gay marriage is now in use by T.
Not they way it's frequently done, but there's nothing to preclude it. You'd just need a smaller tent. If you can't live your principles, what's the point in 'winning'.
Rapid demographic change and the destruction of your industry can cause people to understand the nature of the tent they're in.
Repentant sinners are welcome. They can be excellent members as they've seen it from the other side. Nobody knows alcoholics like an ex-drunk. Reformed degenerates are best to keep the active degenerates out.
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That speed at which that ugly pattern was adopted and incorporated was certainly something.
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I do agree it was more complicated than this in the moment, I was talking more about the long-term outcomes than the momentary tactics.
I do think that in that case it was more that the gay rights movement tried to win over the conservative movement by adopting their values and that worked, rather than vice-versa (although more detailed analysis is that it was more like a continuous feedback loop where more conformity led to more room for acceptance led to more conformity etc, and chicken-and-egg which one happened first on a micro-micro-scale).
But my point was more that there's a pattern here by which counter-culture outsiders get accepted and integrated into the herd and end up more traditionalist on a lot of metrics, and conservatives could be the ones to intentionally trigger that process this time if they wanted to.
I mean, sort of.
First of all, that took ~15 years from gay marriage starting be legalized to any real movement on trans issues. It's not like there will never be a cultural backlash to changes you make, that's not how any of this works, but buying a decade or two of buy-in for your project is a pretty massive victory by culture war standards (which are usually minute and fleeting).
Second, the gay rights movement 'moved on to' trans rights largely by evaporative cooling. Most of the gay rights movement evaporated after marriage rights and worker protections and etc were won, the current trans rights movement is much smaller than the gay rights movement was in its heyday and faces a lot more trepidation and mixed feelings from liberals, including plenty of gay people. In my mind that's why it's weak enough that people can talk about 'eradication' at national party conventions to wide applause and that's barely a scandal, why states can pass laws ranging from school censorship to restricting medical care and have that be a selling point for politicians rather than a scandal, etc.
I'm going to need to noodle on this a bit. When Obergefell hit, I quite literally celebrated with gay friends. I'm really not wed to the position that this was bad, and certainly not wed to the position that it was bad in and of itself. That said, I'm not immersed in queer politics to any meaningful extent and tend to associate the various strains of it and their role in progressive politics more broadly as something of a monolith, which probably isn't accurate. I find quite a bit of trans discourse, particularly about kids, to be appalling, inaccurate, and even self-evidently ridiculous in some cases. When I've had family members that I disagreed with gay marriage bust out the old, "I told you so" routine, I have basically shrugged and said, "yeah, you sure did, I guess I was wrong". I'll think about it more - thanks for the reply.
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"Smaller" means different things in an era of social media, combined with universal media approval. Fewer people, maybe. Less influence, no.
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I feel like this is a weak sauce slippery slope, if it is one. It's hard to find good numbers, but this article claims around 2% of Gen Z and 1% of Millenials identify as trans. And I would wager a large portion of those are just non-binary with no plans for any medical interventions, but even if we assume that all of those people identifying as trans are all chasing medical interventions like surgery and hormone treatment this is hardly enough to destroy a society.
In pre-revolutionary France, the First Estate of clergy made up 0.5% of the population, and theoretically all of those people were supposed to be celibate. Even acknowledging the hypocrisy and non-compliance of some of those clergy, you're still looking at a social institution that causes large swathes of people to be childless if it is strictly adhered to. And yet the biggest issue people had with that institution were things like the Catholic Church owning 6-10% of the land in France, and having an outsized influence on French politics. It was not a widely feared thing that people's sons or daughters would become priests or nuns and be forced to live a life of celibacy.
I think that 1 or 2% of trans youth is not the main ill our society faces, and if we had other working social institutions, structures and norms, we could easily deal with 1-2% of the population becoming sterilized. Our low birth rates are not because of decisions that 1-2% of people feel emboldened to make because of greater social acceptance. I think general social atomization, and an emphasis of comfort over duty are greater issues facing our society than whether a tiny minority choose to sterilize themselves.
All of the other issues like trans women in sports are minor distractions barely worthy of serious discussion. If professional weight-lifting can self-regulate and have de facto anti-doping and pro-doping leagues, then I'm sure that left to their own devices sports organizations running women's sporting events will figure out ways to deal with trans women without the need for outside intervention or pressure on anyone's part. Far more serious are questions of women's prisons and violent trans offenders, and I feel like that only becomes an issue because it is the tip of the iceberg of suffering in prison. Violent trans women prisoners are a useful prop, but do most people shed tears for prisoners (men or women) and their bad living conditions the rest of the time?
Also a very minor note, but I'll point out that about half the over-30 trans people I know have biological children, through one route or another.
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I don't understand how this is supposed to be a counter argument. There weren't that many more gay people than that, and we were asked to rearrenge society for them, and were assured that any claim there will be further demands was a fallacy. We now have further demands just as predicted, therefore the slipperyslope claim was correct.
Also, if the low numbers of trans people mean their demands aren't a big deal, does that mean you'd be ok with rejecting them entirely?
I had a similar intuition to @vorpa-glavo: I don’t think gay-marriage opponents really called it. Even though their slippery-slope argument was pretty broad, no one talked about trans people as a next step, because trans politics weren’t even on the radar. If there’s not much continuity between the LGB and the T agendas, is it accurate to call them “further demands”?
As for your other question, yeah, I guess. It’d be immoral, but not uniquely so.
A collection of positions of religious organizations are obviously going to be focused on theological positions. They don't need slippery slope arguments. This is how you tailor arguments for a religious position piece.
Legal arguments tended toward the most convenient, most obvious legal slippery slope, especially because we have a solid history and case law concerning polygamy that opponents would have to wrestle with. This is how you tailor arguments for a judge.
To build on @ArjinFerman, I think it included, but was even more than "changing the definition of marriage, and if you can do that, what else can you change?" It would be impossible for me to find my old comments on a legal blog from the period, but I had predicted that this general area could continue to be a sore spot, more like abortion and less like interracial marriage. The reason is that it cuts into deep questions of philosophy and science in ways that are difficult to reconcile beyond short-term applications of pure social power.
That is, at the time that interracial marriage rose to prominence, the question was relatively simple (in comparison), and one that was reasonably easily cabined as a purely legal question. Everyone more or less agreed that race was basically a thing. Everyone more or less agreed on what marriage was. They just had to figure out what to do with these things.
On the other hand, gay marriage very much got down to philosophical concepts concerning what is sex, is sexual behavior distinct from an orientation, how is that determined, is it biological or not, etc., as well as questions concerning what marriage is, what its purpose is, why we have it, etc. This is very much like how abortion sparks deep questions about what life is, when it is human, when it has value, etc. Trans questions are likewise in the intersection of very deep and important philosophical questions, and I think they retain the potential to persist as a divide over time.
It is of little surprise to me that as people are getting past the point of peak social power to get a policy outcome, they're realizing that they've actually found themselves in a bit of a philosophical thicket, and some are even wondering whether they let the fervor get the best of them the last time rather than reasoned consideration. We're just digging deeper into the really hard questions. I recall predicting (from my experience taking a queer theory class at the time) that, if anything, we were going to see that the decisions made in the past concerning things like interracial marriage were, not wrong, but woefully shallow, as the philosophical eye would no longer take things like "race" to be more-or-less agreed upon as mostly existing as a thing, and that it might become messier in the future.
I definitely recall arguing (on SSC, even, not just legal blogs) that the philosophical and scientific claims were on dreadful grounds, and that it was going to be a mess, somehow, for them to enshrine, as a matter of Constitutional interpretation, these shaky claims, akin to how Justice Thomas often reminds us that segregation in schools was once justified by social scientists with shaky claims that it would surely enhance learning to be in a cohort of similar looking peers. I don't think those warnings need to be cashed out in ultra-specific predictions of exactly what form the fallout will take. Just a general sense of the "abortion distortion effect" in the legal space, where it seemed to be the case (following Roe/Casey enshrining questionable philosophy buttressed by appeals to science) that the question of abortion precedent mangled far-reaching areas of the law that wouldn't, on their surface, seem to have anything to do with abortion.
Once you walk down the line of enshrining Constitutional interpretation based on lies about science and questionable philosophy, there are going to be bad effects, somewhere, somehow. "Hey, this other claim looks really close to that other lie, and you are absolutely forbidden from acknowledging that it was a lie, so what'r'ya gonna do about it?!" The whole endeavor is built on a rotten premise, and the only question is how many other rotten conclusions will be adopted in service of that rotten premise along the way. It took almost 50 years for Roe to finally be repudiated; will this end up being repudiated at all? Or will it truly be enshrined as complete cultural dogma, irrefutable by science or the lack thereof, free to continue distorting everything that comes close to it? Who knows. No one can predict with any level of granularity. We can't predict which specific offshoots will garner sufficient strained legal analysis and which others will struggle. But I think we can predict that this deep philosophical rift will persist.
Again, to make an analogy to abortion, I think about the fact that Peter Abelard, in the 12th century, has preserved writings on questions that are extremely close to current questions on abortion. That rift is way older than the 50 years from Roe to Dobbs. I can't imagine that fundamental questions about sex, gender, sexuality, identity, nature/nurture, etc., are just going to become suddenly resolved in a stable way super soon. If those fundamental questions are going to stick around, building on a bedrock of questionable philosophy and absolutely horrid "science" seems to almost necessitate some form of weird and bad transient outcomes.
Couldn’t you make up similar deep philosophical questions about race? What counts as a race, is race different from ethnicity? All the same questions about marriage would apply, too.
You’re correct to note they didn’t matter, because the important issue was equal protection under the law. Government guarantees on marriage had to be extended in a race-blind manner. But I’d say the same for gay marriage! The civil right of marriage ought to be extended in a sex-blind manner.
It’s trans issues which are the odd one out. They can get married, can use existing infrastructure. They’re staking claims on social prestige rather than securing some otherwise-inaccessible right.
I mean, I had a whole paragraph immediately before that one:
I even said later:
So sure, nowadays, people are trying to ask more deep philosophical questions about race, along the lines of what you're talking about. But I don't think this was so apparent at the time.
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Right, what I remember from the time was conservatives getting agitated over "changing the definition of marriage". It's an argument I found bewildering at the time, like bro, you can use whatever definition you want, but I recon that "marriage" defined as "a union between a man and a woman" was an important concept to them the same way "woman" defined as "adult human female" is important to a lot of women nowadays. The slippery slope argument applied to that was "if you can change that definition, what else can you change", and while it's true they focused on other ways the definition of marriage could be changed rather than the definition of "man" and "woman", given the reaction to the incremental hypothetical they were actually using, it's hard to blame them they didn't try something more radical.
I'm not sure I agree with the premise. Didn't some of the very same activist orgs that fought for the LGB move directly onto the T?
Right, and I can respect that opinion, but I think it's inconsistent with his "the scale of the issue is so tiny" argument. If he expects the anti-trans side to concede the issue based on it's scale, I don't see why he shouldn't concede it as well based on the same reasoning.
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Gay people didn't present a major restructuring of society. By and large the same people are in power, the same economic system is in place, and the only major difference is that two people of the same sex can sign a contract they couldn't before. Gay marriage did nothing to weaken globalist neoliberal capitalism - since that system is relatively egalitarian and doesn't care if the person at the top is a man or a woman, gay or straight, etc. You can have capitalists and laborers regardless of how you treat gay people.
I seem to recall the specific claims I encountered pre-Obergefell being more along the lines of, "people will want to marry cats and dogs!" or "what if people make pedophilia or incest legal?" While I'm sure there are fringe weirdos advocating even those, I think the fact that the "slippery slope" ended up mostly being people asking for trans people to be legally and socially recognized and to have access to medical interventions is rather less alarming and catastrophic than interspecies marriage or pro-pedophilia/incest claim would have been. I think there were good arguments against these kinds of concerns, and the pro-gay marriage people tended to be right on these specific issues.
I don't recall anyone pre-Obergerfell saying, "If we legalize gay marriage, then we'll have 4,780 adolescents starting on puberty blockers after a gender dysphoria diagnosis over a 5 year period and 14,726 minors will have hormone therapies, and annually around 300 13-17 year old girls will have breast reductions a year in a nation of approximately 73 million total children, accounting (all numbers together) for approximately 0.02% of children." My complaint here is not that no one got the exact numbers, since that would have been unreasonable to expect, but that no one got remotely close to the (relatively small!) scope of the issue, even if I'm sure you could dig up someone pre-Obergerfell making emotive claims that gay marriage will break down the idea of man- and woman-hood, and plunge our youth into a deep spiritual crisis around gender.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the error bars on some of those numbers I'm quoting are high enough to make your average person worry more about the number of trans people. But I think there's a basic motte-and-bailley happening here all the time. When people want to be alarmist, they'll quote the "30% of Gen Alpha is LGBTQ" type of surveys, or point to a 400% increase of referrals to a gender clinic of the last 5 years, or bring up a single clinic in a single country that didn't vet children hard enough. But when people point out that, as far as we know the actual numbers of kids receiving breast reductions or hormones or puberty blockers is relatively low, it's crickets.
I'm generally not impressed with claims that the trans issue somehow poses an existential threat to our society. The numbers just don't add up to that. Even if society evolved to the point where trans people became our palace eunuchs, our celibate priests, our castrati, or our skoptsy, I tend to think that otherwise healthy societies tend to have ways to route around such issues. This article claims 20% American women born between 1885 and 1915 never had children. WWI killed 6% of the adult male population in Britain.
We're regularly producing large populations of people who will never have children, and a healthy society would be able to bounce back, route around and deal with this problem. If that's not happening, then the trans issue is just the straw that broke the camel's back, because we couldn't get enough of our other societal structures functioning right.
I don't think society needs internal scapegoats to function. That's just a strong tendency humans like to indulge in.
I don't believe in the perfectibility of human nature via education, but I want to believe that we can set up society in such a way that alarmist claims about a tiny minority of the population aren't a necessary glue to hold everything together. We could channel those instincts in more productive ways than taking 1/1000th of the population and throwing them under the bus to make the rest of us more comfortable.
Look, the problem isn't just that people who don't think gender essentialism is a coherent worldview think that we're sacrificing the wellbeing of many children and adults needlessly. That's a problem of course but it's secondary to the point deer make horse dynamics. It's deeply unsettling to have what seems like plain reality not just denied but the denial to have in many cases incredible force behind it. There is a troubling kind of argumentation, where one is made out narratively to be a victim and then a huge chunk of the country will blindly support them while being not just immune to argumentation otherwise but actively against it. This feels like an autoimmune response, I don't know if a country can survive this kind of unreasoning in the long term. It's mildly terrifying to consider how easily nearly anyone can be framed as the oppressor against a new invented victim. There does not appear to be any limiting principle.
I know I'm going to sound like a broken record, but it's less "point deer make horse" and more "point guardian make adopted parent."
I maintain that you don't need any dubious metaphysics or unproven biological hypotheses to get a basic conception of trans-ness off the ground. I think if you accept that a legal document can "transform" an unrelated adult guardian into a parent in the eyes of the law and society, then it is possible for a legal document to "transform" a biologically male person into a woman in the eyes of the law and society.
There's nothing magical or spooky going on. There's no need to throw our old maps of reality away. We can fully acknowledge every true, scientifically verifiable fact about trans people, and still treat them like their adopted sex in as many contexts as it makes sense to do so, just as we can treat adoptive parents as biological parents in as many contexts as it makes sense to do so.
I understand that trans people and trans activists are often making stronger claims than I do in my posts on this topic. They'll advance metaphysical claims that they are "real" men or women, or that they have the "soul" of a man or woman. They'll advance unproven or irrelevant facts about biology to bolster their claims. I'm a metaphysical materialist, so I'm unimpressed by most of the metaphysical claims, and I'm willing to concede that the replication crisis and the lurking threat of a repeat of a lobotomy-sized science scandal casts sufficient doubt to make some level of skepticism basically reasonable, no matter what the current state of research is.
I just think it's important to point out that there's no necessary connection between a playbook of regressive social policies and trans activism. The legal and social questions can be settled completely separately from the metaphysical, medical and biological questions, and all of those are completely unrelated to the tactics that are currently being employed by some activists to get what they want.
As I said above, I think cancel culture and victim culture are completely separate issues from what legal regime we decide to adopt with regards to trans people. I don't think any more "unreasoning" is required than for any other social "reality." And I don't think if you somehow definitively ended the trans debate in either a pro- or anti-trans way, that it would magically lead to cancel/victim culture disappearing as important social forces. They're symptoms, not causes in themselves.
I acknowledge there exists a motte of social gender understanding that jettisons nearly the entirety of the movement's beliefs which is merely overly neurotically fixated on gender trappings. As you say though, it has practically no constituency because from that standing it really can't make any demands. The movement needs more than mere preference as motivation to justify demands for extraordinary treatment.
There is a clear and tangible need motivating treating adoptive parents like parents. They've taken on a real responsibility for the care of a child. If they just really liked PTA meetings and being seen pushing a stroller around we wouldn't humor them, or at least wouldn't tolerate any kind of top down demand to humor them.
If we reduce the question of trans down to "some people want to be treated s or they're the opposite sex". Then sure, it's coherent, and I'm even willing to humor it to a degree even though I think it'd be better liberalism to just say men can wear dresses and be treated like women while still being men if they want. This is of course all academic, we're talking about a reasonable version of trans activism that doesn't exist and won't ever be prominent.
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There's just one problem, the legal document does not define a "parent" as "whoever is designated to be a parent by the document", it just formalizes a legal relationship with rights and duties, and it is those rights and duties that are the functional legal definition of being a parent. Even then no one would begrudge a kid trying to find their real parents, and anyone screaming "They are your real parents! Adoptive parents are parents!" would be seen as completely deranged.
There can be no such functional definition for "man" or "woman" for at least two reasons that I can think of:
it will necessarily come into conflict with decades of feminist activism fighting for equality between the sexes
no matter how low you set a functional bar for being "man" / "woman" there will be those in the transgender community that do not fit the criteria, causing outrage about "gatekeeping"
This is where all the drama about "what is a woman" comes from. Pro-trans activists aren't spontaneously getting a bad case of the stutters, it's not that they've been put on the spot and can't come up with a satisfying answer, they don't have an answer, because there can't be an answer that doesn't cause a massive shitstorm. Like @ControlsFreak said, trans issues are in the intersection of very deep and important philosophical questions, and that simply can't be swept under the rug (though we've been trying furiously).
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I feel like you're dodging my question. You say things like "Gay people didn't present a major restructuring of society. By and large the same people are in power...", "Gay marriage did nothing to weaken globalist neoliberal capitalism...", "I don't recall anyone pre-Obergerfell saying, "If we legalize gay marriage, then we'll have 4,780 adolescents starting on puberty blockers after a gender dysphoria diagnosis over a 5 year period...", "I'm generally not impressed with claims that the trans issue somehow poses an existential threat to our society. The numbers just don't add up to that". I might be misinterpreting you, but given the above I don't know how to interpret statements like that other than "unless the issue affects a statistically significant portion of society (or abolishes the current economic system, I suppose), you should not oppose it". If this is the argument you're making, I want to point out that it's symmetrical. You should have no problem with a complete ban on gender affirming therapies for minors, because the issue is exactly as tiny as those therapies being prescribed to them. You accuse the anti-trans side of being hysterical over this tiny amount of prescriptions, but the sitting president of the Unites States called the attempts to regulate them "sinful".
If you do have a problem with these bans, I want you to explain in why, while explicitly taking your own "it's so tiny" argument into account, and once you do that I want you to explain why I can't use the same reasoning as a counter-argument as well.
Yeah, I know, I was laughing at those idiots thinking gay marriage might have any downstream effects at all too. The difference is that I never took it to be a specific prediction (though funnily enough that meme did get at least one specific prediction right), which is why I felt forced to concede they were right when the trans issue become more prominent.
I'd like you to elaborate on why that is a requirement to conclude they were right about the slippery slope. They were operating under constraints of believability, and like I said the idea that gay marriage will have any downstream effects was seen as absurd. As such it feels unreasonable to me to demand that they get second-order effects exactly right.
"Legally and socially recognized" leaves a hole in the argument you can drive an oil tanker through. This is the part where we go from a sub-section of society wanting to live their lives in peace according to their values, towards where speech norms are being imposed on everybody else, people get banned and fired for expressing their opinions, are expected to smile and nod as their daughters are being clobbered in contact sports by men, and to turn their heads when a male rapist is being sent to a female prison.
Why? The number of people affected by these things would be just as tiny.
My response to this is that the scale of the issue is not small at all. The numbers you cited eclipse the number of unarmed black men dying at the hands of the police, they dwarf unethical medical experiments like Tuskagee, and unlike the campus rape epidemic, they are actually happening. I could end at an argument from hypocrisy here, and say that I'd take your argument seriously, when I see progressives trying to reel their own in based on the numbers argument, but I'll go further: this argument is wrong.
Certain issues aren't about the number of affected people, they are worth talking about and addressing even if they affected only one person. I consider gender affirming care - generally - to be a medical scandal. It is scientifically unsupportable, and only tolerable when applied to adults, on the assumption that adults have a right to self-determination - a right that next to no one on the pro-trans side actually takes seriously, I might add. When it's applied to children, it becomes an atrocity. When it turns out that it's applied to children after years long assurances that this never happens, because we have strict standard of care to ensure accurate diagnosis and age-appropriate treatment, and after we find out this is in fact happening, those standards of care are then changed to remove age requirements... well, I'm running out of vocabulary to describe how messed up that is.
I agree that's a bad argument, which is why I never use it.
This argument was not used to claim the scale of the problem is earth-shattering, it was used as evidence for the social contagion theory
What happens inside a clinic is not public information, in fact, we consider medical information to be private and have put specific safeguards to ensure it stays as such. This means we're left with relying on whistleblowers (which has the obvious issue of people worried about losing their jobs and social standing), and clinicians inadvertently telling on themselves (which relies on them being unaware of doing anything controversial). Even then I'm aware of 3 separate clinics - Jaime Reed's, Tamara Pietzke's, and Diane Ehrensaft's. The claim isn't that the children weren't vetted "hard enough", the issue is that they made no attempt to rule out gender dysphoria at all. People running these clinics either belong in jail, or at the very least should have their license to practice medicine stripped from them.
Sure, just like I'm not impressed with claims that there is an ongoing transgender genocide. Now, do you want to take a wild guess which claim is actually being made by activists, and which isn't?
That's just not true. We've had this conversation before, I responded to your points. In fact, you were the one that got quiet after that. I don't hold it against you, it's normal for interest in a conversation to drop off if it's going on for too long / you get responses from multiple people, but you shouldn't act like no one ever addressed your claims.
You are misinterpreting. A better construction of my position is a more classical liberal position along the lines of, "We should consider the amount of harm done to unrelated parties before we consider banning a practice." There are plenty of things that are legal that I think are best avoided such as getting a face tattoo, but I recognize that I don't have access to the One True Way of living life or organizing society, and I think that it is best to keep a diversity of experimenting viewpoints within society for the following reasons:
At the federal level (speaking in a US context), all I advocate for is that adult trans people have the ability to use public accommodations of their adopted sex, except where that would be biologically impracticable. I get that even this position is controversial, but it makes no metaphysical or scientific commitments that can't be justified, and it leaves the more controversial issues of trans minors and things like trans participation in sports to be dealt with as each state wishes.
For me, it is simply a recognition that if any form our society or species is going to survive, then we can't put all of our eggs in one basket when it comes to how we organize society, and allowing trans people to use their preferred public accommodation is a part of making something like what Scott calls Archipelago a more practicable reality.
I fully appreciate that someone who believes strongly in the social contagion hypothesis might consider the mere idea of trans people to be a form of harm being done to people. Personally, I don't know if the social contagion hypothesis is true, and I don't know if I've seen any evidence that makes it particularly more likely than the:
Heck, there's nothing stopping some form of both being true. The number of detransitioners is only evidence of us being bad at doing differential diagnoses, and not really evidence of social contagion as the major driving force of the uptick. There will always be hypochondriacs, or people with OCD who obsessively fear they might have some disease or condition, or teenagers learning a bunch of new medical or psychological terms and wondering if one of those explains the trouble they've been having in life.
I tend to think most of the other things you listed are also a bit overblown, and in our efforts to "learn from" them and create rules for avoiding them we might have done more harm than good. Do you disagree?
I'm not so naive as to believe doctors will always do the right thing, or that current best practices will always be good for the health and well-being of patients. Lobotomies are the perfect example of a medical scandal that I think we should strive to avoid in the future.
If there are bad clinics, I'm not against the idea of shutting them down, stripping a bunch of people of licensees, and letting families affected sue. I have acknowledged in other posts that I think the replication crisis has undermined the basic trust we might place in medicine, and so I don't find it unreasonable for a given person to weigh the evidence and come out against large portions of trans medicine and healthcare.
However, my basic position is a separate one to almost every other part of the trans debate. I think we could allow trans women to use women's restrooms even in a legal regime where cross-sex hormones and surgeries were 100% illegal. There is no contradiction there at all.
Let the best practices in medicine evolve how they will as more, higher quality evidence emerges. We're always making judgements under uncertainty anyways.
I don't control what bad arguments or bad tactics people broadly "on my side" make. Obviously, if I had my druthers such people would only ever use good, convincing arguments and honorable tactics, and never use bad, unconvincing arguments and dishonorable tactics. It is beyond my power to make that happen. All I can do is try my best to articulate what I think are the better reasons for this position.
I'm open to being convinced that I'm wrong, and I get that people who don't share some of my underlying commitments or values might validly arrive at different positions in spite of us looking at broadly the same evidence base.
Fair enough. I understand I might not have responded to every point you raised in past posts. As you say, it is often hard to respond when I get too many responses.
I don't follow. If I want to heavily regulate or ban pediatric gender affirming care, and you point out that the amount of children going through these procedures is small, what does that do to consider the harm done to unrelated parties? Who even are the unrelated parties here? We both seem to be focusing strictly on the children going through gender affirming care. I can understand the disagreement if my claim is that GAC hurts children, and your claim is that it helps them (the usual debate that happens with trans activists), but I don't understand how your "come on, it's just a couple thousand" is supposed to parse as anything other than "it might hurt them, but there's so few of them you shouldn't care".
If you want to say that concerns over children shouldn't limit the rights of adults, I'm mostly with you. I still have plenty to say on the subject, as I don't think the evidence for adult GAC holds up very well either, but I don't think blanket bans are the way to tackle that.
That's a fine principle to follow, but for me it would mean no federal policy at all. Let the states sort it out internally. Some will be restrictive, some will be permissive, and time will tell who was right.
Your approach would just result in kicking the can down the road, and people fighting over what is "biologically impracticable" (Is putting male rapists in female prisons "biologically impracticable"? I mean clearly, it can be done).
I don't disagree, but I resent having a wet blanket thrown on a conversation I care about, when I've just been forced to seriously consider several grievances that felt frivolous to me. As for the reaction causing more harm than good, it's all in the reaction, rather than the issue being overblown. Like I said, I think BLM was frivolous, but body cams were a great idea. This is why the numbers conversation feels like such a deflection, if you're worried about a particular policy being an overkill, I'm sure we could hash one out that will be more acceptable to your classical liberal sentiments. In fact, from everything you're saying it doesn't sound like we even disagree on that much when it comes to policy, which is again why it's so frustrating to get served the numbers argument, and have it implied that it somehow refutes my concerns.
In a perfect world, yes, I'd be happy to let science sort itself out. In the current world science is held hostage to ideology, and political action is part of the self-correcting process you're asking me to trust in, so I feel like I have no other choice than to participate in the politics.
Right, and I'd never demand that from you, but then surely you must understand why I was bemused when asked to answer to some "existential threat" claim that you said was implicit in my position.
That's absolutely fine, it's just the *crickets* bit I took issue with.
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I don't think this has ever been anyone's position in the history of getting things banned by a government. A far more consistent way of understanding bans is that they are used as a way of hurting or disadvantaging people that they don't like, or social engineering attempts at removing undesirable behaviors.
People don't give a shit about harm, and when they do at all, it's often the point to maximize harm to the outgroup.
My understanding of why gay marriage was legalized is that it was a power and institutional flex by the ascendant progressive left as a way of hurting their outgroup, the religious right. They saw an opportunity to stamp on some faces after the religious right was used as a political force by Bush 2 to win his elections, and they did it. Had it been any other issue they could have hurt their political opponents on, they would have done it. Gay marriage was an easy low hanging fruit because it had little to no short term economic costs, there was little political capital used in getting it passed if you worked in a heavily urban area, it stimulated a lot of fervor in the voting base, and it expanded the marriage/divorce lawyer clientele.
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I agree it’s not an existential threat - quite possibly every actually does. The people on the other side of you on the issue are not making a claim on the grounds of Utilitarianism.
I would argue that quite a few trans skeptical arguments are clearly utilitarian/consequentialist in nature: "irreversible damage", detransition woes, and bathroom/women's prison fears all seem to have their basis in a line of consequentialist reasoning.
I'll concede that many trans skeptical arguments are built on foundations of different conceptions of fairness, or metaphysical/epistemological commitments of some kind. But I do think that the "think of the children" type arguments veer into an implicit claim of existential threat. If we're supposed to take it seriously as a call to action, we must believe that more than 0.02%-2% of the population are going to be brainwashed by the trend of "trans ideology." Because "think of a tiny, insignificant minority of the children" is less of a rallying cry than, "it could be your kids next!"
I disagree. If something moves from "so rare you've only heard about it happening in America, via sensationalist media" to "several cases in your tiny, rural, eastern European town" most people will still parse that as "it could be your kids next!"
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I don't undertsand why the 'tiny minority' argument still gets play on here of all places.
The issue is not Lizardman's Constant. The issue is society needlessly and uncomfortably contorting itself to accommodate Lizardmen. I've said it elsewhere here, but trans activism has reached into my world on several fronts over the last decade, twisting up everything from hobby groups, to corporate politics, to the software I install prompting for pronouns. This is all possible even without even so much as sharing room air with trans person.
I may be a simpleton, but - there is something infuriating about the follow-up 'What consequences are you so worried about?'. And I'm really not sure in the specifics! Call it a hunch, but I think the officiated dissolution of the man/woman binary will manifest in a thousand indirect and different ways down to the level of how one socializes with other people. And the amount of confusion and irritation it produces will never abate. They're building a house without a ground floor, because they think floor boards are just ugh trivial.
I think this phrase conceals a lot of different things, not all of which should be considered in the same breath. All of the following are different:
I'm sure I could split out thousands of more specific scenarios, but you get the idea. My overall response would be that where "society" is doing something you don't like, it is important to distinguish between private individuals, groups of private individuals, private companies, or the government. If your complaints are about the first three, then I don't really know what to say. Society is allowed to drift from social norms you would find preferable. I don't like tipping culture in the United States, but I do participate in it in spite of that. You have to choose how much you're willing to interface with larger society, and dealing with the consequences if you step away from the most common social norms around you. You can make the choice to be the guy who never tips anyone out of some principle, but you'll deal with the social fall out of that choice.
If it's the government's actions, or their follow on effects then the answer is "simple", but not "easy." Organize, win over the hearts and minds of the voters, convince the Supreme Court to undo all the laws you hate. There are plenty of laws I don't love in their current form, but if they're relatively small burdens on me I don't spend a ton of time worrying about them. If Federal trans legislation is hurting you personally, then find specific places you can move the legal regime in your favor and work to make it happen.
I really wish we could have these conversations without somebody dropping the "Have you considered that society changes?" chestnut as if this had never occured to their interlocutor. I don't believe in a moral arc of the universe, that this world owes me or anybody anything, or that I will be anything more than insignificant dust and long-forgotten memories long before our universe blinks out. The world is nakedly and unashamedly unfair, and good guys don't always win. I am fully aware of the consequences for participating or abstaining from the social games society expects people to play. I understand that my future position in this new world ranges between softly smiling while keeping my thoughts to myself or the Principal Skinner meme should this state of affairs be permanent. I know that it requires organization and coordination to fight against. Half of the problem with the 'woke resistance' is getting coordinated at all before they buckle under their own ridiculousness or get sabotaged by a hostile media!
Just assume I have thought about this, and that I realize my own predicament. I'm sure you can appreciate that your appeal means nothing to somebody who believes they have legitimate concerns with this forced, artificially imposed consensus while they have years left on this rock. It's certainly not going to stop them from sharing those thoughts on a pebble-sized forum dedicated to that very purpose.
I appreciate that formal and informal 'trans support' manifests through different mechanics and pathways vis a vis public and private actors, but your distinctions just illustrate to me the messy, tangled wholeness of the issue. That a company is just forced to comply with the 'bare minimum' of federal laws imposed by activists - or the increasing set of secondary yet nonetheless important rules alternatingly concocted by and imposed upon every major corporate and media entity that functionally comprise a second government - does not soothe my ire, but speaks to the totality of the whole problem. You recall what Father Merrin said.
I've heard the "it's only a few kids on college campuses" argument, and while I was happy enough to think it would stay in America and only in certain circles, next thing I knew I was getting people putting their preferred pronouns in work emails. It's not something mandated by government or law, which makes it even more insidious; it's people in certain areas or positions who feel that they should, if they believe in all the guff, or that they have to, if they don't, do this thing to signal that they are good greengrocers who know what signs to put in the window.
This thing I was told would never be imposed on anyone, would never become widespread, and was just "a few kids/academics on college campuses in the USA".
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I don't think this really changes your point, but "all the gay people" is definitely an exaggeration here. I definitely know people whose queerness is central to their counter-culture identity of "down with heteronormative patriarchal capitalism" or whatever, including speaking out against nuclear families. And queer artists who joyfully include the same themes in their work.
For sure, blanket statements are always wrong, I was trying to invoke top-level demographic trends and using imprecise language.
Although I would guess (not high confidence, interested in input) that the people doing that now are more interested in the being counter-culture first and are bringing their queerness into it second, as opposed to back then when queerness forced you out of the mainstream culture and a counter-culture was developed as a result. I think that's a real and important difference, though maybe I can't fully articulate why... in practical terms, just the number of people affected, should be different.
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It's fine to be honest. Just as the opposite is fine mostly. Most of my Red neighbors don't rant about Biden or Trump all the time. It certainly isn't what i would call scary. Just as with abortion, or that capitalism is murder or whatever, what people say and what people actually do is very different. And what people mostly do is go to their jobs, come home and then repeat.
Almost every Republican who says they think the election was stolen are not going to do anything about it. Just as almost no-one who says that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism actually does anything about it. Let's not get people's rhetoric confused with something they believe enough to actually do something.
You would be perfectly fine living in the vast majority of right wing leaning places in the US, just as your right wing counterpart would be perfectly fine living in a left leaning area. The vast majority of people are simply not that politically engaged.
I've been instructed by the mods that I should have replied to this.
I didn't because my response is just 'yeah I totally agree, I guess I should have questioned OP's premise instead of accepting and mirroring it', but that feels like it doesn't add much to the discussion so I was just going to upvote and move on.
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I’m going to disagree a bit. There’s a tipping point for any person at which they’re willing to cross a whole lot of lines to get things back to how they believe they should be. And to be honest most of the people who believe that believe in either communism or stolen elections are probably not going to do anything to stop someone else from doing it. If I truly believe that Joe Biden won in 2024, I may not personally fly to DC to try to stop certification, but I’m also not going to stop you from doing exactly that. If it bothers me enough, I might even donate to causes that believe in what I believe. The lady in the pews who opposes abortion probably donates to the cause.
To cut a very long story short, there are gradations in radicalization and normalization in any political or social opinion. And there are gradations of being involved as well. Not everyone is going to be on the bleeding edge, but they will often at least grudgingly accept those who are. And as you get closer to whatever edge you’re on, you’re increasingly okay with personal involvement in the cause. And those support networks allow the fringe to. Operate more easily. If it’s a militant group, someone might allow them to meet in their field. Or even just not say anything to outsiders about the group.
I agree with most of this, but I don't think the US is anywhere near where it was in the 70's in this regard, and certainly not as divided as Northern Ireland was, and things held together just fine. The tipping point for most people in a wealthy country is pretty high.
1973 saw 2-3 domestic bombings daily! We don’t blow up transformers and police stations anymore so much as shoot groups of random people.
Of course, the domestic terrorists of the 70s were left wing radicals whose white leadership often went on to careers in academia which is hard to imagine for the current right wing radicals.
Back to the topic at hand. I don’t know how to compare the two.
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It sounds like part of what you're saying is that undercurrents are more powerful for change than the currents themselves. This is very interesting, and if true, speaks to some sort of profoundly strange with our world or our culture. I feel like this could be worthy of someone writing some kind of political science thesis about this. I'd love to know more about why that's the case, has it always been the case, are there nuances, what things work better for undercurrents vs overcurrents, is it because of our unprecedented online culture, and what this means for how future political movements should be trying to accomplish their ends.
Well, this is probably my libertarian, mottezian, contrarian-style behavior coming out, but I can't stand the fact that you're probably right about this, that optics rule our world more than truth.
I have a more charitable but patronizing view of the general populace, I guess, which basically says 'Most people don't have the time, inclination, or ability to understand most issues deeply, and relying on hueristics when they need to form an opinion or take a side is not actually crazy given that. To a first-order approximation, 'this person seems cruel and/or crazy, their side is probably wrong' is a pretty good hueristic, and a lot of our cultural problems come from more-engaged people realizing that normies are using that heuristic and trying to manipulate their sensory inputs in order to trigger it on their opponents'.
Which is to say, most people do care about being directed by the truth, they're just not competent to discern it.
(which I don't exclude myself from, that's why I check in on arguments from places that disagree with me, just in case)
Of course, maybe that reduces down to your sentiment, anyway.
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