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I wanted to write about the WPATH leaks: the cancers and the shrinks debating over how many of a 12 year old's "multiple personalities" need to be transsexual before they should give them hormones and surgery.
I wanted to write about a woman I know who just got a $90,000 government grant for her instagram hobby farm, alongside hundreds of other fake businesses like "the Black farmers collective." Taxpayers gave her more money than her business will ever have in revenue to play upper-middle-class status games while the few remaining real farmers around her are going out of business.
I wanted to write about watching my friend once again change all the grocery store tags because prices keep skyrocketing as talking heads insist we're imagining it all and everyone's actually getting super rich.
I wanted to write about my state banning non-"cage free" eggs and claiming it won't increase prices... because they negotiated a kickback deal with the remaining suppliers to eat the cost until after the '24 election, after which they can harvest their monopoly rents and some lobby group can release an official report claiming the price increases were unrelated.
I wanted to write about how my state house just banned natural gas hookups and enabled pressuring companies to drop service to existing customers.
I wanted to write about the people chanting "glory to the martyrs by any means necessary" while insisting nobody could possibly suspect them of supporting Hamas, with every leftist somehow getting an identical memo about how to provide cover for them.
But what's the point? Seriously, why even talk about this just to get gaslit by the people who are celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening?
You could spend your entire life writing tens of thousands of words explaining and analyzing this insanity, and all it does it give the perpetrators the satisfaction of gloating about getting away with it.
What are we even doing here? Are we just going to keep doing it forever as the country goes completely insane?
Why? What possible good will it do? Is this whole place just a safety release valve to stop any pressure building up against the overton window slamming left faster than the eye can see?
Does anyone actually get any pleasure out of this? Does anyone think it's doing any good? Can anyone point to an example of it doing any good in the past? Has culture war discussion on the motte ever actually led to anyone solving culture war problems? The closest thing I can come up with are TracingWoodgrain's exposés, which while incredible have hardly moved the needle on public awareness.
Virtually all the energy expended here seems to be vented straight into the void, almost like it's deliberately set up to do so, keeping people arguing in circles until it's too late to do anything about it. And it's been going on for over a decade! When will it stop?
Edit:
I hope this example might get across what I mean. A few weeks ago I wasted time finding out about "multiplicity" (the new social contagion of kids who spend too much time on discord deciding they're all "plural systems" of different personalities). Did a bunch of research, got on a bunch of discords that use the "pluralkit" plugin, found examples of psychologists taking it seriously, started writing a post.
It turned out Gattsuru was already talking about it last year like it was just a normal thing that normies will learn to accept soon.
Yesterday we found out a bunch of WPATH associates all treat it like a legitimate and uncontroversial diagnosis that lots of their "trans kids" mysteriously have. It hardly made a splash in the news. Pretty soon people will be mocking anyone who cares about it.
I realized that any discussion I started on the motte would be pointless. It would just run the same circle of "noticing, denial, minimization, celebration, resigned acceptance" that literally all culture war events go through here.
What good would bringing it to anyone's attention do? Even the most bizarre event that would have been considered unimaginably stupid until the second it happens will just be rationalized away like it's no big deal.
For me, it makes more sense to focus on the ~1 million infants who are circumcised every year in the US than to focus on the relatively much smaller number of minors who undergo gender hormone treatment or surgery. Circumcision isn't as harmful on average, however it is happening to a much larger number of minors than the number of minors who are gender-transitioning, and unlike with gender-transitioning minors, there isn't even a faint amount of consent from the person who gets the surgery, there is literally zero.
I think it's fine to focus on both at the same time, of course.
In my case this is the literal equivalent of "why don't you do something about FGM in Somalia" thrown at western feminists. I find the practice barbaric, but over here it's next to unheard of (at least outside of the protected classes in coalition with the trans movement). Even in America, there are certain characteristics of this issue that doesn't make it prone to becoming a culture war hotspot - most importantly people leave you alone if you don't participate. The other thing is the direction the practice is trending in, 1M per year would put it at ca. 1/3 whereas I remember the stat of 2/3 of men being circumcised in the US back when I was getting into spats about it on internet forums.
All in all, if it makes more sense to you, than go and focus on it, but why do I get the feeling what you actually mean is for people like me to stop talking about the trans stuff?
I don't mean that you should stop talking about the trans stuff, I just don't agree with how big of a deal some people here make of the trans stuff, and how often they post about it, given how few people it affects compared to other issues. I get that it's a leftist vanguard in the culture war, but then people should be more honest that they care about it because it's a leftist vanguard more than that they care about it because of the kids who are getting hurt by it. I agree with you though that the direction the practice is trending in is encouraging in, that makes me happy.
I think a major motivation there is that, for people who have kids, there is a portion of the trans activists who will directly try to influence your kids in their direction; if you are unlucky, your kid could suffer serious consequences. It's one of the aspects of the culture war that has the potential for the most direct, severe personal impact, even if the absolute odds may not be that high. I would be against it even if it were a rightist point.
By contrast, nobody's trying to secretly circumcise the kids. (Or if they are, they're doing an incredible job keeping it secret.)
But that's because they succeeded so well they became the status quo. Assuming you think transness is harmful or something similar, a future where "transing" your kids is done openly is not better one than they have to do it in secret. It's worse because it means they won so thoroughly it is now entirely accepted.
That's status quo bias. Because X succeeded and is now the way things are, it is not as bad as Y which is a new change.
Now Y can still be worse than X for other reasons, but the fact X is done openly isn't on its own an argument for it being less harmful.
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