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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.
If it's any solace to you, I'm a leftist of yesteryear and I don't feel like I'm winning either. Any accusation that I'm just unhappy because this is "too much of the same thing I advocated for" rings hollow - where exactly is the conservation of direction here? I fought against squares and religious nuts trying to ban me from reading and writing the things I wanted to read and write, and briefly things seemed to go uphill, but now I am once again fighting against people wanting to ban me from reading and writing the things I want to read and write. Same for reality-based policymaking, avoiding war, et cetera, all of which used to be considered leftist causes, and I can assure you I wanted them for themselves rather than because this was just what lay in the direction "left" happened to be pointing in at the time. Surely the people who you see as winning nowadays will "lose" eventually too, whether this will be in a way that you would recognise as "their thing going too far" (transracialism?) or something that looking forward from the present era will be as utterly unrecognisable as "left" as the push for joining the Ukraine war or bad-word censorship in every home would have been 50 years ago. Chances are whatever wins at the time will still be considered "left", but should this have any impact on how we feel about it? Do you feel differently about Chinese battles from the Warring States period if you learn that the winning army was called "left" (for entirely unrelated reasons to our modern terminology)?
It turns out that the past and future are usually not just some foreign country, but more akin to the actual Aztec Empire. Greater people than us have tried to do something about it to no avail. You know that meme prayer that ends with asking for serenity to accept the things you can't change?
I could describe your allies back then, and the people who you agree are going to far now, in the same way: They're trying to advance the cause of oppressed groups, especially racial and sexual minorities.
I admit it's a matter of framing, but it looks from my point of view that it's all the same direction, even if they expanded their definitions of "oppressed groups" and "advance the cause". It's true that they've gone from supporting free speech to opposing it, but that's a change in tactics, not a change in principles, even if you have principles.
If you squint hard enough, isn't any political movement that has not already won "trying to advance the cause of oppressed groups"? That description applies increasingly well to most facets of the American Right as it fully realised the position it is in, too. I don't think racial and sexual minorities were a big focus in my environment (but consider that I lived in Germany back then). The main focus was on curtailing the powers of classical power centers like police, military and banks, and the grift and self-serving laws constructed around them. There was also a large environmentalist streak, but I was opposed to them from the start and there seemed to be enough room for a "non-environmentalist left" that could be for, say, individual gas-guzzling while expropriating big oil executives.
True, but it seems to be the same sort of oppressed groups as before. They didn't shift from blacks to Star Trek fans or anything like that and while you could argue they shifted from gays to trans people, the gays and trans people are part of the same coalition.
I would agree that opposing banks or military is deemphasized nowadays and I don't know how different it was in Germany.
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Do leftists of yesteryear still count as leftists? It's a question I keep grappling with, not knowing if I should keep screaming "don't call me right-wing! I was right there with you on the barricades!" or just go "eeeh, fuck it".
As for conservation of direction, we did just have a conversation the post gay marriage slippery slope, and it still feels like one of the areas I have a massive egg on my face given how things panned out.
It's definitely a hard question to answer, in no small part because of how there's no standard definition of what counts as "left," and how "left," "liberal," and "progressive" get conflated. When I look at the values that tend to get associated with such groups, I see values that I support today as much as ever - e.g. sympathy and support for the least well-off in society for "left," freedom of speech for "liberal," and changing the structure of society to get "better" in some meaningful way (i.e. for it to "progress" rather than merely "change") for people who used to be ignored or denigrated for "progressive."
Where I see myself departing greatly from the modern left - besides the fact that they largely just reject the principles of liberalism - is the willingness to check that claims are true and that policies really do create desired outcomes. E.g. the whole WPATH situation seems to be the result of people just deciding not to check what would actually lead to the best outcomes for kids who claim to be trans and just going along with people who are sympathetic and sound like they know what they're talking about. To achieve anything good in this world requires some level of brutal honesty about the reality of the situation, and I just don't see that happening.
And this is one insight that I think right-wingers of yesteryear had when I was poo-pooing their claims of "slippery slope" (I too admit that I have egg on my face on this, for whatever little it's worth) that I lacked. They understood the psychology of self-proclaimed leftists/liberals/progressives than I did. Perhaps unsurprising, because I'm not known for understanding the way others think, but I would have thought back then that as a leftist/liberal/progressive, that I understood their thinking better than their enemies would. They understood that the left/liberal alliance was largely one of convenience, and that liberalism would go out the window if the opportunity presented itself to most of those identifying on the left. That's what they were warning me about, and I was pushing back using basic philosophical/logical arguments instead of recognizing the way the landscape was shaped. Often, when someone is proven wrong, it's not that hard to reach for excuses for why it was reasonable to be wrong at the time or how this thing doesn't actually prove oneself wrong, as a way to save face, but in this one, I don't see any way around just completely submitting to any "I told you so"s that anyone might want to throw at me.
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The way I see it, voluntarily recusing oneself from the term is a rare example of something I'd consider to be a legitimate case of quokka behaviour. Certain circles in society have spent so much energy into establishing a belief or vibe that amounts to "left=good, whatever left happens to be", in no small part cashing in on the goodwill that the left that I associated with amassed - why should I let them have that goodwill and actually get to use it against me? A principled stand for words having a fixed meaning can't be had if you react to every successful redefinition of a word with a "fine, I guess its fixed meaning is what you say now".
I think I started seeing the warning signs there when proponents widely came out against legally equivalent "civil union" proposals. Sure, they could have argued against it on the basis that a difference in terminology might cause problems when you go abroad, or would be easier for hostile forces to rollback, and so on - but instead it was largely argued on the basis that the union ought to be recognised and validated in the same way as it is for heterosexual couples, which was the first significant foray into legal rights over someone else's thoughts and speech.
The latter is basically the same argument as the former though. The reason it might be easier for hostile forces to roll back is because it wouldn't be validated and recognized in the same way as it was for heterosexual couples. In other words, for it to be as safe as heterosexual marriage it must be thought of as equal to heterosexual marriage, not just be legally equal.
Progressiveness (in this context) requires changing minds, not just legalities, because legality is dependent on what the polity thinks. Historically we have been pretty bad at "separate but equal". Therefore it has to be just "equal".
Even if the effective mechanism (minds being changed) is the same, I think the difference between quietly hoping that people's minds will change and openly communicating the will to compel the change is significant; the latter shifts the window towards other forms of mental compulsion (of which we have since seen many) so obviously that only someone either reckless or more accepting of them than I can tolerate in my own camp would do it.
But if they are less open won't they just face accusations of attempting to change minds secretly and nefariously? If you assume that in order to get marriage equality secured (because it is at risk if not as we discussed) people's minds must be changed then your options are to be open or secret to varying degrees.
Openly seems the best option. We all are products of mental compulsion, our upbringing, the social values of our peers and the pressures they put on us to conform. There is no society without mental compulsion in this format. The thing we are fighting over is just which mental compulsions reign. And I would rather know about all of those competing.
Churches openly proselytize their beliefs. Would we better off if they were doing so secretly?
Churches are also recognized as churches for purposes of separation of Church and State.
That doesn't have anything to do with the question in hand though. Would we be better off if churches or ideologies were attempting to change minds secretly or were being open? The fact the US has a specific separation of Church and State for historical reasons doesn't really impinge on this question. The same question would hold in the UK, which does not have such a separation.
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