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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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In the interests of stirring the pot, I'll link to this person's attempt at a fisking of the WPATH files, pointing out examples of factual inaccuracies, things taken out of context or similar. Without having read the WPATH files I can't speak as to whether their characterisation is accurate.

Still gets me that the word "fisking" - a word invented by online warbloggers for their supposed eviscerations of Robert Fisk articles and which, insofar as I remember it, often devolved to just laying the article out sentence by sentence and replying to individual sentences with "Oh come on!" and "Surely no-one can believe this!" -style fare - continues to live, even though most people would in fact probably agree that Fisk was more correct about whether Iraq War was a proper decision or not than the warbloggers.

I saw that scrolling by recently, though haven't read the whole thing. I'll add it to the reading list, and say what I think when I'm through it, but I'm putting high odds on it being cope. For one, the argument I made in the post doesn't rest on anything being taken out of context. The other files are comments on some sort of internal discussion platform they're using, I didn't see anything there being taken out of context or misrepresented either.

I think the only take away from that is to ignore all the editorializing and only look at the actual pictures. I agree that the people who wrote the files are pushing an agenda and playing fast and loose with the facts, but the stuff in the actual WPATH communications is just as crazy.

This mostly seems like an attempt by the author to get people to avoid looking at the actually damning stuff.

and playing fast and loose with the facts

I can understand the agenda bit, though I'm not sure how much agree (worst case scenario they're about as ideologically biased as WPATH itself), but what made you think they're playing fast and loose with the facts?