88 pages from 2021 involving Wilfred Laurier social sciences?
You know what's more interesting, in the months since this study it has become much more clear what's really going down.
NYTimes realized their echo chamber and practically ordered their journalists to exit their echo chambers. Which upon doing so they somewhat returned to better journalistic standards, NYTimes suddenly showed some excellent legitimacy.
CNN is basically in complete collapse because they were too late. Can't see how they recover without some absolute hail mary.
Rachel Maddow had a bit of a sabbatical and then got rebranded and is on air far less. MSNBC ratings not looking so hot lately.
Meanwhile Fox is in dominant #1 position. There's objective measurements that the democrats moved far left creating the polarization. You have star trek discovery a ultra top secret missions best of the best crew... but every character is LGBT. Wtf are they trying to say? Even Trek fell into this same trap as those above.
Has anyone checked out Star Trek Strange New Worlds episode 1 where they literally say second US civil war. The story was intentionally weak as hell to ensure everyone who watches it sees they are talking about the USA. The importance of getting those 2 parties talking together again. That working together for a better future is really the only way.
Even Trek suddenly realized their own mistake. It makes for such an amazing first episode.
Abstract: "Americans’ hostility toward political opponents has intensified to a degree not fully explained by actual ideological polarization. We propose that political animosity may be based particularly on partisans’ overestimation of the prevalence of extreme, egregious views held by only a minority of opponents but imagined to be widespread."
You: "There's objective measurements that the democrats moved far left creating the polarization."
I don't know how we're defining "an objective measure", but pushing CRT sure looks like "move left." So does "we're going to help your kid transition without telling you" and XYs in women's sports.
Of course, one can argue that none of this is new, that what's new is pushback.
"Pushing CRT" sounds pretty subjective. What measurement are you offering here?
CRT, itself, is a pretty nebulous concept outside of actual legal scholarship. "Pushing CRT" is a common right-fringe talking point. How much do you think the majority of Democratic voters agree with "pushing CRT"?
I didn't say that I was offering a measurement, in fact, I asked how we were defining "an objective measure." Moreover, I have no idea how many Democrat voters go along with the institutional Left.
That said, the institutional left (IL) is pushing Project 1619 and associated materials outside of law schools, whether or not you want to call that CRT. (Shades of "no true Scotsman.")
This is part of a broader "all-in" on DIE by the IL. "Everything" is racism, sexism, etc.
There's also deplatforming and doxxing.
No, I'm not going to provide a scale. I'm not even going to order deplatforming and doxxing. So, the above isn't quantitative measure.
I'm claiming that the fact that the original poster didn't provide something like "0.2 units to the left" doesn't actually refute his fundamental point.
> Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
What you've done is complain about some general stuff that you seem to dislike about "the left" and completely fail to engage with the content of the actual article, which I was trying to bring the discussion back to. But hey, at least you acknowledge ignorance about what most people think. Perhaps you should try exiting your bubble and figure that one out instead of dwelling on what you hate about the fringe.
The original claim was that the left hadn't moved. The response was "prove it".
I provided examples of movement by the institutional left. No, those examples don't have numbers, but they do show movement. Besides, how do you apply numbers to this sort of stuff in any reasonable fashion?
Whether or not I like those things or they're "general" has nothing to do with whether they're movement. That's likely why you didn't comment on whether they were in fact movement.
That said, as long as we're lecturing one another on meta-discussion, it's nice of you to provide an opportunity to quote Hannah Arendt:
"The elite is not composed of ideologists; its members’ whole education is aimed at abolishing their capacity for distinguishing between truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction. Their superiority consists in their ability immediately to dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose."
> The original claim was that the left hadn't moved. The response was "prove it".
No, the original claim was actually this: "political animosity may be based particularly on partisans’ overestimation of the prevalence of extreme, egregious views held by only a minority of opponents but imagined to be widespread."
The counterclaim was: "There's objective measurements that the democrats moved far left creating the polarization."
My suggestion was that this counterclaim seems to be exhibiting the same fallacy discussed in the paper.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties are very large, and its members have a wide variety of views. If you pay close attention, you'll see that there's quite a bit of infighting, sometimes very bitter, even within each party. Broad generalizations about Democrats or "the left" — and likewise about Republicans or "the right" — are often going to be grossly inaccurate. You can't just treat huge groups as uniform when they're demonstrably not uniform.
The American people — well over 300 million of them — have diverse political views. But we have a political duopoly. Which means that these diverse views held by Americans have to somehow fit mostly within these 2 parties. It's a mistake to overgeneralize about political parties and similar groups.
I personally find the terms "left", "right", "liberal", "conservative" to be practically meaningless. They've lost all of their original meaning and become opaque cudgels for the political parties to pretend they have some kind of coherent ideology. But this is a bit of a tangent.
Anyway, I would bet that most Democrats and most Republicans don't even know WTF CRT is. Even the ones who complain about it!
> The original claim was that the left hadn't moved. The response was "prove it".
Nope. The top-level post claimed the existence of objective measures of "the left" moving "far left", of which I haven't seen evidence.
And, I'd never claim that "the left" hasn't moved. The left/right terminology is rather sloppy, so I've tried to use the language of TFA: Democratic and Republican voters. But, let's look at "progressives" for a moment. The goal of progressives is to identify oppression in the world, and work towards overcoming it. That is to say, the goal of progressives is to change with the times, which is why, for example, today's progressives hate Margaret Sanger but still support Planned Parenthood. The goal of social conservatives is to resist change and as we're seeing with Roe v. Wade, undo past progressive changes (which, I think, is technically "regressive") which is why, for example, we see today's social conservatives rallying around statues of Robert E. Lee.
But that's not what the article about. The article is about how each side sees the other. It's nicely summarized by this SMBC comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07
What's going on today is that Democratic voters increasingly identify Republican voters as the nazi-flag bearing Charlottesville rioters, and Republican voters increasingly identify Democratic with murderers like Kermit Gosnell and Christopher Dorner.
This is the same sort of argument-by-definition that gun rights supporters use to dismiss anyone who talks about "assault weapons". A whole lot of parents don't want their children separated by race and have white kids told that they bear personal responsibility for historical racism and anything they accomplish is only possible due to the oppression of others, while black kids are told that society hates them and they'll never get a fair chance to succeed (unless of course we overthrow the racist misogynist capitalist power structure). If your response to that is "well actually CRT only refers to the specific legal theories of Kimberle Crenshaw", you're not addressing the actual point.
Whites are the oppressors and BIPOC are the oppressed. That anything and everything boils down to the color of your skin. That white Americans in particular are the sole perpetrators of historic slavery. That current white people should atone for the sins of past slave owners regardless of when their family came to the US.
Well, you're absolutely correct, inasmuch as that's a racist tire fire that shouldn't be in schools. But that's not "critical race theory," it's overwrought caricature that mainstream (and, in my bubble, even the quite radical) progressives would disagree with.
CRT is a legal theory taught in colleges that is based on the ideas that are being taught in some elementary and secondary schools. No, CRT proper is not taught to children. Yes, the ideas that CRT is based on are being taught to some children. When the right says CRT is taught in schools this is what they are talking about. When the left and the media says that CRT isn't taught in schools they are talking about the CRT legal theory.
2) The article about US schools was written by an Australian.
3) The article seems free of any actual empirical examples of its main claim.
4) There have always been groups in the US who want censorship in schools for anything they don't like politically or religiously, most notably, the science of biological evolution. The "oh no, what are they teaching the children in schools" crowd is very hard to take seriously. There are people who don't want slavery mentioned in schools. They don't want the Holocaust mentioned in schools. It's hard to imagine a more "radical agenda" than all of this censorship and denial of facts. Wipe away history? Wipe away science?
The irony is that those who say "just teach the controversy about evolution and the Holocaust" [there's no scientific controversy] would also refuse to "teach the controversy" over CRT.
I've never taught high school, but I did teach (philosophy) at the university level in the past, and the people who complain about what's taught in college typically believe laughably inaccurate caricatures of what actually happens in the classroom. We're not proselytizing students; it's hard enough just to keep them awake during class and prod them to actually do the assigned reading in the first place.
> 3) The article seems free of any actual empirical examples of its main claim.
Yeah, I gave the article an honest read, looking for real evidence, because it runs entirely counter to my experience. I'm a mom of a kid in grade school, and I've talked to a lot of parents and teachers about this topic. I'm in the very liberal Vancouver area, and my same-aged friends are spread across Canada and the US. Nobody I know is seeing anything like the racist trash that tastyfreeze and Areo are spreading.
As I suspected. Unwilling to read evidence with an open mind because they are from the "other side". Both of those sources quote school district administrators and curriculums.
> As I suspected. Unwilling to read evidence with an open mind because they are from the "other side".
I took the time to read the first link you chose. It did not show what you thought it showed. You thereby lost credibility and the benefit of the doubt in my eyes. So no, I'm not going to waste any more time reading your links unless I have a very good reason, and I also find it suspicious that all of your links are to publications with well-known political agendas. This is why I'm suggesting you find an article, one article, any article, that doesn't come from such a publication.
Your "other side" comment is an incorrect assumption, because I'm not on a side and have no political party. I'm what you might call an "independent".
Go put your finger on the republican line and see where it moves.
There has been analysis done by many groups which have confirmed where the political polarization derived heavily starting with gay rights. The republicans who had 'closeted' homosexuals moved left. Trump literally started a fight with russia and the middle east trying to benefit homosexuals. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-adm...
The republicans clearly moved left and it was the right thing to do. Whereas Truman != Obama. It's rather easy to objectively see both parties have moved left.
I feel like this is rather objective fact. The better discussion, why is this the case? Is it perhaps where the democrats have gone is the right place both parties eventually end up? Or are we about to watch 2nd civil war?
> Go put your finger on the republican line and see where it moves.
Ok. I downloaded the gif and went through it frame by frame. What it shows is that the Median Democrat stayed exactly the same during 1998-2011, while the Median Republican moved right the whole period of 2004-2011.
Anyway, this story is from 2014, so it's missing the last 8 years.
> What it shows is that the Median Democrat stayed exactly the same during 1998-2011, while the Median Republican moved right the whole period of 2004-2011.
Now try doing the whole span it's depicting, instead of picking the best years for your viewpoint.
> Anyway, this story is from 2014, so it's missing the last 8 years.
> Now try doing the whole span it's depicting, instead of picking the best years for your viewpoint.
What do you think is my viewpoint?
During 1994-1997, both parties were moving left. And during 2012-2014 they were moving in opposite directions. I focused on the period of 1998-2011 because that seemed to be when there was the biggest difference in behavior between the 2 parties.
The claim of incomingpain was that "the democrats moved far left creating the polarization". But this is not supported by the given data. The parties were moving in lockstep prior to 1998, and the Democrats didn't move at all for many years after 1998.
It seems difficult to argue that the polarization was created in 2017, given the data from 1998-2011. Anyway, incomingpain, the one who made the claim, was also the one who linked to the pre-2015 data.
Here's the funny thing: incomingpain said "The republicans clearly moved left and it was the right thing to do." And Republicans did indeed move left 1994-2003... but then they moved back right starting in 2004. They moved right at the same time that Democrats were staying the same. So shouldn't incomingpain argue that backtracking was the wrong thing to do, if moving left was the right thing to do?
I do think that people are so busy being mad about the "Democrats have moved too far left" meme that they haven't really thought about it. The problem being the definition of "too far left". But yeah, I think they've moved to the left because human rights are important.
It would be interesting to go back to Women's suffrage because I'm sure people were having the same discussion. Liberals have moved left while Republicans have stayed where they are. But of course, moving to the left on equal rights for women is not liberals moving too far to the left. It's society course correcting. You don't get to say "Well liberals got women's rights so we get ____" But too many Republicans are saying the equivalent of that (hell some Republicans do https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/politics/2021/10/22/a... say exactly that.)
Human rights can't be a partisan consideration. It can't be something we compromise over. We just have to evolve as a society, get over it and instead have substantive conversations about the policies that move the needle in people's lives.
The left doesn't equal human rights, it means more government intervention and currently it means using and abusing small portions of society under the guise of human rights and social justice as a false pretense to expand government control. Liberals have also not 'moved left', the democratic party has abandoned liberals in lieu of progressives, socialists and other people who believe in a more involved government instead of individual liberties in order to garner more votes and retain their districts.
It was actually "replace the police with herds of social (government) workers" and the governments ability to allow people to kill unborn kids in order to lessen government burden by eliminating under privileged classes.
If that's the part of my comment you're latching onto, and you're not disagreeing with the notion that Repbulicans don't believe in women's rights, than we're in a much worse place than I thought.
Your entire statement was ridiculous and pompous, but the only thing worth replying to was your incorrect belief that the left represents human rights. So no, I'm not going to sit here and bicker about an ann coulter quote who is known for decades as being purposefully inflammatory for the sake of having people with your point of view bookmark and share her stupid statements in order to prove a point.
Anne Coulter aside, there is a core point here and that is that historically, we've gotten it wrong and I think most of us can agree that looking back we had it wrong. Yes, that Anne Coulter quite is ridiculous but was likely more representative of opinions around the time of Women's suffrage. Is it not possible that we can collectively figure out where we continue to get it wrong?
What are human rights? To have an abortion? To own a gun? To have a say in what your children are taught? To get money from the government? It all depends on who you ask. Calling something a "human right" is a rhetorical device used to make disagreeing with your political position immoral and even heretical rather than just plain old wrong.
Despite whatabouting away from the women example, some of those can be classified as human rights, and what we currently have on some of those topics you could call a "reasonable rational compromise", even if I personally disagree, but right now Republicans are planning some interesting totalitarian anti-women, anti-privacy type stuff to tackle abortion.
Sometimes your opponent actually is taking an actual anti-human rights position. It's pretty common.
The pro-choice side would say the by banning abortions you are infringing the right of a woman to choose when to have a child. The pro-life side would contend that by enabling abortions you are infringing the right to life of an unborn human. Both positions are framed in terms of human rights and plenty of "reasonable rational" people argue vigorously for each one while viewing those who disagree with them as basically evil.
Framing the debate in terms of individuals' rights is intended to remove the topic from the realm of political discussion and shut down dissent. It also completely drowns out discussion of the societal effects of allowing/banning abortion, which is just as important as the effect on individuals. The same unproductive dynamic plays out in the debate over e.g. the right to free speech.
I want to add that I believe the way forward in this debate (and others) is to acknowledge that both rights are valid but neither are unlimited. The best compromise is to be found by sounding out the limits of each right. That is a political debate, not a quasi-religious one, and one that should be rekindled from time to time to update the compromise to match contemporary circumstances. In this regard, for either side in the abortion debate to enshrine their preferred right in the constitution would be a disaster.
> Go put your finger on the republican line and see where it moves
This ignores massive societal shilf we've had - which is erosion of worker's rights.
The 'left' used to mean worker's rights, helping the poor, maybe socialism or welfare.
Now you have folks who see themselves as left because they suport trans right, but their solution to 'No parental leave in America' is 'more freee market'
And the left could have had it all. They could have built a coalition of common cause between trans rights and workers rights, with a common philosophical underpinning. Instead, they've shifted to look down on blue-collar workers as "a basket of deplorables".
Contempt for your constituency is not how you build a winning coalition.
> And the left could have had it all. They could have built a coalition of common cause between trans rights and workers rights, with a common philosophical underpinning. Instead, they've shifted to look down on blue-collar workers as "a basket of deplorables".
Is this actually "the left" though? The same people who came up with the insult "basket of deplorables" also came up with the insult "Bernie bros".
Seriously, if the left means Hillary Clinton and does not mean Bernie Sanders, then we might as well just throw all political labels in the trash.
Fair point, but... Is there any significant politician on the left, other than Bernie Sanders, who is actually pro-working-class at the moment?
If so, I haven't paid enough attention to politics to keep track of what's going on. But if not, then I think it's fair to say that the left as a whole abandoned the working class, with Bernie being the exception.
I think most elected politicians tend to betray their constituents.
Bernie has the "luxury" of living in one of the smallest states in the nation, Vermont. He can wage a ground game campaign and not worry about having to raise massive amounts of money for big market TV ads. This makes him less susceptible to corruption than other senators. Also he was never a Democrat in the first place but an independent who decided to run for the Democratic nomination, so he was never fully a part of the the party apparatus.
It's interesting to contrast with how Trump basically waltzed in and took over the Republican party, despite not having been a solid Republican himself in the past. I take this as a sign of how marginalized the left has been from the Democratic party. Sanders has taken over the spot of being the Democratic scapegoat for all their problems, a spot formerly held by Ralph Nader.
thats because Democrats are largely impotent whereas republicans have let fringe hateful ideas become their platform. If one person in the room smells like shit, can you blame other people for taking a step away?
> republicans have let fringe hateful ideas become their platform.
In 2001, 23% of Republicans/Republican-leaning Americans supported same-sex marraige. By 2019, it was 44%. Among white evangelical protestants specifically, it was 13% and rose to 29%.
If I may inject a bit of dispassionate analysis here: I think there's a grain of truth to both sides.
It's true that Republicans have moved more toward same-sex marriage.
However, it also seems to be true that the legalization of same-sex marriage has politically activated many Republicans who are still opposed to same-sex marriage.
When same-sex marriage was not legal, those opposed to it could remain fairly complacent. It was the status quo and wasn't an issue where they felt the need to engage in political activism. The most outspoken people were those in favor of same-sex marriage. But when same-sex marriage was legalized, there was an almost complete reversal, in terms of activism.
So today it feels like Republicans are more opposed to same-sex marriage, even if the raw numbers say otherwise. But perhaps the raw poll numbers don't reflect the level of enthusiasm or activism regarding the issue.
I think this is actually a general point: the level of political activism regarding any issue tends to be highest among those who feel threatened. So ironically, the level of activism opposed to same-sex marriage, for example, becomes higher as that view tends to wane in public popularity. A powerful overwhelming majority, on the other hand, doesn't need to make much effort to maintain its status.
Cute? I am challenging your perception that Republicans let their "hateful fringe" take over. The data shows that Republicans have actually been getting more progressive. That this trend isn't fast enough to suit you is beyond the point, republicans trending in this direction at all (let alone doubling) contradicts your stated perception of the trend.
Your statistic is based on the opinion of individual voters. My concern is with the forces in government that have made my friends in Florida fear that they cannot talk about their lives without being branded a pedophile. The sitting members of congress who think trans people are an abomination. The 20-something states that allow for conversion therapy for minors. But sure, I'm glad I can feel safe talking about marriage with 44% of rep. voters.
> The data shows that Republicans have actually been getting more progressive.
That data shows only that republicans’ support of gay marriage follows the same trend as democrats’, at a lower level. That indicates to me a cultural shift for this single issue more than a political one.
The data in the article below paints a different overall picture, though I went to the source and did not find the information on what their metrics were for the liberal / moderate / conservative spectrum. It’s likely in their downloadable data sets but I am on mobile.
Actual laws actually enacted by conservatives are not middle of the road. Nor justices they pushed into supreme court. By that I mean that actual politic of both parties is different.
> 88 pages from 2021 involving Wilfred Laurier social sciences? You know what's more interesting...
So, I take it that you didn't read the article and dismissed it based on its length and source?
> There's objective measurements that the democrats moved far left creating the polarization.
Source please?
> You have star trek discovery a ultra top secret missions best of the best crew... but every character is LGBT.
Not even close to every character. There are quite a few romantic entanglements through the story: Burnham/Tyler, Voq/L'Rell, Burnham/Booker, Georgiou/Lorca, Lorca/Cornwell, Pike/Vina, Detmer/(unnamed), Airiam/Stephen, Sarek/Amanda, Burnham's parents, and, yes, one gay couple, Stamets/Culber. There are two trans characters, one bisexual character, and I count three gay characters. The cast list on Wikipedia lists 43 characters in total.
I think you might be misperceiving the opponent fringe here?
>I think you might be misperceiving the opponent fringe here?
Sorry, I wasn't clear, not 'all'. Clearly disproven by just 1 character if you're going evaluate all characters even if they were only on screen for 1 second.
> There are two trans characters, one bisexual character, and I count three gay characters. The cast list on Wikipedia lists 43 characters in total.
12 main characters and 6 lgbt?
Mind you, I LOVE the idea of trill being trans/non-binary. This makes a ton of sense.
What discovery failed at is exactly what is tearing the USA apart. I love they realized why it didnt work and are doing better.
Okay, that's a pretty big goalpost shift. In nearly 60 years of Star Trek, we've now got 4 seasons where some main characters aren't strictly cisgender and straight (but the majority of the couplings are still between straight, cisgender characters). In what regard did Discovery "fail"? As far as I understand, it's been pretty highly acclaimed.
Very curious what objective measures you’re referring to. The downfall of leftish media itself kind of suggests the opposite: mainstream left-leaners are rejecting their more extremist media wings. Meanwhile the right is galvanizing around their most extreme.
All of this is a bit conjecturey too, so I ask again, what’s the objective measure you’re speaking of?
>The downfall of leftish media itself kind of suggests the opposite: mainstream left-leaners are rejecting their more extremist media wings. Meanwhile the right is galvanizing around their most extreme.
I find it telling you see fox news as 'most extreme'.
To me, the polarization is objective. We need to evaluate to determine if perhaps that is the path. In 50 years from now we might be talking about how ridiculously conservative we all are back in those antiquated 2020s. What we would see is the far left doing really well. They did do pretty well while they pushed various disinformation campaigns.
The evaluation though is obviously the opposite. The polarization has derived largely because of echo chambers and identity politics. Those who are failing discovered this reality and have publicly admitted to this failure.
The USA is now sitting at the choice posed in strange new worlds. We dont need to keep fighting. We need to get back to talking to each other. This is the essence of why elon musk is buying twitter. End the censorship and get everyone talking again.
The linked source does not at all support the claim you're making. I do not say that Fox is the "most extreme," though it is certainly extreme. The growth of OAN, Breitbart, etc. is actually what I was referring to.
> NYTimes realized their echo chamber and practically ordered their journalists to exit their echo chambers. Which upon doing so they somewhat returned to better journalistic standards, NYTimes suddenly showed some excellent legitimacy.
Details? I know they've gotten a few people who are outside the progressive orthodoxy and tend to poke holes in it to write opinion columns in the last few months.
I have to wonder if you know what far left means outside of the US. Because even the furthest left of the Democratic party is barely left-leaning in Europe and most other democracies.
So you expect roughly 50% of people to hate you, and for you to hate about 50% of people? Seems a miserable way to look at it.
The fact is that choices are limited. Things like ranked choice voting might start to change that. Maybe we could see other major parties at some point. The fact that we have only two main parties is a product of your (and most people's) sort of game theory mindset - that you have to oppose the other side even if your choice isn't great.
This is exactly the sort of catastrophizing that the study is talking about. Yes, I'm sure you can find a few lunatics on the right who have said something like that. You can also find nutjobs on the left who want a literal Communist revolution. Neither is anywhere near the views of the vast majority of conservatives or liberals.
Did I miss something or is this just inflammatory rhetoric? I know about the literal genocide happening in Yemen but I haven't heard anything about transgender genocide.
Florida's HB 1557 doesn't go that far, but the rhetoric that people use to support it has echoes of fascism. All of the right-wing talking points around trans issues equate teaching kids about lgbt issues to pedophilia. For many supporters, even walking around as trans is seen as sexual deviant and dangerous. When a bill is passed that enshrines into law that "it is bad to tell kids about this person", and the supporters casually say "breaking this law is pedophilia", what do you think is going to happen to trans people trying to live their lives in Florida?
Pretty much. I try not to go down the "dehumanizing language = genocide" path, because dehumanizing language has sadly become par for the course, but there has been a rapid escalation on two fronts, reflected directly in state laws:
1. Moving from simple dehumanization to "trans people are groomers and pedophiles and we must protect our children from them at any cost". This is still only an escalation toward violence, but it certainly is an escalation.
2. Forcible detransitioning of trans people, with the direct aim of eliminating out trans people as a population. It remains to be seen what will be done with people who refuse to detransition, but imprisonment appears to already be on the table. And when you imprison a population for their identity and/or customs, then, well... that's genocide.
Unfortunately your comment is a pretty common disingenuous representation of the arguments being made from the other side along with some misinformation scattered throughout. Please broaden your news sources so you aren't so easily swayed by the partisan rhetoric. In your defense, the propaganda on this topic has been overwhelmingly strong.
What the law actually says is that teaching about sex or gender _in the curriculum_ is not allowed prior to 4th grade. That goes for heterosexuality as well as LGBTQ. No one is exempt or special. Basically, kids at half the age of puberty should not be taught about sex, full-stop. Let them be kids for a few years longer before they learn about sex.
Of course, the law just addresses material in the curriculum, so having a picture on your desk of your same-sex SO is no problem and you can talk about sexuality with young kids as long as it's not curriculum (still gross imo).
The problem is that this equates "relationships" and "love" with "sex". The literal text of the law says "don't teach children about sex". The explicit reasoning behind this law is that this means not teaching children about homosexuality.
This positions homosexuality as inherently sexual in a way that heterosexuality is not, which is, of course, not true. Sex is of course an implied part of heterosexual relationships, we're just conditioned as adults not to think about that.
And in turn, your comment is a pretty common disingenuous representation of the bill from its supporters.
No, it is not about "sex", it is about "sexual orientation", which is generally understood to be whether one is gay or straight or bisexual or asexual. It's often used in place of the more accurate technical term "romantic orientation", which is about who one is romantically attracted to, but the term isn't in common usage. In any case, it is not related to sexual intercourse. Children can understand it, and it is manifestly appropriate for children of any age. The support for this bill has seemingly overwhelmingly been based on this deliberate conflation between discussing sexual/romantic orientation and discussing sexual intercourse.
If you check the bill's text, it's not just "material in the curriculum", it's "classroom instruction", which would include discussion, which could be argued to include any mention of being gay. And it's not just under 4th grade, it's for any instruction not deemed "age-appropriate", which, in a country that still teaches abstinence-only sex-ed in some states, could mean anything. That these links are tenuous is no comfort; if the exceptions aren't strong enough to get the case thrown out immediately, it still leaves the school open for lawsuits, and the school will self-police to avoid them. And you'd have to be truly naïve to think that this will be applied to straight and gay relationships in equal measure.
Plus, there's all the language about parental access to health records that are pretty clearly aimed at requiring the school help out gay and trans kids to their possibly abusive parents, which nobody ever mentions for some reason.
As you both seem to disagree about the actual text (though, in truth, probably agree as "sex" and "sexual orientation" are sometimes synonyms), I had to look it up. From [1], a summary:
> Parental Rights in Education; Requires district school boards to adopt procedures that comport with certain provisions of law for notifying student's parent of specified information; requires such procedures to reinforce fundamental right of parents to make decisions regarding upbringing & control of their children; prohibits school district from adopting procedures or student support forms that prohibit school district personnel from notifying parent about specified information or that encourage student to withhold from parent such information; prohibits school district personnel from discouraging or prohibiting parental notification & involvement in critical decisions affecting student's mental, emotional, or physical well-being; prohibits classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grade levels; requires school districts to notify parents of healthcare services; authorizes parent to bring action against school district to obtain declaratory judgment; provides for additional award of injunctive relief, damages, & reasonable attorney fees & court costs to certain parents.
The line being discussed here is prohibits classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grade levels. The relevant part of the full text linked (in a pdf named PDF.pdf, which made me chuckle) is:
> 3. Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
That's as far as it goes, and the definitions of what is "age-appropriate" or "developmentally appropriate", among other things, are not given. Hence, it appears to me, that any claims as to what it really means, by either side of this debate (or either of the fringe elements, as the majority in the middle appear to for these rules[2], however vague) are unable to be substantiated either way.
I suggest everyone calms down until the actual details come to light.
Some children in kindergarten through grade 3 have parents in same sex relationships. Some socially transition. An actual detail of the law is it prohibits even age appropriate discussion at those levels.
Another poll found 62% of Americans oppose legislation that would prohibit classroom lessons about sexual orientation or gender identity in elementary school.[1] Are Florida Democrats much more conservative? Do many Americans think grade 4 is the right time? Did the people who said somewhat no in the Florida poll mean yes with limits?
Talking about sexual orientation is at times a subset of "discussions about sex". Hence, given a charitable reading of both your comment and the comment you replied to, you may both be talking about the same thing.
> Some children in kindergarten through grade 3 have parents in same sex relationships.
I fail to see the relevance.
> Some socially transition.
I don't know what that is.
> An actual detail of the law is it prohibits even age appropriate discussion at those levels.
As I pointed out, the law doesn't define what age-appropriate means. If you have information to the contrary, please share it.
> Another poll found 62% of Americans oppose legislation that would prohibit classroom lessons about sexual orientation or gender identity in elementary school.
It's not a national law, so again, I don't see how it's relevant.
There are times talking about sexual orientation and talking about sex overlap. This isn't. bavell stated they meant sex independent of sexual orientation specifically. a_shovel stated they meant sexual orientation outside the context of sex specifically.
A search engine can define socially transitioning for you. The relevance of children having same sex parents or socially transitioning is sexual orientation and gender identity are visible to children in age appropriate ways. Not invisible until puberty.
The law not defining age appropriate is irrelevant to the total ban through grade 3.
The national poll casts doubt on the presented interpretation of the Florida poll.
```
Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students
```
The one paragraph in the bill is the entirety of the language used here.
1) "instruction" is vaguely defined here This isn't about sex-ed, this isn't about genitals, it is about "orientation or gender identity". I'll note here that being gay and trans isn't just about sex and genitalia. If a student asks the question: "why does sally have two moms?", does answering that question put the teacher at risk? What if Billy asks if being gay is ok? Are teachers allowed to answer?
2) if the teacher is trans and the students ask about it, what is the teacher allowed to say? Is the teacher able to write their name on the board with their preferred title?
3) Is the teacher allowed to mention the existence of their spouse regardless of orientation?
4) if a child is bullied for wearing clothes that don't match their percieved gender (i.e. boys wearing dresses), is a teacher allowed to explain that it is not ok to bully someone because of their gender? Regardless of what you think about a childs ability to make decisions about gender, you surely understand that they have an idea of what gender is and might decide to bully eachother for it.
I will note that this bill is amended from its original language, which shows the true intent of the law:
```
A school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age -appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.
```
I am basing this analysis entirely on the language of the bill and its amendments. I very much encourage you to look at the reasonable amendments that FAILED in committee here, as they speak volumes to the intent of the republican majority.
My previous comment is informed by the documented behaviors and speech of right wing politicians and commentators around the passing of this bill, which do escalate this topic to dangerous levels of right-wing outrage. No there is not language in here that equates sex-education to grooming, but there is ABSOLUTELY discussion on the right that does draw that line.
Also "don't mess with parents"??? Who is messing with parents? What actual harm came to kids before this bill? Are parents just mad that trans people exist and that their kids are being taught not to bully trans people?
I think we also need to move primary voting to the same day nationally. Right now just a few states narrow down the primary choices. By the time it gets to the later states there's only one or two left.
"voting Republican in America gives power to a party that believes that it is evil to tell children about the effects of slavery or the fact that queer people exist and deserve rights."
That's the same sort of extreme view that the paper was talking about, and mischaraterizes the party's position (even if a small faction does believe it). Don't you think that some Republicans think all Democrats want to abolish the police or take their guns?
My opinion of Republican values regarding LGBT rights comes directly from spoken statements from sitting members of congress and state legislators. If Republicans can point to actual legislators that say "no one should have guns", I'll listen. But typically I find that gun-control "debates" involve a nuanced "common-sense" gun control side and a "they want to disarm you and take your stuff" side. Which again, comes down to disinformation spreading among the right and preventing good-faith arguments for gun-control.
You may want to consider viewing things more neutrally. As someone who doesn't care about guns, your dishonest take on the gun control "debate" is obvious. If you are going to apply a silly caricature at least do it to both sides ("they want to take all your guns" vs "they don't care if children get shot at school").
A nuanced view of the actual debate is that one side believes the second amendment is absolute and the other believes that it allows for some restrictions similar to the free speech / "fire in a theater" situation. The posturing you see around this is just to rally votes, that is the meta-game. Too many Americans are unable to separate the rules of the game and the underlying issues at stake.
> A nuanced view of the actual debate is that one side believes the second amendment is absolute and the other believes that it allows for some restrictions similar to the free speech / "fire in a theater" situation.
You presume that there is agreement among the first group that the First Amendment is not just as absolute as the Second.
BTW, that "falsely yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theater" bit was actually a threadbare excuse to punish people for protesting the draft, something many would consider protected political speech. The hypothetical scenario is not very well reasoned, either, even ignoring the context. If anyone is hurt during the evacuation the fault lies with those who panicked and trampled them in their haste to escape, not the person who claimed there was a fire, regardless of whether that report was true or false. The most they could reasonably be held responsible for is the interruption of the show for an orderly evacuation.
I don't think my description of right wing talking points is caricature. The right wing do see any reasonable reform as "taking our guns away", their side is the one that fails to see nuance. That absolutist, literalist read of the constitution is the side without nuance, categorically. My view of gun control is neutral, I want to protect the rights of citizens to stand against their government and I acknowledge that loose gun laws can lead to harm, direct or indirect. That is the most neutral position possible and sitting members of Congress would consider me far-left and fascist for it. The Right is seemingly allergic to nuance, incapable of digesting reasonable objection. How do you meet in the middle with that?
How far right are we talking? In your previous comment you said Republicans. Now you say right wing. There may be extremist groups that say any regulation is unconstitutional (which can apply to guns, speech, etc). But that doesn't represent everyone. Gun groups have supported past restrictions/laws. Even fairly recently the NRA said that they support banning bump stocks.
The real question is, what is considers an infringement? This is true of other rights as well. It's hard to define without trampling rights, especially for minority interests in a democracy.
fair, I do use right-wing and republican interchangeably. In this context I do mean republican politicians and media commentators that largely follow the conservative party line, and not the more nuanced voting base that is potentially open to debate.
> The real question is, what is considered an infringement?
gee itd be great if that question was discussed in right-wing media instead of uncritically painting every attempt at discussion as a violation.
"gee itd be great if that question was discussed in right-wing media"
I don't just mean on this issue, but in general. We see vastly different controls on guns/abortion/voting/etc from state to state. When is a restriction an infringement? Who decides that and on what basis? It seems that it's up to judges, but what happens if none of the judges are members of the minority group who are being restricted (think segregation)? That's the part I find interesting.
> A nuanced view of the actual debate is that one side believes the second amendment is absolute and the other believes that it allows for some restrictions similar to the free speech / "fire in a theater" situation.
I don't think this is accurate description of guns debate I have seen.
> The posturing you see around this is just to rally votes, that is the meta-game. Too many Americans are unable to separate the rules of the game and the underlying issues at stake.
What you call meta game is in fact the real thing. The posturing is expression of values and opinions. It is reflected in laws and court judgements. Too many people domt take it seriously and even worst blame those who take it seriously.
Then the "posturing" becomes policy and laws. While the same people oretend to be all surprised ... who could have guess they would do exactly what they said they will do.
"Common-sense" is a highly opinionated phrase. I do sympathize that it's hard to find a good debate due to the misinformation or poor arguments on both sides. Without good debate it is tough to get a good view of the issue. Even then, there can be points that come down to philosophy or law around how the action can/should be implemented. And of course, there's very little nuance or compromise being investigated by either side.
That said, which LGBT rights do you think they oppose? Do they oppose all rights or just "common sense regulations" (see where I'm going?)? What one person sees as a right, someone else might see as a privilege. Or what they see as reasonable regulation another might see as infringement. The sides have to convey their reasoning for why something is a right, or why they see it the way they do. It's supposed to be an effort to understand each other to make things work for both sides through compromise.
There are a lot of vehement and downright ridiculous comments out there. Perhaps you see more of them on the LGBTQ issues. Perhaps gun owners notice them on gun issues. So perspective can matter. You have people like Beto O'Rourke saying they will confiscate certain arms. There the DNC committee member that said she thinks nobody should have a gun (Bonnie Schaefer). Many have declined to answer whether they believe if owning a gun is a right, including Hillary Clinton. If they can't answer the question, then people will think it's a bad sign. There are a lot from Feinstein that I'll put at the end. And this doesn't even cover all the misinformation (what was used in a specific crime, things that are already illegal), frivolous laws (a folding stock isn't making a difference), and wrong terminology (assault rifle, clip/mag, etc). It's hard to write intelligent legislation if the terms aren't used correctly or the subject isn't well understood. I assume you've seen the same on cis people writing LGBTQ laws.
Many gun organizations have supported past restrictions. Maybe we could implement "universal" background checks by creating a free to use system that can be used for other types of checks as well and doesn't keep a record of what the check was for (maybe using a zero trust pattern or some one way hashing which industry/watch group oversight)? This would address the concerns the concerns of building registries or abuse of power while making a seller civilly liable if the person they sold to was prohibited. Why doesn't anyone in power suggest such a thing as a compromise?
There are tons of options out there. "Common sense" has just become a marketing term by politicians on both sides to appeal to people without actually proving out their issue.
I'll leave you with some quotes from Feinstein:
“Banning guns addresses a fundamental right of all Americans to feel safe.” – Associated Press, 18 November, 1993.
“If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them; “Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in,” I would have done it.” – 60 Minutes on CBS, 5 February, 1995.
"All vets are mentally ill in some way and government should prevent them from owning firearms."
I would argue that statements made 30 years ago are irrelevant to the current debate, considering that would also bring into discussion every opinion held by GOP operatives over that time period and boy that ain't pretty.
Im generally opposed to equating LGBT issues to gun-control issues. This dichotomy was brought up by a previous comment and I dont really want to get bogged down in the issue. After all, one is an issue of bodily autonomy and freedom of expression, and the other is an issue of "what do we do about this thing that is expressly designed to harm other humans".
My personal views on gun control aren't really reflected by any sitting member in congress, and I will admit that a lot of debate on both sides are largely reactionary and you can take impassioned statements from either side out of context. Fine. I will still hold that the right will shut down at any nuanced discussion of the issue, which I see as the main problem. If the GOP took a principled but open-minded stance, you could negotiate down from the reactionary Dem position down to one that thinks critically about privacy as you suggest... but the GOP doesn't allow that discussion.
> That said, which LGBT rights do you think they oppose?
My right to self expression. My right to live a life of my choosing without fear of retaliation. My right to tell others about my existence. As evidenced by objections to bills that would enshrine my safety in finding employment and healthcare. As evidenced by politicians that equate my speech to pedophilia. Are my rights to safety and speech privileges given only to cis/straight people? What are the "common sense" regulations to me living my life? Do you see how I may not agree with the false equivalency of gun rights and lgbt rights?
"I would argue that statements made 30 years ago are irrelevant to the current debate"
You asked for a sitting representative. She's still there. I would guess her views haven't changed much but is just out of the spot light now.
"Im generally opposed to equating LGBT issues to gun-control issues. This dichotomy was brought up by a previous comment and I dont really want to get bogged down in the issue. After all, one is an issue of bodily autonomy and freedom of expression, and the other is an issue of "what do we do about this thing that is expressly designed to harm other humans"."
I don't think they are closely related, but they are both strongly held beliefs and deal with rights. Some say the right to self defense is a natural human right and that guns are a tool in that context. It seems that by your statement you hold some rights above others (and don't even mention anything related to right on the other subject). Is this perhaps indicating that each side has a different perception? Also, guns have other purposes, they aren't all just for harming others.
"I will still hold that the right will shut down at any nuanced discussion of the issue, which I see as the main problem. If the GOP took a principled but open-minded stance, you could negotiate down from the reactionary Dem position down to one that thinks critically about privacy as you suggest... but the GOP doesn't allow that discussion."
Is it possible this is a standoff - that the GOP thinks they would have critical debate if only the other side proposed something they saw as reasonable first? Everyone wants to blame the other side, and I agree that it's just all reactionary at this point. But seeing the other side as the main problem might just be the reason we have such stalemate.
"Do you see how I may not agree with the false equivalency of gun rights and lgbt rights?"
I'm not saying they are equal, but they are similar in how rights and restrictions are imposed/violated in the name of common sense and reasonable things (as said by people with no experience on the issues).
I'm not aware of anyone at the federal level trying to take away your Healthcare and safety rights (but maybe they aren't mainstream enough).
On the fear and retaliation, I believe those would be federal hate crimes. Again, I don't know of any mainstream movement against that.
The comments about pedophilia are terrible. I believe the bill only removes all sex related cirruculum material but doesn't impact personal expression.
>I think we also need to move primary voting to the same day nationally.
while we're at it, Democrat voters should get their party to sunset its superdelegates system if they want their primaries to actually be, y'know, democratic
The Republican party might have a better defense if their platform in the last election weren't literally "we support whatever Donald Trump wants" [0] . That way, the American people would have any way to tell whether their loudest (and most divisive) voices were representative of the larger party on any given position, rather than just having to assume they are.
The way I, and likely many other voters, have viewed the past couple elections is a little different.
It's basically a choice between a shit sandwich and a shit sandwich without the bread. Which one is which depends on your perspective. They both suck but the bread makes one slightly more palatable.
With that in mind, the platform for democrats was to vote out Trump. Similar to four years earlier the republican platform was to vote for anyone but Hillary.
That works if you think only the national scale matters; that there's been a similar pattern at the state and local level (without the overblown individual personalities) suggests that it's not just the "this specific person sucks" pattern.
Of course it's not just that pattern. There are others.
It does tend to exist and depends on the state. In the general election you still typically have only 2-3 choices for many offices at the state level. They tend to follow a similar two party paradigm and have a "Not that person" feel to some of them. Local elections have less personality involved in many areas simply because the person is less notorious and their positions are less well publicized.
> The fact that we have only two main parties is a product of your (and most people's) sort of game theory mindset
Or of a winner-take-all electoral system? I can’t say that the systems I’ve seen which have you vote for an amorphous entity instead of a tangible and somewhat accessible person are better in every sense, exactly, but I think of the sort of environment which would develop the word bipartisan to mean universally supported and can’t shake off an overwhelming feeling of stupid.
From the linked paper: "Time spent watching partisan media (controlling political orientation) predicted greater overestimations of the prevalence of extreme views"
“Hate” is too much. I can exist in a society with opponents and allies pretty smoothly. But morally, I’m going to bucket people, yeah.
If you vote one way, you don’t care all that much about key issues that matter to me. I do. It’s relevant to my life. It doesn’t matter what you say. The truth is you don’t care as much as I do.
I don’t have to oppose anything. That’s you projecting. Knowing who is opposing me is not opposing them. It’s just knowing the landscape. I’m quite comfortable not opposing someone even if they oppose me, but I do insist on knowing they oppose me.
> So you expect roughly 50% of people to hate you, and for you to hate about 50% of people?
You don't have to vote either Republican or Democrat. Third-parties, write-ins, and simply abstaining in protest are all perfectly valid alternatives which would get you out of that 50%. I more-or-less agree with the GP here: If you vote for a candidate knowing that they will use the power you give them in ways which are harmful to others, you're contributing to the problem. That's true even in FPTP voting systems where the winner will almost certainly have an (R) or (D) next to their name no matter what you do. Overall turnout (voter engagement) and the percentage that actually voted for the winning candidate both matter even if they don't change the official result of the election.
Yes, you don't need to be part of the 50%, but that doesn't get you away from that effect of the 50% either. There are causes in both major parties that someone is likely to find themselves on the receiving end of some law or regulation that they don't like. So you could still end up opposing that 50% if you're lumping them all in with the politician on that side.
"If you vote for a candidate knowing that they will use the power you give them in ways which are harmful to others, you're contributing to the problem."
Can you name any candidate that wouldn't harm any group? It seems they all have ideas about what laws would make things better, and those laws tend to involve control of people's actions or inactions.
> Can you name any candidate that wouldn't harm any group?
No, I can't. That's the problem with voting for representatives or officials—you inevitably end up voting for a politician. The candidate pool is made up of people who see force as a reasonable means for solving problems, real or imagined; those who don't see it that way have more productive things to do than run for political office in a system they consider immoral. Occasionally you get an idealist who thinks they can change the system from within, but it's too well entrenched—the corruption ends up infecting them instead.
"In the 1960’s, only 5% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats reported that they would be “displeased” if their son or daughter chose to marry a political opponent (Iyengar et al., 2012). By 2010, these numbers had risen tenfold."
When you combine that with twin, adoption, or half-sibling studies which all show that political orientation is partially inherited, it's like we're splitting into two different species. Hopefully things will get back on track long before that.
Certainly it wasn't. I would like to think that there is not a 'conservation of intolerance' principle here, though, that requires some other kind of intolerance to go up in order for intolerance of race, religion, etc. to go down.
If you look at the last ~40 years of government policy in the USA, and focus on where the Republicans and Democrats are in alignment (neoliberal trade policy & outsourcing of manufacturing, steadily increasing military-industrial budgets, and no-strings-attached bailouts of Wall Street firms), then you get a picture of the country as a corporation where the politicians are essentially little more than corporate middle managers.
The middle manager has a rather unusual job - keep the corporate board and the shareholders wealthy and happy, and keep the rank-and-file employees productive and happy. The former job is done more in private, the latter job is done more in public. (Note how certain politicians notoriously stated the need for having both public and private positions, which fits this model).
Somewhere along the way, the middle managers had a bright idea: if we ensure the rank-and-file employees distrust and hate one another more than either us or the corporate board, we can keep this whole thing rolling along, even while we screw them over and enrich ourselves and the board! Genius. For a while, anyway.
Yeah, I was about to say, I want no parts of this track that you want to get back on. If my kids bring home white people they want to marry, I no longer have to worry about the repercussions.
And what I am saying is that you can't separate these two things; the improvements in integration are at least partially the cause of this perceived "polarization."
Back then, Democrats and Republicans alike could be comfortably racist; one might wonder if black folks even got to take the survey. But two things happened, one is the civil rights movement which made people less racist. (yay!) and the other is the radicalization of the Republican party.
Today, Democrat/Republican is a much better proxy/predictor for -- well, let's be PC here and say, potential matches. It's not a bad predictor (and before someone says some nonsense comparing this to prejudice, political party is 100% a choice and nothing like racial discrimination.)
>When you combine that with twin, adoption, or half-sibling studies which all show that political orientation is partially inherited, it's like we're splitting into two different species. Hopefully things will get back on track long before that.
Evolution is a very powerful force; ultimately the genes that make people incline towards having more children will become dominant. https://www.fatherly.com/health-science/republicans-have-mor... currently it looks like Republicans are winning the reproduction war.
This same train of thought comes up when talking about environmental conservation. Namely: "If you're worried about the environment, you should have more kids because they'll also be environmentalists".
It's so ridiculous on its face that I'm not sure why I'm typing out this reply, but if there was a simple straight line between genetics and ideology, why would positions like those opposed to the Republicans exist at all? Shouldn't they all have been bred out by now?
And what about the fact that what it means to be a Republican and a Democrat change as well. There used to be a time when the Democrats were the pro-slavery party. So what ideological elements are inherited exactly? Is it the broad party affiliation? Is it beliefs about tax policy? Beliefs about gun rights[1]? Religion?
Edit: Oh yeah, and anecdotally plenty of kids raised by conservatives grow up to hate their parents' guts. Perhaps because of the authoritarian nature of some conservative households. As you might expect, this is especially true for LGBTQ kids.
The 1960s was in the middle of the long overlapping double political realignment between the New Deal and the mid-1990s, so the main ideological divides in the country did not line up with the divide between the major parties.
This resulted in less partisan division, but no less political division, as the large scale political violence of, particularly, the 1950s and 1960s, makes pretty clear.
All the hand-wringing over the fact that we’ve in the last couple decades returned to the normal state where salient ideological divisions actually map reasonably well to the main partisan division is...bizarre.
> it's like we're splitting into two different species.
Or nations. A lot of the turmoil in Eastern Europe since the 90s is related to certain nations considering themselves distinct, and other nations refusing to entertain it. The former group will fight for their liberty and the latter group will try to conquer and absorb them.
Will the same happen in the US? I see the African Americans being their own unique North American nation with associated food, music and culture, but also being part of the dominant American national culture. Not many of them appear to want to be fully separate, black nationalist extremists aside.
If heartland white Americans attempted to distinguish themselves as a separate nation, it would be civil war 2, but fuelled by nationalism as opposed to slavery, traditionalism and states rights.
I firmly believe there are more than 2 parties. France is a good example - reactionary extreme right, centrist/corporatist, and far left. Both the left and right hate the centrist, but also have widely divergent views on how to unseat the centrists.
It's just that in the US, only 2 parties can work given the FPTP system that makes all 3rd parties spoilers.
Is this really anything new? I think most people who actually talk with their neighbors about various topics can see that most people aren't as extreme as their party is represented to be in the media.
There are hundreds of millions of party members. Did anyone truly think that a member of either party supports every policy the party supports, or that there are different factions within the party that take opposing stances on specific issues? There's no way we're able to fully map 100M to 1 on an innumerable amount of topics/solutions.
Sorry, I shouldn't have used absolutist language. You're right, there are likely a small minority that agrees with everything that at least their faction of the party says.
(hopefully) relevant perspective from a transgender person: It is irrelevant to me that most people are not extremists. There are a lot of "non-extremist" people who consider me a loon because of my appearance and gender. Those people seem to get along perfectly fine with "moderates" who are more accepting of me... and that really doesn't help, because the typical result is that both of them will agree to treat me as an extremist. For existing.
Yeah, that's my position as well. People make fun of leftists for infighting and "cancel culture" and "eating their own", but the alternative seems to be allowing the worst parts of "your side" to keep and even expand their influence over the political landscape, and that seems to be what the right has done.
I think that’s because you don’t denounce actual extremists within the transgender movement.
I think you’re conflating both groups denouncing those extremists as denouncing you, because those extremists are who represents your group on the mainstream narrative.
So now I'm supposed to spend my time proving that I'm mainstream enough to be acceptable, because my existence makes me guilty by association? This is the "Black people should have no issue proving they aren't criminals" argument.
Also, transgender people aren't a movement. We're people.
> Also, transgender people aren't a movement. We're people.
I’m not saying it’s fair or right…
But transgender people are a minority whose voice has been appropriated by a political movement to force their radical agenda under euphemisms like “inclusion”.
I’m not saying that you need to be outspoken about it — but if the only exposure most people have is that extremist view from TV, they will associate you with that due to how humans work.
> "Black people should have no issue proving they aren't criminals"
The equivalent would be black people debouncing the neo-racism of Democrats under euphemisms like “equity” and publicly denouncing nonsense done in their name, like de-policing.
Again, I’m not saying it’s fair or right… but I’d tell a black Democrat who was upset about being associated with that idiocy the same thing:
You’re tacitly letting your identity be used to push dumb policies — and you’ll be associated until you stand up and say “no, this doesn’t represent me”.
You're using a thin facade of decorum to push the idea that the oppression of minorities is their own fault, with the strong implication that you have nothing to do with it because that's just the way the world works. How am I personally responsible by association for the actions of others, while you aren't?
And again, am I supposed to be out here actively looking for people and views to disavow? Do I have to do this in front of everyone I meet, so then they'll be sure I'm one of the good ones and they can treat me like a normal person?
> How am I personally responsible by association for the actions of others, while you aren't?
Whites not associated with racism are expected to denounce it.
Men not associated with misogyny are expected to denounce it.
I’m not holding double-standards, just acknowledging that humans work based on heuristics.
> Do I have to do this in front of everyone I meet, so then they'll be sure I'm one of the good ones and they can treat me like a normal person?
You don’t have to do it at all, but yelling at people because they’re human and their brains react to repeated exposure by finding patterns isn’t going to lead to the outcome you want.
So if you don’t like being associated with that kind of behavior — you probably want to do it some time, in some way.
That perception won’t change until there’s enough people out there denouncing the misappropriation of their identity by politicians to make it clear that they dont represent that group.
Racism and Misogyny are actual forces in this country. Minority activists don't actually have any political power.
Besides, who are you expecting to do the denouncing and what are they supposed to denounce? Before I started this comment was I supposed to do a quick google search and see if there were any fringe activists saying something to denounce? What's the time scale I have to cover before I can reply to your comment. A week? A month? What if I already denounced it in another thread, do I have to do a recap of everything I've denounced in every thread?
I'm not calling you racist, No one asked you to denounce racism or misogyny, so why are you bringing it up?
> there’s enough people out there denouncing the misappropriation of their identity by politicians to make it clear that they don't represent that group
This is laughably unquantifiable and political forces ensure that even if this was happening you wouldn't know about it.
> Minority activists don't actually have any political power.
As Malcolm X explained, minorities are routinely used as a political cudgel in feuds between parties — and the promotion of extremist voices is part of that today.
> political forces ensure that even if this was happening you wouldn't know about it
…which is why it’s important to occasionally share those thoughts in your personal life, to help unwind that narrative for people around you.
>Racism and Misogyny are actual forces in this country
As everybody knows off course, only the things you hate are actual and real, and you're being noble and virtuous by talking about them. While the things your opponents hate are disinformation and a mirage, and they're being hysteric and alarmist by talking about them.
No I mean, what 'very real power that that transgender ideology holds in US institutions and corporations'. All the political action is bathroom bills and sports bills coming from the right, what political power is the 'transgender ideology' wielding.
You can have a point and make an argument while showing any kind of dignity or intelligence...or you can go looking for a response and titter "u mad?" when you get one.
It's astoundingly funny how you're the one who insulted me in response to my completely insult-free words, and even after your insults I didn't reply in kind, and yet I'm the one lacking dignity and intelligence.
It is a special breed of shamelessness to accuse others of your own vices.
>All the political action is bathroom bills and sports bills coming from the right
It's hilariously disingenuous and backward how you mention the reaction to the encroaching transgender ideology without mentioning the action itself that prompted it. The bathroom and sports bills are defensive measures against the ideology infiltrating institutions and allowing the easy access of vulnerable spaces to mentally unstable individuals.
>what political power is the 'transgender ideology' wielding.
Other than
- In [1] an academic professor is fired for publishing a book critical of transgender beliefs
- In [2] a school covered for a trans rapist who raped a teenager in the girls bathroom, he was eventually transfered to another school where he raped a second teenager.
- In [3] an. archeologist is fired for trans critical views
- [4] documents several other cases of harassment perpetrated by trans ideology supporters in academia
- In [5], a British political party struggles with the definition of a woman, party representatives repeatedly refused to answer straightforward questions about basic female biology to avoid angering the trans lobby
- In [6], as in [5], a US Supreme Court judge refused to answer the question "What's a woman", citing that "She's not a biologist".
- The social media giants ban any dissenting discussion. Examples too numerous to mention, and can be empirically reproduced for yourself.
This is a bunch of stories of people acting individually, this isn't political power. My argument isn't that there aren't people in this world trying to establish their validity in our society, and that those people aren't upsetting other people, just that those people aren't exercising broad systemic political power.
Is your argument that people should just accept their lot in life and not challenge the status quo? Or more that they should do it in a way that doesn't upset anyone.
I see that you have some concerns here, I don't see why your response is to try and ostracize or ban this thing you don't understand.
It seems like it’s hard to believe you’re engaged in honest debate when you argue that all of liberal America is working together to enable pedophiles.
If that’s what you think then this wasn’t the debate I thought it was.
Do you think that all gay people are pedophiles too?
>when you argue that all of liberal America is working together to enable pedophiles.
I do not argue for this, the existence of a systematic and widespread ideology does not necessarily imply that the ideology is all-powerful or has full support.
But you can't handwave away the rather obvious evidence that this "minority" has some curious methods to impose its will on a whole lot of people, can you ? How is this small, oppressed minority capable of terrifying the heads of political parties and judges of high courts away from answering questions that any 18 years old can reliably answer ? By the power of looking adorable and saying 'Please' ?
>Do you think that all gay people are pedophiles too?
I fail to see why this is relevant to the discussion now, but no. I don't think there is a link between sexual affinity to same sex individuals and sexual affinity to children.
"The bathroom and sports bills are defensive measures against the ideology infiltrating institutions and allowing the easy access of vulnerable spaces to mentally unstable individuals."
He considers transgender women to be mentally unstable predators who want access to women's spaces in order to attack them.
What activity/behaviour, anologous to racism and misogyny in your example, do you believe is being done by politicians "in the name of (trans) inclusivity"?
A return to institutional bigotry, under the DIE agenda, of which the misappropriation of transgender voices (or rather, promoting extremist voices) is a piece. Further, using the claim “you’re not being inclusive!” as a club towards people who object to things such as preferential hiring, affinity groups based on protected class, censorship on social media, etc.
For example, WA and CA are attempting to repeal civil rights laws to re-legalize government bigotry.
Good, because concern trolling like this is pretty shitty, and definitely not fair or right.
Certainly not intellectually honest. You attack someone repeatedly for supposedly not standing up against "dumb policies" and "extremist" positions, without your daring to name what you think those are. After all, if you did that, you might have to defend your stance against criticism instead of attacking someone for not preventing the entire Democratic Party from committing unspecified wrongs of "inclusion".
It's not really a matter of "daring". Most online platforms don't permit dissent on transgender issues. If someone attempted to directly argue that they don't think transgenderism is real, they wouldn't face criticism or engage in a robust debate, they'd simply get their comment deleted. (If you turn on showdead you can see that's happened in this very thread, although admittedly the guy was a bit rude about it.)
The fact that transgender people exist is quite settled from a scientific perspective. Most reasonable platforms will not put up with people asserting that trans people are either mentally ill, clout-chasing, or victims of abuse, in the same way that most reasonable platforms will not put up with arguments that Black people are a criminal race because <insert debunked science here>.
Dissent along those lines, no matter how politely framed, is simply an attempt to launder bigotry into "debate".
This is a willful misinterpretation of the very realistic idea that it is possible to make me disappear from public existence by legally forcing me into the closet.
There is nobody that can make you disappear from public existence unless you help them do so, by being utterly dependent on their continued acknowledgement and validation of an identity that you made central to your existence. But that's really nobody's fault except you, anybody is allowed to view any identity as illegitimate, it's totally on you that you're so attached to this identity that a bunch of people not believing in it is a thing that makes you "disappear from public life".
Within living memory, people could get arrested for wearing clothes
that the cops deemed inappropriate for their sex.
Most trans women had to present as men to avoid
being fired from their jobs or publicly ridiculed.
Those who were lucky enough to transition
generally had to disappear and cut all ties to the previous life.
More and more of us have emerged from the underground in recent decades,
but there are many people out there who want us to go back.
The recent Alabama bill targeting trans youth
makes explicit the fact that it's setting out to prevent them
from ever becoming trans adults.
It's completely reasonable for us to be afraid of being forced back
into the position we were in a few decades ago.
So how does this relate to the aggressive lobbying and infiltration that modern trans advocacy groups do? is it to secure a 'buffer' of rights, gain so much privileges that even if the scary 'cis majority' takes away some of them you will still have some?
I'm trying hard to correlate "We were arrested and discriminated against in the past" to "We must teach impressionable pre-pubescents about gender dysphoria behind their parents' back and ban anyone who criticizes this off the internet in the present". A majority used to take your rights away, then it self corrected and gave you your rights back, then you... impose your views back on them and influence institutions to crush their dissenting views ?
Am I just naive or is "we used to be second class citizens but now we're not" cause for reconciliation with and gratitude toward the majority, not hostility and belligerent activism ?
> I'm trying hard to correlate "We were arrested and discriminated against in the past"
Current bathroom bills, bans on transgender medical care, and efforts to equate LGBTQ+ acceptance and care with grooming are not "the past", they're happening right now.
Is that government/public bathrooms or private businesses bathrooms? Aren't LGBT++ people extremely fond of saying "It's a private business, it can do whatever it wants", or does that only work when people critical of them are banned off the internet ?
>bans on transgender medical care
I'm highly, highly skeptical that a western country really did ban transgender "medical" care. Most likely it's an obscure law that just made it a private expense not paid for by tax money.
You can prove me wrong though.
>efforts to equate LGBTQ+ acceptance and care with grooming
I have a feeling that people who are reacting to pre-12-years-olds being shown pornographic imagery of 2 boys doing a sexual activity by defending it as "Queer sex education", I have just the slightest feeling, that those people are, indeed, defending what amounts to pedophilic tendencies. When those people are the most visible parts of a community and they're shouting their rather unusual opinions without the slightest pushback or dissent from others in the same community, I have a feeling, again just a very slight feeling, that this community does, in fact, present a very attractive affiliation for pedophiles.
In other words, if some people want to be treated as equal, maybe they should start acting as equals, respecting the things that everybody else respect. Maybe they should stop being the spoilt children of corporate giants who call for banning/firing anyone who looks at them funnily, maybe they should disavow clearly criminal tendencies within their own. Maybe they should stop treating a joke as a genocide.
Maybe then, just maybe, other people would start seeing them as ordinry humans with the same duties, and consequently the same rights and respect, as the rest of us.
You need to do more research on this, even a passing inquiry into current transgender legislation being debated would have answered these questions.
> Is that government/public bathrooms or private businesses bathrooms?
It is the government dictating how private businesses structure their bathrooms. That's ranged from attempts to flat-out ban businesses from offering multi-person gender neutral bathrooms to requiring businesses to attach signage "warning" people that they have LGBTQ+ friendly bathrooms. It's not only state governments attacking transgender populations, it is also the state interfering in private business.
> bans on transgender medical care
Texas's ban on affirmative transgender care literally just went into effect, how do you not know about this? Notably, Texas doesn't only ban transitioning, and it doesn't even only ban puberty blockers, it bans affirmative care of any kind including therapy for minors. There have been talks of extending those bans past 18 years up to 25 year olds.
> I have a feeling that people who are reacting to pre-12-years-olds being shown pornographic imagery of 2 boys doing a sexual activity by defending it as "Queer sex education", I have just the slightest feeling, that those people are, indeed, defending what amounts to pedophilic tendencies.
You're out of touch with the current discourse about transgender rights if you think that these are the only people being called pedophiles. Florida's "don't say gay" bill bans any discussion of gender/orientation regardless of whether or not it's sexual in nature. When schools are threatening students that they can't use the word "gay" during graduation speeches, then I'm sorry but this is very clearly not about protecting minors or preventing grooming, and lawmakers equating pedophilia with even just basic acknowledgement that queer people exist is dangerous, bigoted rhetoric.
You're arguing that this pushback is related to extreme or clearly inappropriate lessons, but again, even just a passing amount of research into the rhetoric being pushed out by mainstream governors and lawmakers would be enough to show that there is a coordinated effort happening to characterize LGBTQ+ identity as entirely sexual in nature and innately deviant. The intention is to create a perspective that someone openly identifying as gay inherently makes that person dangerous around children.
The root cause of all this is the LGBTQ+ in aggregate. Everything after the first three letters is irrelevant to sexual orientation.
If it had just been left as the LGB, that's something people can get on board with much more easily, from an individual liberties perspective and the principle of equal treatment under the law.
However, the TQ+, with its fundamental reframing of what it means to be a man or a woman, in terms of gender identity rather than sex, is something quite different. It's compelling people to believe something very controversial: that some men are actually women, and some women are actually man, and some people are somehow neither.
No surprise that this is getting pushback. But it's unfortunate, and really quite galling, that the LGB are also being dragged into this mess, particularly given all the gains made in recent years on equality.
I have some very bad news for you if you think that a lot of transphobic, aphobic, and queerphobic people in aggregate aren't going to eventually come for LGB people too. If you think the LGB movement is going to pacify bigots by throwing transgender people under the bus... it's just a bad plan, they're not going to be pacified. A lot of the politicians banning affirmative care for transgender people would love to roll back gay protections.
But whatever, this is mostly just identity gatekeeping anyway. Transgender people were always active in early LGB rights movements from the beginning, and the idea that gay identity is normal but transgenderism is "controversial" is just laughably ignorant of how controversial gay identity used to be (and how controversial it still is in many circles).
People have some really serious short-term memory loss if they think that the LGB rights movement didn't go through the exact same pushback that the transgender rights movement is facing today, and that pushback included a ton of people who were all too eager to talk about how "respectable" gays deserved rights, but the fringe gays who did stuff like hold hands in public or talk about their partners openly were holding back the rest of the movement.
They may have been active in the movement since the early days, but it's also been a point of contention then, particularly amongst lesbians.
In particular, the modern gender critical movement is a direct continuation of an ideological split amongst lesbian feminists back in the 1970s, one group of whom considered transsexual males to be honorary women and welcome in their spaces as lesbians, and the other who regarded them as straight men who were infiltrating and imposing themselves, and effectively erasing lesbians as a group.
In some parts of the world, LGB acceptance is very high amongst the general population. Over 80% in much of western Europe, Canada and Australia. And over 70% in the US and Argentina.
What we're seeing with this pushback against trans activism in these more accepting places isn't because people have suddenly become more homophobic, but for very specific reasons caused by this activism - effectively the same issue that the feminists of the 1970s were arguing furiously about, but in the public sphere.
Now you are right that some homophobic politicians have jumped onto this issue too, and used it as a lever to push against LGB rights. But they're doing so opportunistically. The more fundamental issue, opposed by many across the political spectrum who have otherwise discordant beliefs, is this elevation of gender identity above sex. For example, in the UK, on a grassroots level it's been mostly left-wing feminist women pushing back against this, not homophobic conservatives.
> In some parts of the world, LGB acceptance is very high amongst the general population.
Because of activism in the face of people who called gay orientation unnatural or dangerous -- activism that trans-exclusionists now want to see stopped just because they're worried about backlash and because they feel that they personally, individually no longer need that activism in order to be accepted in mainstream society.
If you went back in time you would see the same conversation we're having now play out about both bisexual and asexual people who both have faced the same kind of "are they really gay" gatekeeping that's happening here. If you went back further, you would see another split among feminists about whether lesbians could be considered feminist or whether they were distracting from feminist goals. If you went back even further, you'd see the same splits in feminist circles about intersectionality and whether talking about racism made feminism unattractive to white people. At every step, these exclusions were justified by talking about how the "less proper" activists were holding the broader gay/feminist/whatever movement back from mainstream acceptance.
It's the same story over and over again with each pushback characterizing the people they want to exclude as if they're uniquely controversial or dangerous to the movement. But they're not; it's just gatekeeping. Excusing bigotry that labels transgender people as pedophiles as if that bigotry is just reactionary pushback is really historically ignorant, given that literally the exact same "gays are pedophiles and groomers" rhetoric was used against LGB groups (and was especially used against bisexual people). There are parallels here that are impossible to ignore.
> For example, in the UK, on a grassroots level it's been mostly left-wing feminist women pushing back against this, not homophobic conservatives.
If trans-exclusionists want to talk strategy, then arguing that identity is the same as sexual deviancy, and aligning themselves with homophobic reactionaries is extremely short-sighted, foolish, and dangerous to the overall gay rights movement.
From the beginning, transgender people have done just as much to fight for LGB rights as anyone else in the movement and they deserve acceptance and support. Transgender people helped these so-called feminists put up the ladder, you don't get to pull the ladder up behind you now.
And that's all reasonable on its own terms, but your opponents don't see it this way at all. I see being trans as more like being a Mormon; it would obviously be obnoxious for me to walk up to random Mormons and say "you don't exist" or "Joseph Smith was a fraud", but it would be equally obnoxious if a Mormon friend told me that studies have proven they hold the Melchizedek priesthood and I need to affirm that or they won't feel comfortable around me.
I don't see any posts by him in this thread with showdead on that I can't see with it off, so I don't buy your complaint. As it is it, looks like what you think is "a bit rude" amounts to some guy facing criticism and working himself up into a lather about how that's everyone saying "shut up white man".
But at any rate, your argument amounts to, "But he has to be disingenuous and chickenshit, because Hacker News is run by the SJWs!", which I find laughable.
The comment I'm referring to is by a different commenter twofornone.
My argument definitely isn't that Hacker News is run by the SJWs, both because I don't think HN moderation is particularly left wing and because I don't think "the SJWs" is a meaningful category. What I would say is that debates about the fundamental legitimacy of transgender stuff get too heated for most platforms to accept, because people have strong, passionate beliefs on the issue which can't easily be compromised on. It's an entirely reasonable moderation decision and I might very well make the same one if I were in charge - but as a consequence, those of us who are transgender skeptical sometimes need to carefully talk around the touchiest issues rather than engaging on them directly.
> It's equally forbidden (and there's also an example of this downthread) to go around saying that if you don't believe the right things about trans people you're committing genocide.
That's a very strange interpretation of my comment. If you think my gender identity is invalid, you're not committing genocide, you're just an asshole. If you think my gender identity makes me a pedophile groomer who needs to be kept away from kids, and want to enforce that via imprisonment, then you're committing genocide. Unfortunately, that is a political position of the governor of at least one US state. It is not the political position of most of the people voting for him, but that's not a ton of consolation.
"The comment I'm referring to is by a different commenter twofornone"
Then you're just being disingenuous, jumping into a thread responding to someone else entirely and talking about dead comments as if the person being responded to had made them.
To be clear, I was attempting to point to external data to explain why people in this thread might be hesitant to explain their views in full detail. Sorry if it came across as misleading.
It's really at this step where things start to take a wrong turn. I truly believe you're acting in good faith, so please take this as a gentle suggestion. Rather than telling trans/black/etc people anything, pause and really listen.
We are already told how to do everything else in our lives, being told how to stand up for ourselves and how to fight for our rights feels like another example of the same pattern. A better question is, "How can we help?" or "What do you need?"
This is a really good example that demonstrates what happens when a trans person stands up for themselves. Thank you for providing it so that others can witness that the careful steps we take aren't enough to prevent the abuse we experience.
Like it or not, you are beholden to what your group says and does in public. The group name you identify with strongly biases anybody meeting you into modeling you as the most visible people of your group.
> transgender people aren't a movement. We're people.
Every movement is ultimately a group of people with a purpose.
Sad to say, but I think this is both (1) fairly true, and (2) a sign that the world we live in is fairly f*cked up. I'm free to identify as a white male American, without needing to immediately denounce a laundry list - ..., NAMBLA, Nathaniel Hawthorn's ancestors, Nazi sympathizers, negro slavery, NIN's substance abuse, ... - of notorious positions, people, and practices which are publicly associated with white males Americans.
I have noticed that even the L and G (to say nothing of BTQ+) folks who've come out to me in the past 10 years have added "but I am nothing like those {unfavorable words here} who proclaim themselves L's or G's on the web" - generally so fast that I couldn't have gotten a word in edgewise.
It's not clear to me what you're referring to as "extremists" or by "transgender movement", because at this point that could mean a lot of things that almost don't even exist or it could just mean "anything I don't like".
But even if it did refer to actually existing extremism, presuming a trans person should know about a sub-category of extremists that happen to be trans and make unprompted verbal attacks against them just to signal some kind of virtue at is a pretty weird demand of compelled speech on your part.
This kind of shameless bigotry and stereotyping is pretty transparent.
"There are a lot of "non-extremist" people who consider me a loon because of my appearance and gender. Those people seem to get along perfectly fine with "moderates" who are more accepting of me... and that really doesn't help, because the typical result is that both of them will agree to treat me as an extremist."
I'm curious, why would these people not be considered extreme for treating you like a loon or treating you as an extremist?
I've seen similar stuff on other issues. For example, there are people who hate guns who treat gun owners as loons and extremists regardless of their actions/positions/etc. Just saying that some people treat others as extremists just because they hold an opposing view. My guess is it's often to prevent cognitive dissonance in examining their own beliefs (most people don't consider themselves extremists even if they hold extreme views).
I think you're on to something here, but my (admittedly anecdotal) experience (in person, not online) is that these people are not generally considered extremist. You make a very good point in your last sentence: this extremist view is held by a lot of people who are otherwise non-extremist, and it's hard for most people to differentiate between "extremist views" and "extremist people". So it ends up being considered much less extremist than it should be, which also means it gets much more mainstream acceptance than it should.
And I encourage everyone to keep whatever circles make them happy. But if a devout Christian said she doesn't like anyone who hangs out with atheists, or a meat-eater said he doesn't like anyone who hangs out with vegans, I don't think you'd struggle to identify these as extremist attitudes. The expectation that a person is guaranteed to mistreat me if any of their friends disapproves of me or think I'm a loon seems like a clear example of miscalibrated contempt.
I could say everything you said, as a person hoping the planet will remain habitable for my children.
(Substitute the bit about appearance with "because I think we should immediately stop new fossil fuel exploration / capital investment and institute atmospheric carbon recapture taxes of $1-2 per gallon-of-gasoline-equivalent emissions")
Anyway, I think the premise of the article is flawed:
I don't care whether voters in some red state are queer-bashing, abortion-banning putin apologists that want to strip mine for coal. (Want them for neighbors, or not? Move!)
I care that the people they've voted in and appointed to the supreme court are all of those things, and this planet is not large enough to let the rest of us escape from their idiocy.
The abortion banning part is provably true at this point.
And it is very fair to guess it was plan from the start, despite pretention not. Despite calling those who guesses it 100% correctly exaggerating and hysterical.
>> I don't care whether voters in some red state are queer-bashing, abortion-banning putin apologists that want to strip mine for coal. (Want them for neighbors, or not? Move!)
>> I care that the people they've voted in and appointed to the supreme court are all of those things
> The abortion banning part is provably true at this point.
a) Not comprehensively for all people, as was claimed.
b) It is supreme court justices that would be banning it, not elected representatives.
c) How might one prove it for any given elected representative, short of an explicit confession?
d) Abortion banning wasn't the only claim.
> And it is very fair to guess it was plan from the start, despite pretention not.
"Fair to say" and "correct/true" are very different things.
> Despite calling those who guesses it 100% correctly exaggerating and hysterical.
Where "100% correctly" refers to perception of reality, but is typically perceived as reality itself.
Human beings are silly, I would say without exception - News at 11.
> Human beings are silly, I would say without exception - News at 11.
I dont think they are silly. I think that they prefer to good relationship with that political branch over telling truth. They think it makes them sound like smart and rational and dont mind throwing others under the bus in the process.
E.g., they have priorities.
> "Fair to say" and "correct/true" are very different things.
Ok, I will say out loud, it is correct thing to say.
> It is supreme court justices that would be banning it, not elected representatives.
Supreme court did not came out of skies. They were put in place by politicians who picked people guaranteed to make political decisions.
> Ok, I will say out loud, it is correct thing to say.
It may be a "correct thing to say" (aka: popular), but this is distinctly different from correct from en epistemology perspective.
> But it was part I 100% agree with.
You are welcome to agree, but I am discussing what is true (and indirectly, the nature of human consciousness, which renders the customized/unique "reality" that each person on this forum experiences, and tends to mistake for reality itself).
> There's no way we're able to fully map 100M to 1 on an innumerable amount of topics/solutions.
There's no way to do it accurately, but the mind "does it" all day err day without breaking a sweat, as it evolved to do. This phenomenon is what this paper is describing, is it not?
I think you should have cooled off for a bit before posting this emotion-laden comment. I would suggest that the people you should be angry with are the ones behind the singular corporate uniparty which pits us against each other by creating false narratives and rhetoric that spread through our media ecosystem.
> I'm kinda done with listening to the other side at this point.
Don't let the propaganda win, always be willing to listen.
>I would suggest that the people you should be angry with are the ones behind the singular corporate uniparty which pits us against each other by creating false narratives and rhetoric that spread through our media ecosystem.
Thats a two way street buddy. I can't listen to the other side if they are blabbering on about their own false narrative. This comment section is full of people who think that its the lefts fault and are absolutely incapable of looking at their own party. I don't know how to explain to you that I do not give a shit about Democrats or Liberal media or the "singular corporate uniparty", let it all burn and I will still be fighting for LGBT rights and there will still be people who think I shouldn't exist.
There will always be people who think you shouldn't exist, that is true. But parent comment is suggesting that if you let it all burn down those people would likely turn out to be only a small minority, easily dismissed, rather than a unified bloc of 50% of brainwashed america.
I don't think the GOP is a unified bloc. I think it is beholden to a vocal minority without whom they wouldnt win elections because running on their last 20 years of policy alone hasnt worked. If we destroyed the current political parties and had everyone in government rerun as independents, that vocal minority would still find a political foothold.
I'm in agreement here. How are people supposed to reach across the aisle and fight our common enemy when the other side of the aisle is completely unwilling to make this sort of introspective conclusion?
The question is whether it's true that the other side of the aisle is unwilling to make introspective conclusions, or if they actually are but you've been affected by the misperceptions and miscalibrations the source article describes. For example, Social Security privatization has entirely dropped off the radar in recent years - what happened there if not an introspective conclusion that it was a bad idea?
Similarly, I also do not give a shit about the GOP. Or any party for that matter. They can come to me if they want my vote.
Where we differ I guess is in degree of nihilism - I don't want to see everything burn and I'm happy to listen to other people's perspectives. I'm just a mildy intelligent ape and don't have everything figured out yet. I don't think throwing in the towel is a better solution than persevering and standing up for your values though. Thank you for listening! :)
I think they make a lot of good points, and the post doesn't sound too emotionally charged to me.
Frankly, the left should start to go lower, and speak more emotionally. It turns out that clinical, sterile statements are not a good way to sway a majority, and they don't make good sound-bites.
At some point, you have to fight fire with fire to avoid becoming yet another victim of the paradox of tolerance.
Your response to “America is polarized because of misperceptions” is to double down on polarization and misperceptions claiming in fact, we don’t have enough of either?
Admittedly I was a bit rambley because i am scared for the safety of myself and others in this political climate. And everytime someone tries to "diagnose" the problem, they do so by treating the left and the right as the same, as value-neutral, as though they are two people on a tennis court following the same rules hitting a ball back and forth. I think this fundamentally misses the fact that both sides use vastly different tactics and have different standards for truth. I think that the values of each side cannot be put on the same line ("I think cops should be held accountable" and "democrats stole the election" are not equal and opposite positions). I think both sides are playing completely different games and each can claim the other is losing/winning/cheating, that is the problem... not individuals misperceptions.
i think thats a false equivalency. First of all I see them as people, I just see them as people who dont care about my personhood. Second of all, my value judgement of the right is based on the actions they take against my personhood, whereas their value judgement of me is based on.... who I am? who I love? the clothes I wear?
Notice how the person you're replying to conflated two extremely different forms of "dehumanization." Calling an attacker an attacker isn't dehumanizing them. This comment section isn't worth your energy.
Seeing people as persons, judged and viewed as individuals, has been one of the major contention between the center/center right and the left. The two sides that been fighting hardest to push identity politics away from the political discussion is generally the same group that view the left and the far right as being two sides of the same coin.
If the goal is getting people to see you as a person and the strategy you are deploying to reach that goal is pushing people away, then it might be worth looking into the effectiveness of that strategy.
You are misunderstanding and lashing out. Please don't.
Politics should not require strategy and neither the left nor right should see others as subhumans. Everyone is human living in the now and should be treated with respect and rights.
Human being are not a gender, a color, a sexual orientation, or a political object to be attacked. They are not a religion, ethnic origin, age or demographic. Human individuals are human. Reducing people down to single bits of information is reducing people to be less than human.
Everyone is scared, even the other side. They are just different fears. That's why its so vital to talk to your neighbors and to those who are different. To listen and to try to change hearts. Especially important is to see why people order their beliefs the way they do. They also think that values cannot be put on the same line ("I think babies should have the right to life" and "republicans stole the election from Gore" are not equal and opposite positions).
The hierarchy of needs is different on both sides; they are mostly incompatible and each side not only will, but _must_ violate the other's definition of justice (abortion is a perfect example of this, defined not by the act itself, but by the conflicting definitions/hierarchy of life and of rights).
I think social media is the problem. You used to have to get along with those around you. Now you can just bubble yourself on the internet, no matter how niche your position is. I am glad to have friendships all across the political spectrum -- we can always bond over being screwed by the system at large instead of the nebulous "other side".
If it’s only the extremes of a group that want a thing, but supporting the group means that the extremes get what they want, there is precisely zero distinction. The group is extreme, on the ground, in reality.
We didn't get Medicare For All, Green New Deal, Housing For All, $15 minimum wage, etc. under Biden, also we never got a federal law protecting abortion under Obama when he had a super majority. Hillary had more opposition to Sanders than to Trump. Manchin and Sinema regularly vote Republican on topics important to Democrat voters. So you could say it's the opposite for Democrats. This is called the Ratchet Effect.
Keeping it relevant to the paper itself, there is something particularly powerful in amplifying if not creating this effect in the first place: sock-puppetry, known in the MICIMATT world (Military-Industrial-Counter-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank complex) as "persona management"
I saw this really take off around 2010 and tried to warn people. The issue is that the forces that actually control the major political parties need to divide the people, for never forget the thing the oligarchs fear the most is a united proliteriat, and have heavily invested in creating the illusion of a consesus or narrative view from one "side" or the other, reinforcing the division at play.
Three letter grade psyops are at play on an unprecendented scale, and failing to understand that will leave anyone interested in this topic twirling at windmills.
I believe you. Unfortunately targeting polarizing figures or unpopular minorities is an easy way for three letter agencies to ensure that that a large percentage of the American public happily and enthusiastically supports their evil.
Dividing the people matches the Machiavellian goal of the government to preserve itself as the source of power, so you don't want a populace that could coalesce to overthrow you. Of course, that doesn't help the populace when said government becomes tyrannical in any way.
But I feel like Plato's cave metaphor would suggest that artists (music, TV, movies) are the best sock puppets we've got, and often don't even know they're doing it (e.g., the apathy towards deeper goals that immersion in pop culture cultivates).
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I think a problem is that within certain bubbles, the extreme viewpoints are genuinely really ubiquotous but if you have certain other cultural preferences it can be hard to escape those other bubbles.
I find just being around a certain group of people, namely young left urban college educated people who are counnterculture, the norms for that group are unbelievably far left. Like the nuances of Maosism vs Lenninism is a more common discussion than the budget of congress amongst this group (percieved to be a right wing issue). It's unbelievably extreme. And yet I never interact with the other side, let's say Mid west evangelicals, and rarely interact with the unengaged center even though those other two groups are combined an order of magnitude bigger.
But based on non political preferences I spend a lot of my time around woke communists and end up having a strong distaste for them even though they are a small minority in the bigger picture.
I think this same group has a very outsized influence in a large number of spheres. So I don't think it's unreasonable to worry about them even if they are a minority.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 386 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE78OLNY6JQ
You know what's more interesting, in the months since this study it has become much more clear what's really going down.
NYTimes realized their echo chamber and practically ordered their journalists to exit their echo chambers. Which upon doing so they somewhat returned to better journalistic standards, NYTimes suddenly showed some excellent legitimacy.
CNN is basically in complete collapse because they were too late. Can't see how they recover without some absolute hail mary.
Rachel Maddow had a bit of a sabbatical and then got rebranded and is on air far less. MSNBC ratings not looking so hot lately.
Meanwhile Fox is in dominant #1 position. There's objective measurements that the democrats moved far left creating the polarization. You have star trek discovery a ultra top secret missions best of the best crew... but every character is LGBT. Wtf are they trying to say? Even Trek fell into this same trap as those above.
Has anyone checked out Star Trek Strange New Worlds episode 1 where they literally say second US civil war. The story was intentionally weak as hell to ensure everyone who watches it sees they are talking about the USA. The importance of getting those 2 parties talking together again. That working together for a better future is really the only way.
Even Trek suddenly realized their own mistake. It makes for such an amazing first episode.
You: "There's objective measurements that the democrats moved far left creating the polarization."
Hmm. Could it be that you're... overestimating?
Of course, one can argue that none of this is new, that what's new is pushback.
CRT, itself, is a pretty nebulous concept outside of actual legal scholarship. "Pushing CRT" is a common right-fringe talking point. How much do you think the majority of Democratic voters agree with "pushing CRT"?
That said, the institutional left (IL) is pushing Project 1619 and associated materials outside of law schools, whether or not you want to call that CRT. (Shades of "no true Scotsman.")
This is part of a broader "all-in" on DIE by the IL. "Everything" is racism, sexism, etc.
There's also deplatforming and doxxing.
No, I'm not going to provide a scale. I'm not even going to order deplatforming and doxxing. So, the above isn't quantitative measure.
That's a long way from "nothing is happening."
Who are you quoting? Nobody said that. This seems like a non sequitur.
I'm claiming that the fact that the original poster didn't provide something like "0.2 units to the left" doesn't actually refute his fundamental point.
Feel free to disagree.
> Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
What you've done is complain about some general stuff that you seem to dislike about "the left" and completely fail to engage with the content of the actual article, which I was trying to bring the discussion back to. But hey, at least you acknowledge ignorance about what most people think. Perhaps you should try exiting your bubble and figure that one out instead of dwelling on what you hate about the fringe.
I provided examples of movement by the institutional left. No, those examples don't have numbers, but they do show movement. Besides, how do you apply numbers to this sort of stuff in any reasonable fashion?
Whether or not I like those things or they're "general" has nothing to do with whether they're movement. That's likely why you didn't comment on whether they were in fact movement.
That said, as long as we're lecturing one another on meta-discussion, it's nice of you to provide an opportunity to quote Hannah Arendt: "The elite is not composed of ideologists; its members’ whole education is aimed at abolishing their capacity for distinguishing between truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction. Their superiority consists in their ability immediately to dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose."
No, the original claim was actually this: "political animosity may be based particularly on partisans’ overestimation of the prevalence of extreme, egregious views held by only a minority of opponents but imagined to be widespread."
The counterclaim was: "There's objective measurements that the democrats moved far left creating the polarization."
My suggestion was that this counterclaim seems to be exhibiting the same fallacy discussed in the paper.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties are very large, and its members have a wide variety of views. If you pay close attention, you'll see that there's quite a bit of infighting, sometimes very bitter, even within each party. Broad generalizations about Democrats or "the left" — and likewise about Republicans or "the right" — are often going to be grossly inaccurate. You can't just treat huge groups as uniform when they're demonstrably not uniform.
The American people — well over 300 million of them — have diverse political views. But we have a political duopoly. Which means that these diverse views held by Americans have to somehow fit mostly within these 2 parties. It's a mistake to overgeneralize about political parties and similar groups.
I personally find the terms "left", "right", "liberal", "conservative" to be practically meaningless. They've lost all of their original meaning and become opaque cudgels for the political parties to pretend they have some kind of coherent ideology. But this is a bit of a tangent.
Anyway, I would bet that most Democrats and most Republicans don't even know WTF CRT is. Even the ones who complain about it!
Nope. The top-level post claimed the existence of objective measures of "the left" moving "far left", of which I haven't seen evidence.
And, I'd never claim that "the left" hasn't moved. The left/right terminology is rather sloppy, so I've tried to use the language of TFA: Democratic and Republican voters. But, let's look at "progressives" for a moment. The goal of progressives is to identify oppression in the world, and work towards overcoming it. That is to say, the goal of progressives is to change with the times, which is why, for example, today's progressives hate Margaret Sanger but still support Planned Parenthood. The goal of social conservatives is to resist change and as we're seeing with Roe v. Wade, undo past progressive changes (which, I think, is technically "regressive") which is why, for example, we see today's social conservatives rallying around statues of Robert E. Lee.
But that's not what the article about. The article is about how each side sees the other. It's nicely summarized by this SMBC comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07
What's going on today is that Democratic voters increasingly identify Republican voters as the nazi-flag bearing Charlottesville rioters, and Republican voters increasingly identify Democratic with murderers like Kermit Gosnell and Christopher Dorner.
https://areomagazine.com/2022/01/18/yes-children-are-being-t...
2) The article about US schools was written by an Australian.
3) The article seems free of any actual empirical examples of its main claim.
4) There have always been groups in the US who want censorship in schools for anything they don't like politically or religiously, most notably, the science of biological evolution. The "oh no, what are they teaching the children in schools" crowd is very hard to take seriously. There are people who don't want slavery mentioned in schools. They don't want the Holocaust mentioned in schools. It's hard to imagine a more "radical agenda" than all of this censorship and denial of facts. Wipe away history? Wipe away science?
The irony is that those who say "just teach the controversy about evolution and the Holocaust" [there's no scientific controversy] would also refuse to "teach the controversy" over CRT.
I've never taught high school, but I did teach (philosophy) at the university level in the past, and the people who complain about what's taught in college typically believe laughably inaccurate caricatures of what actually happens in the classroom. We're not proselytizing students; it's hard enough just to keep them awake during class and prod them to actually do the assigned reading in the first place.
Yeah, I gave the article an honest read, looking for real evidence, because it runs entirely counter to my experience. I'm a mom of a kid in grade school, and I've talked to a lot of parents and teachers about this topic. I'm in the very liberal Vancouver area, and my same-aged friends are spread across Canada and the US. Nobody I know is seeing anything like the racist trash that tastyfreeze and Areo are spreading.
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/12/22/...
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/rescuing-math-and-...
Heh, let me know when you come up with something that isn't a political hack publication.
I took the time to read the first link you chose. It did not show what you thought it showed. You thereby lost credibility and the benefit of the doubt in my eyes. So no, I'm not going to waste any more time reading your links unless I have a very good reason, and I also find it suspicious that all of your links are to publications with well-known political agendas. This is why I'm suggesting you find an article, one article, any article, that doesn't come from such a publication.
Your "other side" comment is an incorrect assumption, because I'm not on a side and have no political party. I'm what you might call an "independent".
As I said... wilfred social science...
Here's a nice visual graph that I like: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/7-things-to...
Go put your finger on the republican line and see where it moves.
There has been analysis done by many groups which have confirmed where the political polarization derived heavily starting with gay rights. The republicans who had 'closeted' homosexuals moved left. Trump literally started a fight with russia and the middle east trying to benefit homosexuals. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-adm...
The republicans clearly moved left and it was the right thing to do. Whereas Truman != Obama. It's rather easy to objectively see both parties have moved left.
I feel like this is rather objective fact. The better discussion, why is this the case? Is it perhaps where the democrats have gone is the right place both parties eventually end up? Or are we about to watch 2nd civil war?
I don't know what the point is supposed to be here.
> Here's a nice visual graph that I like: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/7-things-to...
> Go put your finger on the republican line and see where it moves.
Ok. I downloaded the gif and went through it frame by frame. What it shows is that the Median Democrat stayed exactly the same during 1998-2011, while the Median Republican moved right the whole period of 2004-2011.
Anyway, this story is from 2014, so it's missing the last 8 years.
Now try doing the whole span it's depicting, instead of picking the best years for your viewpoint.
> Anyway, this story is from 2014, so it's missing the last 8 years.
Here's an update that includes 2015 and 2017: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-...
It continues the same trend of median Republican barely moving while come 2017 median Democrat flies off even further left.
What do you think is my viewpoint?
During 1994-1997, both parties were moving left. And during 2012-2014 they were moving in opposite directions. I focused on the period of 1998-2011 because that seemed to be when there was the biggest difference in behavior between the 2 parties.
The claim of incomingpain was that "the democrats moved far left creating the polarization". But this is not supported by the given data. The parties were moving in lockstep prior to 1998, and the Democrats didn't move at all for many years after 1998.
It seems difficult to argue that the polarization was created in 2017, given the data from 1998-2011. Anyway, incomingpain, the one who made the claim, was also the one who linked to the pre-2015 data.
Here's the funny thing: incomingpain said "The republicans clearly moved left and it was the right thing to do." And Republicans did indeed move left 1994-2003... but then they moved back right starting in 2004. They moved right at the same time that Democrats were staying the same. So shouldn't incomingpain argue that backtracking was the wrong thing to do, if moving left was the right thing to do?
It would be interesting to go back to Women's suffrage because I'm sure people were having the same discussion. Liberals have moved left while Republicans have stayed where they are. But of course, moving to the left on equal rights for women is not liberals moving too far to the left. It's society course correcting. You don't get to say "Well liberals got women's rights so we get ____" But too many Republicans are saying the equivalent of that (hell some Republicans do https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/politics/2021/10/22/a... say exactly that.)
Human rights can't be a partisan consideration. It can't be something we compromise over. We just have to evolve as a society, get over it and instead have substantive conversations about the policies that move the needle in people's lives.
Really? Does "legalize abortion" mean more government intervention? Does "abolish the police" mean more government intervention?
Sometimes your opponent actually is taking an actual anti-human rights position. It's pretty common.
Framing the debate in terms of individuals' rights is intended to remove the topic from the realm of political discussion and shut down dissent. It also completely drowns out discussion of the societal effects of allowing/banning abortion, which is just as important as the effect on individuals. The same unproductive dynamic plays out in the debate over e.g. the right to free speech.
This ignores massive societal shilf we've had - which is erosion of worker's rights.
The 'left' used to mean worker's rights, helping the poor, maybe socialism or welfare.
Now you have folks who see themselves as left because they suport trans right, but their solution to 'No parental leave in America' is 'more freee market'
Contempt for your constituency is not how you build a winning coalition.
Is this actually "the left" though? The same people who came up with the insult "basket of deplorables" also came up with the insult "Bernie bros".
Seriously, if the left means Hillary Clinton and does not mean Bernie Sanders, then we might as well just throw all political labels in the trash.
If so, I haven't paid enough attention to politics to keep track of what's going on. But if not, then I think it's fair to say that the left as a whole abandoned the working class, with Bernie being the exception.
Bernie has the "luxury" of living in one of the smallest states in the nation, Vermont. He can wage a ground game campaign and not worry about having to raise massive amounts of money for big market TV ads. This makes him less susceptible to corruption than other senators. Also he was never a Democrat in the first place but an independent who decided to run for the Democratic nomination, so he was never fully a part of the the party apparatus.
It's interesting to contrast with how Trump basically waltzed in and took over the Republican party, despite not having been a solid Republican himself in the past. I take this as a sign of how marginalized the left has been from the Democratic party. Sanders has taken over the spot of being the Democratic scapegoat for all their problems, a spot formerly held by Ralph Nader.
Young Dems more likely to despise the other party https://www.axios.com/2021/12/08/poll-political-polarization...
In 2001, 23% of Republicans/Republican-leaning Americans supported same-sex marraige. By 2019, it was 44%. Among white evangelical protestants specifically, it was 13% and rose to 29%.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-att...
It's true that Republicans have moved more toward same-sex marriage.
However, it also seems to be true that the legalization of same-sex marriage has politically activated many Republicans who are still opposed to same-sex marriage.
When same-sex marriage was not legal, those opposed to it could remain fairly complacent. It was the status quo and wasn't an issue where they felt the need to engage in political activism. The most outspoken people were those in favor of same-sex marriage. But when same-sex marriage was legalized, there was an almost complete reversal, in terms of activism.
So today it feels like Republicans are more opposed to same-sex marriage, even if the raw numbers say otherwise. But perhaps the raw poll numbers don't reflect the level of enthusiasm or activism regarding the issue.
I think this is actually a general point: the level of political activism regarding any issue tends to be highest among those who feel threatened. So ironically, the level of activism opposed to same-sex marriage, for example, becomes higher as that view tends to wane in public popularity. A powerful overwhelming majority, on the other hand, doesn't need to make much effort to maintain its status.
That data shows only that republicans’ support of gay marriage follows the same trend as democrats’, at a lower level. That indicates to me a cultural shift for this single issue more than a political one.
The data in the article below paints a different overall picture, though I went to the source and did not find the information on what their metrics were for the liberal / moderate / conservative spectrum. It’s likely in their downloadable data sets but I am on mobile.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/28/what-elon...
So, I take it that you didn't read the article and dismissed it based on its length and source?
> There's objective measurements that the democrats moved far left creating the polarization.
Source please?
> You have star trek discovery a ultra top secret missions best of the best crew... but every character is LGBT.
Not even close to every character. There are quite a few romantic entanglements through the story: Burnham/Tyler, Voq/L'Rell, Burnham/Booker, Georgiou/Lorca, Lorca/Cornwell, Pike/Vina, Detmer/(unnamed), Airiam/Stephen, Sarek/Amanda, Burnham's parents, and, yes, one gay couple, Stamets/Culber. There are two trans characters, one bisexual character, and I count three gay characters. The cast list on Wikipedia lists 43 characters in total.
I think you might be misperceiving the opponent fringe here?
Sorry, I wasn't clear, not 'all'. Clearly disproven by just 1 character if you're going evaluate all characters even if they were only on screen for 1 second.
> There are two trans characters, one bisexual character, and I count three gay characters. The cast list on Wikipedia lists 43 characters in total.
12 main characters and 6 lgbt?
Mind you, I LOVE the idea of trill being trans/non-binary. This makes a ton of sense.
What discovery failed at is exactly what is tearing the USA apart. I love they realized why it didnt work and are doing better.
All of this is a bit conjecturey too, so I ask again, what’s the objective measure you’re speaking of?
Take this one with pretty graphs. Political polarization in the usa has been ongoing for quite some time. Many groups have been recording it.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/7-things-to...
>The downfall of leftish media itself kind of suggests the opposite: mainstream left-leaners are rejecting their more extremist media wings. Meanwhile the right is galvanizing around their most extreme.
I find it telling you see fox news as 'most extreme'.
To me, the polarization is objective. We need to evaluate to determine if perhaps that is the path. In 50 years from now we might be talking about how ridiculously conservative we all are back in those antiquated 2020s. What we would see is the far left doing really well. They did do pretty well while they pushed various disinformation campaigns.
The evaluation though is obviously the opposite. The polarization has derived largely because of echo chambers and identity politics. Those who are failing discovered this reality and have publicly admitted to this failure.
The USA is now sitting at the choice posed in strange new worlds. We dont need to keep fighting. We need to get back to talking to each other. This is the essence of why elon musk is buying twitter. End the censorship and get everyone talking again.
Yeah yeah, Musk will save the day. Got it.
Details? I know they've gotten a few people who are outside the progressive orthodoxy and tend to poke holes in it to write opinion columns in the last few months.
I have to wonder if you know what far left means outside of the US. Because even the furthest left of the Democratic party is barely left-leaning in Europe and most other democracies.
The fact is that choices are limited. Things like ranked choice voting might start to change that. Maybe we could see other major parties at some point. The fact that we have only two main parties is a product of your (and most people's) sort of game theory mindset - that you have to oppose the other side even if your choice isn't great.
That's pretty loaded, almost flaggable, but I think in this thread I'll ask what are you talking about?
Did I miss something or is this just inflammatory rhetoric? I know about the literal genocide happening in Yemen but I haven't heard anything about transgender genocide.
1. Moving from simple dehumanization to "trans people are groomers and pedophiles and we must protect our children from them at any cost". This is still only an escalation toward violence, but it certainly is an escalation.
2. Forcible detransitioning of trans people, with the direct aim of eliminating out trans people as a population. It remains to be seen what will be done with people who refuse to detransition, but imprisonment appears to already be on the table. And when you imprison a population for their identity and/or customs, then, well... that's genocide.
What the law actually says is that teaching about sex or gender _in the curriculum_ is not allowed prior to 4th grade. That goes for heterosexuality as well as LGBTQ. No one is exempt or special. Basically, kids at half the age of puberty should not be taught about sex, full-stop. Let them be kids for a few years longer before they learn about sex.
Of course, the law just addresses material in the curriculum, so having a picture on your desk of your same-sex SO is no problem and you can talk about sexuality with young kids as long as it's not curriculum (still gross imo).
The lesson of HB 1557... don't mess with parents.
This positions homosexuality as inherently sexual in a way that heterosexuality is not, which is, of course, not true. Sex is of course an implied part of heterosexual relationships, we're just conditioned as adults not to think about that.
No, it is not about "sex", it is about "sexual orientation", which is generally understood to be whether one is gay or straight or bisexual or asexual. It's often used in place of the more accurate technical term "romantic orientation", which is about who one is romantically attracted to, but the term isn't in common usage. In any case, it is not related to sexual intercourse. Children can understand it, and it is manifestly appropriate for children of any age. The support for this bill has seemingly overwhelmingly been based on this deliberate conflation between discussing sexual/romantic orientation and discussing sexual intercourse.
If you check the bill's text, it's not just "material in the curriculum", it's "classroom instruction", which would include discussion, which could be argued to include any mention of being gay. And it's not just under 4th grade, it's for any instruction not deemed "age-appropriate", which, in a country that still teaches abstinence-only sex-ed in some states, could mean anything. That these links are tenuous is no comfort; if the exceptions aren't strong enough to get the case thrown out immediately, it still leaves the school open for lawsuits, and the school will self-police to avoid them. And you'd have to be truly naïve to think that this will be applied to straight and gay relationships in equal measure.
Plus, there's all the language about parental access to health records that are pretty clearly aimed at requiring the school help out gay and trans kids to their possibly abusive parents, which nobody ever mentions for some reason.
> Parental Rights in Education; Requires district school boards to adopt procedures that comport with certain provisions of law for notifying student's parent of specified information; requires such procedures to reinforce fundamental right of parents to make decisions regarding upbringing & control of their children; prohibits school district from adopting procedures or student support forms that prohibit school district personnel from notifying parent about specified information or that encourage student to withhold from parent such information; prohibits school district personnel from discouraging or prohibiting parental notification & involvement in critical decisions affecting student's mental, emotional, or physical well-being; prohibits classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grade levels; requires school districts to notify parents of healthcare services; authorizes parent to bring action against school district to obtain declaratory judgment; provides for additional award of injunctive relief, damages, & reasonable attorney fees & court costs to certain parents.
The line being discussed here is prohibits classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grade levels. The relevant part of the full text linked (in a pdf named PDF.pdf, which made me chuckle) is:
> 3. Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
That's as far as it goes, and the definitions of what is "age-appropriate" or "developmentally appropriate", among other things, are not given. Hence, it appears to me, that any claims as to what it really means, by either side of this debate (or either of the fringe elements, as the majority in the middle appear to for these rules[2], however vague) are unable to be substantiated either way.
I suggest everyone calms down until the actual details come to light.
[1] https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557
[2] https://floridianpress.com/2022/03/new-poll-52-of-florida-de...
Some children in kindergarten through grade 3 have parents in same sex relationships. Some socially transition. An actual detail of the law is it prohibits even age appropriate discussion at those levels.
Another poll found 62% of Americans oppose legislation that would prohibit classroom lessons about sexual orientation or gender identity in elementary school.[1] Are Florida Democrats much more conservative? Do many Americans think grade 4 is the right time? Did the people who said somewhat no in the Florida poll mean yes with limits?
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/10-americans-oppose-laws-pro...
Talking about sexual orientation is at times a subset of "discussions about sex". Hence, given a charitable reading of both your comment and the comment you replied to, you may both be talking about the same thing.
> Some children in kindergarten through grade 3 have parents in same sex relationships.
I fail to see the relevance.
> Some socially transition.
I don't know what that is.
> An actual detail of the law is it prohibits even age appropriate discussion at those levels.
As I pointed out, the law doesn't define what age-appropriate means. If you have information to the contrary, please share it.
> Another poll found 62% of Americans oppose legislation that would prohibit classroom lessons about sexual orientation or gender identity in elementary school.
It's not a national law, so again, I don't see how it's relevant.
A search engine can define socially transitioning for you. The relevance of children having same sex parents or socially transitioning is sexual orientation and gender identity are visible to children in age appropriate ways. Not invisible until puberty.
The law not defining age appropriate is irrelevant to the total ban through grade 3.
The national poll casts doubt on the presented interpretation of the Florida poll.
``` Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students ```
The one paragraph in the bill is the entirety of the language used here.
1) "instruction" is vaguely defined here This isn't about sex-ed, this isn't about genitals, it is about "orientation or gender identity". I'll note here that being gay and trans isn't just about sex and genitalia. If a student asks the question: "why does sally have two moms?", does answering that question put the teacher at risk? What if Billy asks if being gay is ok? Are teachers allowed to answer?
2) if the teacher is trans and the students ask about it, what is the teacher allowed to say? Is the teacher able to write their name on the board with their preferred title?
3) Is the teacher allowed to mention the existence of their spouse regardless of orientation?
4) if a child is bullied for wearing clothes that don't match their percieved gender (i.e. boys wearing dresses), is a teacher allowed to explain that it is not ok to bully someone because of their gender? Regardless of what you think about a childs ability to make decisions about gender, you surely understand that they have an idea of what gender is and might decide to bully eachother for it.
I will note that this bill is amended from its original language, which shows the true intent of the law:
``` A school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age -appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students. ```
source: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557/?Tab=BillTex...
I am basing this analysis entirely on the language of the bill and its amendments. I very much encourage you to look at the reasonable amendments that FAILED in committee here, as they speak volumes to the intent of the republican majority.
My previous comment is informed by the documented behaviors and speech of right wing politicians and commentators around the passing of this bill, which do escalate this topic to dangerous levels of right-wing outrage. No there is not language in here that equates sex-education to grooming, but there is ABSOLUTELY discussion on the right that does draw that line.
"voting Republican in America gives power to a party that believes that it is evil to tell children about the effects of slavery or the fact that queer people exist and deserve rights."
That's the same sort of extreme view that the paper was talking about, and mischaraterizes the party's position (even if a small faction does believe it). Don't you think that some Republicans think all Democrats want to abolish the police or take their guns?
A nuanced view of the actual debate is that one side believes the second amendment is absolute and the other believes that it allows for some restrictions similar to the free speech / "fire in a theater" situation. The posturing you see around this is just to rally votes, that is the meta-game. Too many Americans are unable to separate the rules of the game and the underlying issues at stake.
You presume that there is agreement among the first group that the First Amendment is not just as absolute as the Second.
BTW, that "falsely yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theater" bit was actually a threadbare excuse to punish people for protesting the draft, something many would consider protected political speech. The hypothetical scenario is not very well reasoned, either, even ignoring the context. If anyone is hurt during the evacuation the fault lies with those who panicked and trampled them in their haste to escape, not the person who claimed there was a fire, regardless of whether that report was true or false. The most they could reasonably be held responsible for is the interruption of the show for an orderly evacuation.
The real question is, what is considers an infringement? This is true of other rights as well. It's hard to define without trampling rights, especially for minority interests in a democracy.
> The real question is, what is considered an infringement?
gee itd be great if that question was discussed in right-wing media instead of uncritically painting every attempt at discussion as a violation.
I don't just mean on this issue, but in general. We see vastly different controls on guns/abortion/voting/etc from state to state. When is a restriction an infringement? Who decides that and on what basis? It seems that it's up to judges, but what happens if none of the judges are members of the minority group who are being restricted (think segregation)? That's the part I find interesting.
I don't think this is accurate description of guns debate I have seen.
> The posturing you see around this is just to rally votes, that is the meta-game. Too many Americans are unable to separate the rules of the game and the underlying issues at stake.
What you call meta game is in fact the real thing. The posturing is expression of values and opinions. It is reflected in laws and court judgements. Too many people domt take it seriously and even worst blame those who take it seriously.
Then the "posturing" becomes policy and laws. While the same people oretend to be all surprised ... who could have guess they would do exactly what they said they will do.
That said, which LGBT rights do you think they oppose? Do they oppose all rights or just "common sense regulations" (see where I'm going?)? What one person sees as a right, someone else might see as a privilege. Or what they see as reasonable regulation another might see as infringement. The sides have to convey their reasoning for why something is a right, or why they see it the way they do. It's supposed to be an effort to understand each other to make things work for both sides through compromise.
There are a lot of vehement and downright ridiculous comments out there. Perhaps you see more of them on the LGBTQ issues. Perhaps gun owners notice them on gun issues. So perspective can matter. You have people like Beto O'Rourke saying they will confiscate certain arms. There the DNC committee member that said she thinks nobody should have a gun (Bonnie Schaefer). Many have declined to answer whether they believe if owning a gun is a right, including Hillary Clinton. If they can't answer the question, then people will think it's a bad sign. There are a lot from Feinstein that I'll put at the end. And this doesn't even cover all the misinformation (what was used in a specific crime, things that are already illegal), frivolous laws (a folding stock isn't making a difference), and wrong terminology (assault rifle, clip/mag, etc). It's hard to write intelligent legislation if the terms aren't used correctly or the subject isn't well understood. I assume you've seen the same on cis people writing LGBTQ laws.
Many gun organizations have supported past restrictions. Maybe we could implement "universal" background checks by creating a free to use system that can be used for other types of checks as well and doesn't keep a record of what the check was for (maybe using a zero trust pattern or some one way hashing which industry/watch group oversight)? This would address the concerns the concerns of building registries or abuse of power while making a seller civilly liable if the person they sold to was prohibited. Why doesn't anyone in power suggest such a thing as a compromise?
There are tons of options out there. "Common sense" has just become a marketing term by politicians on both sides to appeal to people without actually proving out their issue.
I'll leave you with some quotes from Feinstein:
“Banning guns addresses a fundamental right of all Americans to feel safe.” – Associated Press, 18 November, 1993.
“If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them; “Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in,” I would have done it.” – 60 Minutes on CBS, 5 February, 1995.
"All vets are mentally ill in some way and government should prevent them from owning firearms."
I would argue that statements made 30 years ago are irrelevant to the current debate, considering that would also bring into discussion every opinion held by GOP operatives over that time period and boy that ain't pretty.
Im generally opposed to equating LGBT issues to gun-control issues. This dichotomy was brought up by a previous comment and I dont really want to get bogged down in the issue. After all, one is an issue of bodily autonomy and freedom of expression, and the other is an issue of "what do we do about this thing that is expressly designed to harm other humans".
My personal views on gun control aren't really reflected by any sitting member in congress, and I will admit that a lot of debate on both sides are largely reactionary and you can take impassioned statements from either side out of context. Fine. I will still hold that the right will shut down at any nuanced discussion of the issue, which I see as the main problem. If the GOP took a principled but open-minded stance, you could negotiate down from the reactionary Dem position down to one that thinks critically about privacy as you suggest... but the GOP doesn't allow that discussion.
> That said, which LGBT rights do you think they oppose?
My right to self expression. My right to live a life of my choosing without fear of retaliation. My right to tell others about my existence. As evidenced by objections to bills that would enshrine my safety in finding employment and healthcare. As evidenced by politicians that equate my speech to pedophilia. Are my rights to safety and speech privileges given only to cis/straight people? What are the "common sense" regulations to me living my life? Do you see how I may not agree with the false equivalency of gun rights and lgbt rights?
You asked for a sitting representative. She's still there. I would guess her views haven't changed much but is just out of the spot light now.
"Im generally opposed to equating LGBT issues to gun-control issues. This dichotomy was brought up by a previous comment and I dont really want to get bogged down in the issue. After all, one is an issue of bodily autonomy and freedom of expression, and the other is an issue of "what do we do about this thing that is expressly designed to harm other humans"."
I don't think they are closely related, but they are both strongly held beliefs and deal with rights. Some say the right to self defense is a natural human right and that guns are a tool in that context. It seems that by your statement you hold some rights above others (and don't even mention anything related to right on the other subject). Is this perhaps indicating that each side has a different perception? Also, guns have other purposes, they aren't all just for harming others.
"I will still hold that the right will shut down at any nuanced discussion of the issue, which I see as the main problem. If the GOP took a principled but open-minded stance, you could negotiate down from the reactionary Dem position down to one that thinks critically about privacy as you suggest... but the GOP doesn't allow that discussion."
Is it possible this is a standoff - that the GOP thinks they would have critical debate if only the other side proposed something they saw as reasonable first? Everyone wants to blame the other side, and I agree that it's just all reactionary at this point. But seeing the other side as the main problem might just be the reason we have such stalemate.
"Do you see how I may not agree with the false equivalency of gun rights and lgbt rights?"
I'm not saying they are equal, but they are similar in how rights and restrictions are imposed/violated in the name of common sense and reasonable things (as said by people with no experience on the issues).
I'm not aware of anyone at the federal level trying to take away your Healthcare and safety rights (but maybe they aren't mainstream enough).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bostock_v._Clayton_County
On the fear and retaliation, I believe those would be federal hate crimes. Again, I don't know of any mainstream movement against that.
The comments about pedophilia are terrible. I believe the bill only removes all sex related cirruculum material but doesn't impact personal expression.
while we're at it, Democrat voters should get their party to sunset its superdelegates system if they want their primaries to actually be, y'know, democratic
[0]https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2020
It's basically a choice between a shit sandwich and a shit sandwich without the bread. Which one is which depends on your perspective. They both suck but the bread makes one slightly more palatable.
With that in mind, the platform for democrats was to vote out Trump. Similar to four years earlier the republican platform was to vote for anyone but Hillary.
It does tend to exist and depends on the state. In the general election you still typically have only 2-3 choices for many offices at the state level. They tend to follow a similar two party paradigm and have a "Not that person" feel to some of them. Local elections have less personality involved in many areas simply because the person is less notorious and their positions are less well publicized.
Or of a winner-take-all electoral system? I can’t say that the systems I’ve seen which have you vote for an amorphous entity instead of a tangible and somewhat accessible person are better in every sense, exactly, but I think of the sort of environment which would develop the word bipartisan to mean universally supported and can’t shake off an overwhelming feeling of stupid.
Who's "we"? I don't think a single Black American would agree with your statement.
If you vote one way, you don’t care all that much about key issues that matter to me. I do. It’s relevant to my life. It doesn’t matter what you say. The truth is you don’t care as much as I do.
I don’t have to oppose anything. That’s you projecting. Knowing who is opposing me is not opposing them. It’s just knowing the landscape. I’m quite comfortable not opposing someone even if they oppose me, but I do insist on knowing they oppose me.
You don't have to vote either Republican or Democrat. Third-parties, write-ins, and simply abstaining in protest are all perfectly valid alternatives which would get you out of that 50%. I more-or-less agree with the GP here: If you vote for a candidate knowing that they will use the power you give them in ways which are harmful to others, you're contributing to the problem. That's true even in FPTP voting systems where the winner will almost certainly have an (R) or (D) next to their name no matter what you do. Overall turnout (voter engagement) and the percentage that actually voted for the winning candidate both matter even if they don't change the official result of the election.
"If you vote for a candidate knowing that they will use the power you give them in ways which are harmful to others, you're contributing to the problem."
Can you name any candidate that wouldn't harm any group? It seems they all have ideas about what laws would make things better, and those laws tend to involve control of people's actions or inactions.
No, I can't. That's the problem with voting for representatives or officials—you inevitably end up voting for a politician. The candidate pool is made up of people who see force as a reasonable means for solving problems, real or imagined; those who don't see it that way have more productive things to do than run for political office in a system they consider immoral. Occasionally you get an idealist who thinks they can change the system from within, but it's too well entrenched—the corruption ends up infecting them instead.
When you combine that with twin, adoption, or half-sibling studies which all show that political orientation is partially inherited, it's like we're splitting into two different species. Hopefully things will get back on track long before that.
The difference now is that the "other species" now has a voice in 2-party politics, after previously being silenced.
It wasn't better in the past when Democrats and Republicans worked together to oppress non-WASPs.
The middle manager has a rather unusual job - keep the corporate board and the shareholders wealthy and happy, and keep the rank-and-file employees productive and happy. The former job is done more in private, the latter job is done more in public. (Note how certain politicians notoriously stated the need for having both public and private positions, which fits this model).
Somewhere along the way, the middle managers had a bright idea: if we ensure the rank-and-file employees distrust and hate one another more than either us or the corporate board, we can keep this whole thing rolling along, even while we screw them over and enrich ourselves and the board! Genius. For a while, anyway.
Back then, Democrats and Republicans alike could be comfortably racist; one might wonder if black folks even got to take the survey. But two things happened, one is the civil rights movement which made people less racist. (yay!) and the other is the radicalization of the Republican party.
Today, Democrat/Republican is a much better proxy/predictor for -- well, let's be PC here and say, potential matches. It's not a bad predictor (and before someone says some nonsense comparing this to prejudice, political party is 100% a choice and nothing like racial discrimination.)
Evolution is a very powerful force; ultimately the genes that make people incline towards having more children will become dominant. https://www.fatherly.com/health-science/republicans-have-mor... currently it looks like Republicans are winning the reproduction war.
It's so ridiculous on its face that I'm not sure why I'm typing out this reply, but if there was a simple straight line between genetics and ideology, why would positions like those opposed to the Republicans exist at all? Shouldn't they all have been bred out by now?
And what about the fact that what it means to be a Republican and a Democrat change as well. There used to be a time when the Democrats were the pro-slavery party. So what ideological elements are inherited exactly? Is it the broad party affiliation? Is it beliefs about tax policy? Beliefs about gun rights[1]? Religion?
[1] Incidentally, the left is becoming increasingly pro-second-ammendment: https://www.theirisnyc.com/post/american-gun-rights-activism...
Edit: Oh yeah, and anecdotally plenty of kids raised by conservatives grow up to hate their parents' guts. Perhaps because of the authoritarian nature of some conservative households. As you might expect, this is especially true for LGBTQ kids.
This resulted in less partisan division, but no less political division, as the large scale political violence of, particularly, the 1950s and 1960s, makes pretty clear.
All the hand-wringing over the fact that we’ve in the last couple decades returned to the normal state where salient ideological divisions actually map reasonably well to the main partisan division is...bizarre.
Or nations. A lot of the turmoil in Eastern Europe since the 90s is related to certain nations considering themselves distinct, and other nations refusing to entertain it. The former group will fight for their liberty and the latter group will try to conquer and absorb them.
Will the same happen in the US? I see the African Americans being their own unique North American nation with associated food, music and culture, but also being part of the dominant American national culture. Not many of them appear to want to be fully separate, black nationalist extremists aside.
If heartland white Americans attempted to distinguish themselves as a separate nation, it would be civil war 2, but fuelled by nationalism as opposed to slavery, traditionalism and states rights.
It's just that in the US, only 2 parties can work given the FPTP system that makes all 3rd parties spoilers.
There are hundreds of millions of party members. Did anyone truly think that a member of either party supports every policy the party supports, or that there are different factions within the party that take opposing stances on specific issues? There's no way we're able to fully map 100M to 1 on an innumerable amount of topics/solutions.
I see you haven't met my in-laws.
I think you’re conflating both groups denouncing those extremists as denouncing you, because those extremists are who represents your group on the mainstream narrative.
Also, transgender people aren't a movement. We're people.
I’m not saying it’s fair or right…
But transgender people are a minority whose voice has been appropriated by a political movement to force their radical agenda under euphemisms like “inclusion”.
I’m not saying that you need to be outspoken about it — but if the only exposure most people have is that extremist view from TV, they will associate you with that due to how humans work.
> "Black people should have no issue proving they aren't criminals"
The equivalent would be black people debouncing the neo-racism of Democrats under euphemisms like “equity” and publicly denouncing nonsense done in their name, like de-policing.
Again, I’m not saying it’s fair or right… but I’d tell a black Democrat who was upset about being associated with that idiocy the same thing:
You’re tacitly letting your identity be used to push dumb policies — and you’ll be associated until you stand up and say “no, this doesn’t represent me”.
And again, am I supposed to be out here actively looking for people and views to disavow? Do I have to do this in front of everyone I meet, so then they'll be sure I'm one of the good ones and they can treat me like a normal person?
Whites not associated with racism are expected to denounce it.
Men not associated with misogyny are expected to denounce it.
I’m not holding double-standards, just acknowledging that humans work based on heuristics.
> Do I have to do this in front of everyone I meet, so then they'll be sure I'm one of the good ones and they can treat me like a normal person?
You don’t have to do it at all, but yelling at people because they’re human and their brains react to repeated exposure by finding patterns isn’t going to lead to the outcome you want.
So if you don’t like being associated with that kind of behavior — you probably want to do it some time, in some way.
That perception won’t change until there’s enough people out there denouncing the misappropriation of their identity by politicians to make it clear that they dont represent that group.
Besides, who are you expecting to do the denouncing and what are they supposed to denounce? Before I started this comment was I supposed to do a quick google search and see if there were any fringe activists saying something to denounce? What's the time scale I have to cover before I can reply to your comment. A week? A month? What if I already denounced it in another thread, do I have to do a recap of everything I've denounced in every thread?
I'm not calling you racist, No one asked you to denounce racism or misogyny, so why are you bringing it up?
> there’s enough people out there denouncing the misappropriation of their identity by politicians to make it clear that they don't represent that group
This is laughably unquantifiable and political forces ensure that even if this was happening you wouldn't know about it.
As Malcolm X explained, minorities are routinely used as a political cudgel in feuds between parties — and the promotion of extremist voices is part of that today.
> political forces ensure that even if this was happening you wouldn't know about it
…which is why it’s important to occasionally share those thoughts in your personal life, to help unwind that narrative for people around you.
As everybody knows off course, only the things you hate are actual and real, and you're being noble and virtuous by talking about them. While the things your opponents hate are disinformation and a mirage, and they're being hysteric and alarmist by talking about them.
Looks like you made it clear what you're doing.
It is a special breed of shamelessness to accuse others of your own vices.
It's hilariously disingenuous and backward how you mention the reaction to the encroaching transgender ideology without mentioning the action itself that prompted it. The bathroom and sports bills are defensive measures against the ideology infiltrating institutions and allowing the easy access of vulnerable spaces to mentally unstable individuals.
>what political power is the 'transgender ideology' wielding.
Other than
- In [1] an academic professor is fired for publishing a book critical of transgender beliefs
- In [2] a school covered for a trans rapist who raped a teenager in the girls bathroom, he was eventually transfered to another school where he raped a second teenager.
- In [3] an. archeologist is fired for trans critical views
- [4] documents several other cases of harassment perpetrated by trans ideology supporters in academia
- In [5], a British political party struggles with the definition of a woman, party representatives repeatedly refused to answer straightforward questions about basic female biology to avoid angering the trans lobby
- In [6], as in [5], a US Supreme Court judge refused to answer the question "What's a woman", citing that "She's not a biologist".
- The social media giants ban any dissenting discussion. Examples too numerous to mention, and can be empirically reproduced for yourself.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/may/22/kathleen-s...
[2] https://news.yahoo.com/judge-rules-loudoun-county-teen-13141...
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-01950-9
[4] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349967840_The_Gende...
[5] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/labour-s-refusal-to-acce...
[6] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/22/blackburn-jackson-d...
Is your argument that people should just accept their lot in life and not challenge the status quo? Or more that they should do it in a way that doesn't upset anyone.
I see that you have some concerns here, I don't see why your response is to try and ostracize or ban this thing you don't understand.
If that’s what you think then this wasn’t the debate I thought it was.
Do you think that all gay people are pedophiles too?
I do not argue for this, the existence of a systematic and widespread ideology does not necessarily imply that the ideology is all-powerful or has full support.
But you can't handwave away the rather obvious evidence that this "minority" has some curious methods to impose its will on a whole lot of people, can you ? How is this small, oppressed minority capable of terrifying the heads of political parties and judges of high courts away from answering questions that any 18 years old can reliably answer ? By the power of looking adorable and saying 'Please' ?
>Do you think that all gay people are pedophiles too?
I fail to see why this is relevant to the discussion now, but no. I don't think there is a link between sexual affinity to same sex individuals and sexual affinity to children.
"The bathroom and sports bills are defensive measures against the ideology infiltrating institutions and allowing the easy access of vulnerable spaces to mentally unstable individuals."
He considers transgender women to be mentally unstable predators who want access to women's spaces in order to attack them.
For example, WA and CA are attempting to repeal civil rights laws to re-legalize government bigotry.
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...
https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Initiative_1000,_Affirmat...
Ah, but yes, you're right, that's preposterous.
Good, because concern trolling like this is pretty shitty, and definitely not fair or right.
Certainly not intellectually honest. You attack someone repeatedly for supposedly not standing up against "dumb policies" and "extremist" positions, without your daring to name what you think those are. After all, if you did that, you might have to defend your stance against criticism instead of attacking someone for not preventing the entire Democratic Party from committing unspecified wrongs of "inclusion".
Dissent along those lines, no matter how politely framed, is simply an attempt to launder bigotry into "debate".
I'm trying hard to correlate "We were arrested and discriminated against in the past" to "We must teach impressionable pre-pubescents about gender dysphoria behind their parents' back and ban anyone who criticizes this off the internet in the present". A majority used to take your rights away, then it self corrected and gave you your rights back, then you... impose your views back on them and influence institutions to crush their dissenting views ?
Am I just naive or is "we used to be second class citizens but now we're not" cause for reconciliation with and gratitude toward the majority, not hostility and belligerent activism ?
Current bathroom bills, bans on transgender medical care, and efforts to equate LGBTQ+ acceptance and care with grooming are not "the past", they're happening right now.
Is that government/public bathrooms or private businesses bathrooms? Aren't LGBT++ people extremely fond of saying "It's a private business, it can do whatever it wants", or does that only work when people critical of them are banned off the internet ?
>bans on transgender medical care
I'm highly, highly skeptical that a western country really did ban transgender "medical" care. Most likely it's an obscure law that just made it a private expense not paid for by tax money.
You can prove me wrong though.
>efforts to equate LGBTQ+ acceptance and care with grooming
I have a feeling that people who are reacting to pre-12-years-olds being shown pornographic imagery of 2 boys doing a sexual activity by defending it as "Queer sex education", I have just the slightest feeling, that those people are, indeed, defending what amounts to pedophilic tendencies. When those people are the most visible parts of a community and they're shouting their rather unusual opinions without the slightest pushback or dissent from others in the same community, I have a feeling, again just a very slight feeling, that this community does, in fact, present a very attractive affiliation for pedophiles.
In other words, if some people want to be treated as equal, maybe they should start acting as equals, respecting the things that everybody else respect. Maybe they should stop being the spoilt children of corporate giants who call for banning/firing anyone who looks at them funnily, maybe they should disavow clearly criminal tendencies within their own. Maybe they should stop treating a joke as a genocide.
Maybe then, just maybe, other people would start seeing them as ordinry humans with the same duties, and consequently the same rights and respect, as the rest of us.
> Is that government/public bathrooms or private businesses bathrooms?
It is the government dictating how private businesses structure their bathrooms. That's ranged from attempts to flat-out ban businesses from offering multi-person gender neutral bathrooms to requiring businesses to attach signage "warning" people that they have LGBTQ+ friendly bathrooms. It's not only state governments attacking transgender populations, it is also the state interfering in private business.
> bans on transgender medical care
Texas's ban on affirmative transgender care literally just went into effect, how do you not know about this? Notably, Texas doesn't only ban transitioning, and it doesn't even only ban puberty blockers, it bans affirmative care of any kind including therapy for minors. There have been talks of extending those bans past 18 years up to 25 year olds.
> I have a feeling that people who are reacting to pre-12-years-olds being shown pornographic imagery of 2 boys doing a sexual activity by defending it as "Queer sex education", I have just the slightest feeling, that those people are, indeed, defending what amounts to pedophilic tendencies.
You're out of touch with the current discourse about transgender rights if you think that these are the only people being called pedophiles. Florida's "don't say gay" bill bans any discussion of gender/orientation regardless of whether or not it's sexual in nature. When schools are threatening students that they can't use the word "gay" during graduation speeches, then I'm sorry but this is very clearly not about protecting minors or preventing grooming, and lawmakers equating pedophilia with even just basic acknowledgement that queer people exist is dangerous, bigoted rhetoric.
You're arguing that this pushback is related to extreme or clearly inappropriate lessons, but again, even just a passing amount of research into the rhetoric being pushed out by mainstream governors and lawmakers would be enough to show that there is a coordinated effort happening to characterize LGBTQ+ identity as entirely sexual in nature and innately deviant. The intention is to create a perspective that someone openly identifying as gay inherently makes that person dangerous around children.
If it had just been left as the LGB, that's something people can get on board with much more easily, from an individual liberties perspective and the principle of equal treatment under the law.
However, the TQ+, with its fundamental reframing of what it means to be a man or a woman, in terms of gender identity rather than sex, is something quite different. It's compelling people to believe something very controversial: that some men are actually women, and some women are actually man, and some people are somehow neither.
No surprise that this is getting pushback. But it's unfortunate, and really quite galling, that the LGB are also being dragged into this mess, particularly given all the gains made in recent years on equality.
But whatever, this is mostly just identity gatekeeping anyway. Transgender people were always active in early LGB rights movements from the beginning, and the idea that gay identity is normal but transgenderism is "controversial" is just laughably ignorant of how controversial gay identity used to be (and how controversial it still is in many circles).
People have some really serious short-term memory loss if they think that the LGB rights movement didn't go through the exact same pushback that the transgender rights movement is facing today, and that pushback included a ton of people who were all too eager to talk about how "respectable" gays deserved rights, but the fringe gays who did stuff like hold hands in public or talk about their partners openly were holding back the rest of the movement.
In particular, the modern gender critical movement is a direct continuation of an ideological split amongst lesbian feminists back in the 1970s, one group of whom considered transsexual males to be honorary women and welcome in their spaces as lesbians, and the other who regarded them as straight men who were infiltrating and imposing themselves, and effectively erasing lesbians as a group.
In some parts of the world, LGB acceptance is very high amongst the general population. Over 80% in much of western Europe, Canada and Australia. And over 70% in the US and Argentina.
What we're seeing with this pushback against trans activism in these more accepting places isn't because people have suddenly become more homophobic, but for very specific reasons caused by this activism - effectively the same issue that the feminists of the 1970s were arguing furiously about, but in the public sphere.
Now you are right that some homophobic politicians have jumped onto this issue too, and used it as a lever to push against LGB rights. But they're doing so opportunistically. The more fundamental issue, opposed by many across the political spectrum who have otherwise discordant beliefs, is this elevation of gender identity above sex. For example, in the UK, on a grassroots level it's been mostly left-wing feminist women pushing back against this, not homophobic conservatives.
Because of activism in the face of people who called gay orientation unnatural or dangerous -- activism that trans-exclusionists now want to see stopped just because they're worried about backlash and because they feel that they personally, individually no longer need that activism in order to be accepted in mainstream society.
If you went back in time you would see the same conversation we're having now play out about both bisexual and asexual people who both have faced the same kind of "are they really gay" gatekeeping that's happening here. If you went back further, you would see another split among feminists about whether lesbians could be considered feminist or whether they were distracting from feminist goals. If you went back even further, you'd see the same splits in feminist circles about intersectionality and whether talking about racism made feminism unattractive to white people. At every step, these exclusions were justified by talking about how the "less proper" activists were holding the broader gay/feminist/whatever movement back from mainstream acceptance.
It's the same story over and over again with each pushback characterizing the people they want to exclude as if they're uniquely controversial or dangerous to the movement. But they're not; it's just gatekeeping. Excusing bigotry that labels transgender people as pedophiles as if that bigotry is just reactionary pushback is really historically ignorant, given that literally the exact same "gays are pedophiles and groomers" rhetoric was used against LGB groups (and was especially used against bisexual people). There are parallels here that are impossible to ignore.
> For example, in the UK, on a grassroots level it's been mostly left-wing feminist women pushing back against this, not homophobic conservatives.
If trans-exclusionists want to talk strategy, then arguing that identity is the same as sexual deviancy, and aligning themselves with homophobic reactionaries is extremely short-sighted, foolish, and dangerous to the overall gay rights movement.
From the beginning, transgender people have done just as much to fight for LGB rights as anyone else in the movement and they deserve acceptance and support. Transgender people helped these so-called feminists put up the ladder, you don't get to pull the ladder up behind you now.
But at any rate, your argument amounts to, "But he has to be disingenuous and chickenshit, because Hacker News is run by the SJWs!", which I find laughable.
My argument definitely isn't that Hacker News is run by the SJWs, both because I don't think HN moderation is particularly left wing and because I don't think "the SJWs" is a meaningful category. What I would say is that debates about the fundamental legitimacy of transgender stuff get too heated for most platforms to accept, because people have strong, passionate beliefs on the issue which can't easily be compromised on. It's an entirely reasonable moderation decision and I might very well make the same one if I were in charge - but as a consequence, those of us who are transgender skeptical sometimes need to carefully talk around the touchiest issues rather than engaging on them directly.
That's a very strange interpretation of my comment. If you think my gender identity is invalid, you're not committing genocide, you're just an asshole. If you think my gender identity makes me a pedophile groomer who needs to be kept away from kids, and want to enforce that via imprisonment, then you're committing genocide. Unfortunately, that is a political position of the governor of at least one US state. It is not the political position of most of the people voting for him, but that's not a ton of consolation.
Then you're just being disingenuous, jumping into a thread responding to someone else entirely and talking about dead comments as if the person being responded to had made them.
It's really at this step where things start to take a wrong turn. I truly believe you're acting in good faith, so please take this as a gentle suggestion. Rather than telling trans/black/etc people anything, pause and really listen.
We are already told how to do everything else in our lives, being told how to stand up for ourselves and how to fight for our rights feels like another example of the same pattern. A better question is, "How can we help?" or "What do you need?"
> transgender people aren't a movement. We're people.
Every movement is ultimately a group of people with a purpose.
I have noticed that even the L and G (to say nothing of BTQ+) folks who've come out to me in the past 10 years have added "but I am nothing like those {unfavorable words here} who proclaim themselves L's or G's on the web" - generally so fast that I couldn't have gotten a word in edgewise.
Until that is requirement for then too, then this just amounts to support for anti trans extremists.
But even if it did refer to actually existing extremism, presuming a trans person should know about a sub-category of extremists that happen to be trans and make unprompted verbal attacks against them just to signal some kind of virtue at is a pretty weird demand of compelled speech on your part.
This kind of shameless bigotry and stereotyping is pretty transparent.
I'm curious, why would these people not be considered extreme for treating you like a loon or treating you as an extremist?
I've seen similar stuff on other issues. For example, there are people who hate guns who treat gun owners as loons and extremists regardless of their actions/positions/etc. Just saying that some people treat others as extremists just because they hold an opposing view. My guess is it's often to prevent cognitive dissonance in examining their own beliefs (most people don't consider themselves extremists even if they hold extreme views).
(Substitute the bit about appearance with "because I think we should immediately stop new fossil fuel exploration / capital investment and institute atmospheric carbon recapture taxes of $1-2 per gallon-of-gasoline-equivalent emissions")
Anyway, I think the premise of the article is flawed:
I don't care whether voters in some red state are queer-bashing, abortion-banning putin apologists that want to strip mine for coal. (Want them for neighbors, or not? Move!)
I care that the people they've voted in and appointed to the supreme court are all of those things, and this planet is not large enough to let the rest of us escape from their idiocy.
Do you care whether this belief (which may have the appearance of knowledge) is objectively and flawlessly true?
And it is very fair to guess it was plan from the start, despite pretention not. Despite calling those who guesses it 100% correctly exaggerating and hysterical.
>> I don't care whether voters in some red state are queer-bashing, abortion-banning putin apologists that want to strip mine for coal. (Want them for neighbors, or not? Move!)
>> I care that the people they've voted in and appointed to the supreme court are all of those things
> The abortion banning part is provably true at this point.
a) Not comprehensively for all people, as was claimed.
b) It is supreme court justices that would be banning it, not elected representatives.
c) How might one prove it for any given elected representative, short of an explicit confession?
d) Abortion banning wasn't the only claim.
> And it is very fair to guess it was plan from the start, despite pretention not.
"Fair to say" and "correct/true" are very different things.
> Despite calling those who guesses it 100% correctly exaggerating and hysterical.
Where "100% correctly" refers to perception of reality, but is typically perceived as reality itself.
Human beings are silly, I would say without exception - News at 11.
I dont think they are silly. I think that they prefer to good relationship with that political branch over telling truth. They think it makes them sound like smart and rational and dont mind throwing others under the bus in the process.
E.g., they have priorities.
> "Fair to say" and "correct/true" are very different things.
Ok, I will say out loud, it is correct thing to say.
> It is supreme court justices that would be banning it, not elected representatives.
Supreme court did not came out of skies. They were put in place by politicians who picked people guaranteed to make political decisions.
> Abortion banning wasn't the only claim.
No. But it was part I 100% agree with.
It may be a "correct thing to say" (aka: popular), but this is distinctly different from correct from en epistemology perspective.
> But it was part I 100% agree with.
You are welcome to agree, but I am discussing what is true (and indirectly, the nature of human consciousness, which renders the customized/unique "reality" that each person on this forum experiences, and tends to mistake for reality itself).
There's no way to do it accurately, but the mind "does it" all day err day without breaking a sweat, as it evolved to do. This phenomenon is what this paper is describing, is it not?
Possibly relevant:
https://www.simplypsychology.org/context-and-state-dependent...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31338304
> I'm kinda done with listening to the other side at this point.
Don't let the propaganda win, always be willing to listen.
Thats a two way street buddy. I can't listen to the other side if they are blabbering on about their own false narrative. This comment section is full of people who think that its the lefts fault and are absolutely incapable of looking at their own party. I don't know how to explain to you that I do not give a shit about Democrats or Liberal media or the "singular corporate uniparty", let it all burn and I will still be fighting for LGBT rights and there will still be people who think I shouldn't exist.
Where we differ I guess is in degree of nihilism - I don't want to see everything burn and I'm happy to listen to other people's perspectives. I'm just a mildy intelligent ape and don't have everything figured out yet. I don't think throwing in the towel is a better solution than persevering and standing up for your values though. Thank you for listening! :)
Frankly, the left should start to go lower, and speak more emotionally. It turns out that clinical, sterile statements are not a good way to sway a majority, and they don't make good sound-bites.
At some point, you have to fight fire with fire to avoid becoming yet another victim of the paradox of tolerance.
Admittedly I was a bit rambley because i am scared for the safety of myself and others in this political climate. And everytime someone tries to "diagnose" the problem, they do so by treating the left and the right as the same, as value-neutral, as though they are two people on a tennis court following the same rules hitting a ball back and forth. I think this fundamentally misses the fact that both sides use vastly different tactics and have different standards for truth. I think that the values of each side cannot be put on the same line ("I think cops should be held accountable" and "democrats stole the election" are not equal and opposite positions). I think both sides are playing completely different games and each can claim the other is losing/winning/cheating, that is the problem... not individuals misperceptions.
If the goal is getting people to see you as a person and the strategy you are deploying to reach that goal is pushing people away, then it might be worth looking into the effectiveness of that strategy.
Politics should not require strategy and neither the left nor right should see others as subhumans. Everyone is human living in the now and should be treated with respect and rights.
Human being are not a gender, a color, a sexual orientation, or a political object to be attacked. They are not a religion, ethnic origin, age or demographic. Human individuals are human. Reducing people down to single bits of information is reducing people to be less than human.
The hierarchy of needs is different on both sides; they are mostly incompatible and each side not only will, but _must_ violate the other's definition of justice (abortion is a perfect example of this, defined not by the act itself, but by the conflicting definitions/hierarchy of life and of rights).
I think social media is the problem. You used to have to get along with those around you. Now you can just bubble yourself on the internet, no matter how niche your position is. I am glad to have friendships all across the political spectrum -- we can always bond over being screwed by the system at large instead of the nebulous "other side".
I saw this really take off around 2010 and tried to warn people. The issue is that the forces that actually control the major political parties need to divide the people, for never forget the thing the oligarchs fear the most is a united proliteriat, and have heavily invested in creating the illusion of a consesus or narrative view from one "side" or the other, reinforcing the division at play.
Three letter grade psyops are at play on an unprecendented scale, and failing to understand that will leave anyone interested in this topic twirling at windmills.
When he was in power they were trusted and reliable.
Also - perhaps massive disinterest is the goal.
But I feel like Plato's cave metaphor would suggest that artists (music, TV, movies) are the best sock puppets we've got, and often don't even know they're doing it (e.g., the apathy towards deeper goals that immersion in pop culture cultivates).
I find just being around a certain group of people, namely young left urban college educated people who are counnterculture, the norms for that group are unbelievably far left. Like the nuances of Maosism vs Lenninism is a more common discussion than the budget of congress amongst this group (percieved to be a right wing issue). It's unbelievably extreme. And yet I never interact with the other side, let's say Mid west evangelicals, and rarely interact with the unengaged center even though those other two groups are combined an order of magnitude bigger.
But based on non political preferences I spend a lot of my time around woke communists and end up having a strong distaste for them even though they are a small minority in the bigger picture.
I think this same group has a very outsized influence in a large number of spheres. So I don't think it's unreasonable to worry about them even if they are a minority.