The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

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orange808
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by orange808 »

Everything that people do and believe is invented in the moment for pure personal convenience with no absolutely no basis in consistent principles or theory. Case and point: the term "free speech".
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Mischief Maker
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by Mischief Maker »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote:It is gaslighting however when a woman, as in an adult human female, is lectured on how she is a bigot for thinking that she should be able to advocate for herself on the basis of her sex. It is also gaslighting when she is told that she needs a re-education on "what it really means to be a woman" by a male who identifies himself as a woman due to sexual fetishism.

Pure, utter misogyny.
I wish you were more specific with phrases like "advocate for herself on the basis of her sex." Is there a specific bill you're speaking about? An anti-trans organization she's advocating for? A brick-sized fictional book she wrote about a trans predator?


Here, I'll give you an example of a specific criticism: When John Michael Bailey, a cis man, writes a book about how trans women are sexually rapacious narcissistic living fuck-dolls, and trans woman tell him that's not true, then he responds by saying they're only having an irrational narcissistic freak-out to his totally logical super-science, that is gaslighting. Contradicting a person's own perceptions and experience in a manner aimed at making them doubt their own sanity is gaslighting.

And when trans women give actual hard data on the fact that female hormones crater the libido, in direct contradiction to Bailey's claims, and he responds that when a trans woman transitions, her libido drops because she's undergoing a psychic marriage between their former male persona and new female persona, that is fucking stupid and reason to roll your eyes at this whole concept.

If John Michael Bailey did the fuck-saw show in a vacuum, it could be waved away. But when John Michael Bailey is busy libeling other people as being sexually insatiable perverts, the fuck-saw incident is a relevant point toward the question of whether he's doing a little projection of his own issues in his pop-psychology book.
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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BryanM
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BryanM »

This raging wildfire from all this sex talk really illustrates why these topics were usually kept under one's hat, pre-internet.

For what it's worth (nothing!), as a third level volcel my opinion is it's illegal to be horny about anything that actually exists.
If you are a man who wants to best women in feats of physical prowess, you will be looked at askance by most.
Hey now hey, I feel like I'm being persecuted for my dream of wanting to be like my hero Andy Kaufman here.

The compromise with reality as it is, is to become one of those massage guys. I already lead a pants-free lifestyle, I just need to pick up about 20 tanktops for a full wardrobe of uniforms.

Even there, the distance between dreams and reality would be vast. The majority of my clientele would be elderly and require very delicate work. I'd be so paranoid about breaking them >_< And living where I live, 95% of them would smoke and only ~20% of them would bathe.

Ah... we live very far from the ideal world.
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BareKnuckleRoo
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Mischief Maker wrote:I wish you were more specific with phrases like "advocate for herself on the basis of her sex."
You mean other than the specific examples I've already provided?
requoting myself because of your apparent reading difficulties wrote:On a related note, the same groups that target [JK Rowling] also find it fashionable nowadays for homosexuality to be cancelled. This specifically happens to lesbians [as in females who are same-sex attracted], who are told that their same sex attraction is insufficiently inclusive and therefore bigoted.
seriously, stop acting like I didn't already give you examples wrote:Morgane's exploits include defunding a women's rape shelter for strictly being for those of the female sex. Considering that there are numerous reports out there of men self-identifying their way into women's prisons and then raping the women in those prisons, Vancouver Rape Relief seems well justified in providing sex-based services [as in to those of the female sex] (and does indeed provide them to women who identify as trans men).
I'm also not going to dignify your gross mischaracterizations of Bailey's writings with a response. I seriously doubt this is your field of study/expertise, and people can read his writings as I've previously linked and decide for themselves.

Since I keep having to repeat myself and requote myself, you'll have to forgive me if I find responding unproductive and ignore any further responses from you on this subject.
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BIL
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BIL »

BryanM wrote:
If you are a man who wants to best women in feats of physical prowess, you will be looked at askance by most.
Hey now hey, I feel like I'm being persecuted for my dream of wanting to be like my hero Andy Kaufman here.
Oh no, trolling is different. Tennis bro Kaarsten Braache (then ranked 203) going to war against the Williams Sisters for the honour of his fellow sub-200 scrubs (the Williams had claimed they would destroy any male player ranked outside the top 200), playing a round of golf while enjoying beer n' cigs so he'd be mildly drowsy, then demolishing both 6-1 apiece? Only a massive gaping asshole could dislike that guy. All good fun! He was very gentlemanly and insightful about it all, and I get the impression both sisters wanted to fuck him SAME TIME afterward. Image
The compromise with reality as it is, is to become one of those massage guys. I already lead a pants-free lifestyle, I just need to pick up about 20 tanktops for a full wardrobe of uniforms.
Sadly, that JERK George Uhl has stolen all the pretty girls, leaving the rest of us Massage Virgins With Rage 3;
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Ed Oscuro
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by Ed Oscuro »

Transgender athletics is a niche issue outside of right-wing politics. I've seen arguments from female athletes that it was hard to build women's athletics to stand on its own - I can respect that; consent amongst the competition is important. But I've also seen female athletes point out that society has never really cared to pay women athletes a decent wage - let alone the humongous amounts paid to male pros. The tangible things at stake for women seems mostly to be in the rarefied arena of collegiate scholarships and sponsorships. Andy Kaufman made some money in mixed-gender wrestling, didn't he? I don't know whether he made any money off sponsorships but certainly everybody was looking forward to his comedic downfall. I get the impression from reading female athletes that they're mostly concerned less about men invading their sport in competition, and more about men invading their sport to make it another political arena. The classic arguments for sports are the same as they always were: Building confidence and social camaraderie, staying fit, and self-discovery. If anything, society is moving in the direction of being more critical about the treatment of collegiate athletes as profit centers.

The people who benefit most from this are right-wing political candidates and their allies of convenience, like TERFs. Right-wingers argue youth are just confused about wanting to transition - just like they did with gays and the supposed miracle cure of 'conversion therapy' trying to force the Other to knuckle under. That's an impossible task as insecurity about sex and gender feature prominently even in some of the oldest legends and myths known to humanity. The hysterical Right's plan would stick trans youth in a Catch-22: Kids grow up without access to puberty blockers. The majority of them will still want to transition, and the Right Wing will continue to Other them as Bad, Evil, and Confused. The right wing and their reactionary friends also dismiss the very obvious and well-researched links to trans youth suicides. There's been multiple studies of this and they're very clear: suicides go down when trans youth have access to transition care.

So far, we have "trying to be normal and having normal youth experiences" in the Pro Trans Athlete Inclusion category, and the argument Against is "money and consent." When it comes to consent, however, things aren't so clear against trans athletics either. Policing gender and sex conformance in sports isn't going to disappear if trans athletes are banned - Caster Semenya, an intersex female athlete, was born female, raised female, identifies as female, and still got trolled. Even very average born-as-female athletes also get swept up into this nonsense with demands they take intrusive tests and a number have complained about that too. All of this is still strictly biological - yet we don't see many people arguing that Michael Phelps needed his trunk sawed down to reduce his biological advantages over other swimmers. No, he is presented as a marvel of good genes. Even the best and most sympathetic of the transgender-critical articles I read (which I can't find again for some reason) was by a former female swimmer who competed against Eastern Bloc female athletes who were "doped up to the gills" to the point it affected their appearance - and still she notes that she beat them all. I've seen the rather remarkable-looking calculations that trans swimmer Lia Thomas' advantage was so exceptional that it could only be related to male biology. But I haven't seen that same analysis put towards discrediting her losses to other cisgender female swimmers, nor any argument that she sandbagged those races. In any case, I can't help but think that you get what you pay for - if you don't offer trans athletes transition care then you are going to end up with hard cases, simple as that.

I can still understand why people don't like all this. If Lia goes to the Olympics it will be an incredible controversy. The two major US swimming bodies have tried to put forward some standards to ensure that male-to-female transgender athletes have to have completed their transition, medically, before being accepted for competition, although one can say these rules are in flux too. What could work better and I think mollify most of the critics would be rules on puberty development as well. But It won't be enough to placate everybody. As we've seen with Roe, it doesn't matter what the hell the majority think as long as there are enough wealthy right-wingers willing to push an issue for decades. Again, the question of fairness is exacerbated by a lack of medical transition care in the country. It turns out that the right wing likes to create problems and then claim to be the victim of those problems - who could have guessed?
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BareKnuckleRoo
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Ed Oscuro wrote:There's been multiple studies of this and they're very clear: suicides go down when trans youth have access to transition care.
Several countries have recently tightened medical intervention guidelines after a broad review of the evidence that shows that medical intervention such as hormones and surgery actually are not helpful to youth suffering from gender dysphoria. For example, Sweden's updated guidance:

https://segm.org/segm-summary-sweden-pr ... oric-youth
Summary of Key Points (NBHW February 2022 Update)

Following a rigorous analysis of evidence base, there has been a marked change in treatment recommendations. The guidance has changed from a previously strong recommendation to treat youth with hormones, to new caution to avoid hormones except for “exceptional cases.” A more cautious approach that prioritizes non-invasive interventions is now recommended, due to recognition of the importance of allowing ongoing maturation and identity formation of youth.

Currently, the NBHW assert that the risks of hormonal treatments outweigh the benefits for most gender-dysphoric youth:

Poor quality/insufficient evidence: The evidence for safety and efficacy of treatments remains insufficient to draw any definitive conclusions;

Poorly understood marked change in demographics: The sharp rise in the numbers of youth seeking to transition and the change in sex ratio toward a preponderance of females is not well-understood;

Growing visibility of detransition/regret: New knowledge about detransition in young adults challenges prior assumption of low regret, and the fact that most do not tell practitioners about their detransition could indicate that detransition rates have been underestimated.

Psychological and psychiatric care will become the first line of treatment for all gender dysphoric youth <18.
edit: And it's important to note that Sweden was previously one of the most openly trans-friendly countries in the world, so if it's found evidence that encouraging rapid access to hormonal treatments and surgery has not actually been helping youth with severe gender dysphoria, and if that evidence is strong enough to merit rewriting their guidelines, that's incredibly significant. It raises serious questions about the quality of healthcare for people with gender dysphoria in countries that currently promote rapid access to hormones and surgical treatments rather than first doing psychological and psychiatric care.

A lot of the promotion of rushing gender dysphoric youth into medical interventions has been done by both the medical community who profits off it, and the trans community that seeks to normalize and broaden the accessibility of it to those whose transition interests are fetish-driven rather than dysphoria-driven. The same groups are also the ones who are doing a lot of astroturfing on social media and insisting that any critical groups are hard-core right-wingers, something which is patently untrue (though it's true that for people who are socially progressive and left-leaning, there are generally few if any political parties that are both left-leaning and willing to critically examine the trans movement's demands).

I wish I were joking, but because basic medical oversight is labelled as "gatekeeping" nowadays, there's entire web communities of people dedicated to DIY transition and obtaining hormones online at places like https://hrt.cafe/ and https://otokonokopharma.com/ (buy your hormones complete with pictures of anime girls!) And when trans adults promote this to youth as a way for these kids to access transition without their parents' knowledge, yes, that's child grooming. Hormone therapy is serious shit and fucking around with your endocrine system with hormones you bought online can have severe medical consequences. Hormone therapy is absolutely NOT something you can "DIY" and do without medical oversight.

Fortunately, the medical community at least seems like it's starting to re-assess its standards of care.
Last edited by BareKnuckleRoo on Fri May 06, 2022 10:30 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BulletMagnet »

BIL wrote:That does indeed sound like a starkly textbook example of the former. No business is entitled to your money, let alone if you find them disagreeable for whatever reason.
Okay, if this is the case, then what about when the roles are reversed, and a business refuses to serve a customer it finds disagreeable (or simply driving away other customers), i.e. the much-decried Twitter and Facebook bans? At least here in the USA plenty of businesses already display a "we reserve the right to deny service for any reason" disclaimer and have done so for ages, but considering the reaction that the social media bans have elicited, do businesses, or at least some kinds of businesses, have less of a right to choose their customers than their customers have to choose them?
An entirely different kind of social ill, to be sure, but the refusal to so much as acknowledge reality (report it, even) is unmistakable, after a couple decades' this side of the pond.
I must admit that for me this is a particularly difficult subject; on the one hand I like to consider myself a proponent of always reporting the unvarnished truth without embellishment, but at the same time I've had a front row seat, along with everyone else, to how easily "raw" news items, especially headlines without context, can be massaged into something incredibly misleading or outright false ("Al Gore said he invented the internet" comes readily to mind). I've mentioned it here before and it's not an ideal parallel, but one of my most consequential "political coming-of-age" memories is how voicing opposition to the Bush-era Iraq war immediately caused scads of people, with pretty much zero pushback from anywhere within their ranks, to declare me a terrorist sympathizer and hater of freedom itself; experiencing much the same thing anew when encouraging people to get the Covid vaccine has certainly kept the sensation fresh in mind.

As much as I'd love to be able to say "always just give it to us straight, the fact that it's the truth will eventually ensure it all works out", in case every individual human's frustratingly-innate tendency to see what they want to see when looking at the same thing wasn't enough (along with our shameful lack of civics education), unfortunately there are also plenty of people, sometimes very well-compensated ones, simply acting in open and gleeful bad faith...and they in turn have plenty of fans who not only know exactly what they're doing but loudly demand more. As the saying goes, a lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes, so any effective means of resisting the torrent of nonsense is almost certainly going to get uncomfortably close to chipping away at free speech as an institution...though when so much of society has seemingly rejected any desire to follow the truth where it leads anyway, one wonders why anyone would even bother. Certainly not a subject I can even pretend to have sussed out to any meaningful degree.
To bridge my tangent to your point (hopefully! obscenely late here), I think cases of white victims being singled out and preyed upon by non-white offenders should be treated identically to ones in which their racial characteristics are inverted.
I don't think too many people would disagree (though I'm sure a handful do) that when it comes to outright criminal behavior, or anything close to it, neither race nor racial history should be a mitigating factor (i.e. a black person can't use slavery and Jim Crow as the excuse to beat up a random white person); I'm talking more about the sort of situations that could ostensibly lead, not to prosecution, but "cancelling" in some form or another, like the use of racial epithets I used in my examples. To what extent is someone being "singled out and preyed upon" if others treat them differently, albeit without "actively" inflicting harm, when their views elicit offense, and moreover are there cases where the specific race/gender/religion/etc. involved would affect how severe an "acceptable" reaction should be?
Talking helps, I believe. As in, the ability to talk. Take that away and historically, shit happens.
Another point that, taken broadly, I think most people would readily agree with, but I would again suggest that for this to truly serve as part of the solution beyond "yeah, that'd be nice" sentiment the terms, for lack of a better word, do need to be hashed out a bit more deeply; speaking one's mind freely is one thing, but having a productive conversation is a significantly more complex affair, as the goal is not simply to "say your piece" but to both be seriously listened to and seriously listen to others in a concerted attempt to accomplish something beyond "I said it, you heard it, and you couldn't stop me from doing it". I.e. you can say anything you want, but for the sake of whomever you're talking to consciously choose not to speak entirely unfiltered, all the time, with the assumption that your counterpart will return the favor.

Obviously there's a limit to this, lest the conversation devolve into an unending parade of empty pleasantries, but hopefully it's safe to say that a baseline of good faith along the lines of "what I say here, even if disagreeable to you, is not purposely intended to offend or provoke, and I am willing to assume the same of disagreeable things you say to me" certainly helps. Naturally, since both groups and individuals have different notions of where something crosses past "I'm uncomfortable" into "I'm being attacked", just getting there involves a lot of prep work on everyone's part. And yes, treating communication like work can royally suck, but I guess you might say it's the difference between "talk" and "conversation" is the difference between casual and score play; you can't just instinctively react to everything anew every time, you've got to know the route and have a plan. And if you don't consider coming to an understanding with someone else as worth the effort on your part, that's your decision, but don't expect to make any significant contributions to the proverbial leaderboard.
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Ed Oscuro
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by Ed Oscuro »

Roo, the "trans care is youthful to children" argument is not supported by science, period.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dawnstacey ... ans-youth/
It is EXACTLY the opposite of the argument JKR has been peddling. And you should also note there are other studies all finding similar harms for untreated transgender youth, see:
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/trgh.2021.0079
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32345113/

The supposed harms of transition care have so far not been credibly demonstrated to approach the harms of not treating. For what it's worth, I'm personally very intervention-adverse and I think we'd find most medical professionals are going to be conservative when it comes to prescribing treatments, too, out of a concern for a 'false positive' of transgender identification. This doesn't mean that it's not possible for transgender youth to regret transition care, let alone surgery, but I have never found the anti-transitioning advocates to be serious or even honest in measuring up the harms or in providing a plan that is actually credible. In short, if you're against puberty blockers, you're not doing what's proven to be most helpful for transgender youth. Who knows - maybe something different will happen in the future, but we have to deal with an epidemic of transgender mental health problems and even suicides.

A note on JK Rowling: We can explain where bad behavior comes from without excusing it. A trans person asking for a ball wax doesn't make them a man; it makes them bad. I thought everybody knew we were supposed to leave behind that "gays have to be perfect and better than the straights" nonsense. That was half the point of the Stonewall riots: Gay people are just people and don't have to seek out the approval of the Straights. The other half of the riots is that it was about trans rights too: The cops were beating trans people (transvestites, in the lingo of the day, but I think it's clear they weren't all crossdressers) and the gays wanted to show solidarity even though they didn't identify like those people, because it was an outrage. Years later it feels like we got a lot of people talking about hate crimes only because of Matthew Shepard, not Brandon Teena who was murdered earlier.

I was already out of the age bracket for books about magical wizards when the HP books come out, but it's depressing to read shit like "oh, by the way, I've decided that I will throw a crumb for gay representation by declaring that Dumbledore is gay, enjoy the inclusiveness everyone," "I named the token black man Shacklebolt, he is very fond of chains and shackles," "I killed off Tonks because rubbing out all of her unique qualities wasn't enough to stop her for being a nonbinary fan favorite," "magical people are people too, but also it is very good for them to be segregated," "have you ever really thought how good the wizards are to keep magical slaves, because look at them, they are very happy being House Elves, no relation to House Slaves of course!" Ah, yes, the English, loving to talk about how they abolished slavery and not so much about how they spread it with the Empire to begin with. As far as Potter goes, the entire franchise is basically Dickensian - except instead of a tale about good being ground down by evil and triumphing nevertheless after hard work and stalwart friends, it's a story about how you can get ahead at every step by choosing to be born noble. Wait, I born "wizardly." Not at all a story about class, no. Credit where credit's due - I thought "Diagon Alley" was clever, but I am out of patience with her constant trolling in favor of regressive values.

JKR is also not the only victim of the Twitter Hate Economy. There's also some bitter feeling about the way Madison Cawthorn, Congressional Representative from district NC-17, is being punished for his homophobic platform and his apparent hypocrisy. Guess you reap what you sow! But unlike most bad apples, JKR is also distinctly a beneficiary of the Twitter Hate Economy, too, with thousands of accounts that do nothing but swarm JKR-critical accounts for merely disagreeing with her. I think we can take for granted that some of them are lightning rods for death threats too, but as the Trans Critics of JKR are just muggles they don't rate the same concern, do they?

So let's talk about a recent round of Stuff from JKR. She's got some cherry-picked "expert" who is completely at odds with the mainstream of medical science arguing "children will die" if given transition care (i.e., puberty blockers). This is NOT what the research shows, period, and it promotes a dangerous conspiracy theory that will actually promote trans youth suicide, which I think should be taken into consideration when meteing out judgements.

Try and point out that JKR and her 'experts' are wrong, and TERFs - who very much would like to keep men out of issues of female bodily autonomy - boil forth to scold you for questioning why other peoples' bodily autonomy is their choice. Quite a puzzle.
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Ed Oscuro wrote:Roo, the "trans care is youthful [sic] to children" argument is not supported by science, period.
Giving quality healthcare to gender dysphoric individuals is extremely important. I don't think anyone's claimed otherwise. However, it's fair to question what qualifies as quality healthcare. It's safe to say that some dude in Russia writing a wiki guide on how to cook and inject your own estrogen (what the fuck have I stumbled on) does not qualify as quality healthcare.

I wasn't aware that you spoke on behalf of all of Sweden and France's medical community, Ed. Granted, they don't disagree with your premise either; the question is simply about what form of care is helpful to provide. See: France's Académie Nationale de Médecine encouraging caution with respect to hormone use and actively stressing the need for strong psychological care.

Nobody sane would say that denying kids treatment for gender dysphoria isn't harmful, but it's important to review standards of care and make sure the care that's being provided is appropriate and is actually reducing self-harm and suicidality. We do the exact same reviews for standards of care and with other treatment plans for other things like how we treat diseases adjust accordingly as better data and options for treatment become available.
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Ed Oscuro
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by Ed Oscuro »

Well, I went outside, took a walk in the rain, saved a squirmy worm that was trying to inch across the road, and I'm pleased to return and see that this hasn't yet totally devolved into hysterical name-calling and so on.

I'm not sure what that single source is intended to prove, nor the use of trying to pit the American medical establishment against Swedes (who you don't cite) and the French. The only thing in the French statement which raises my eyebrows is the question of identifying youth gender identity. You'll note that the mention of permanent surgery reflects the consensus - I'm not a doctor, but I'm going off what doctors say - that surgery is generally off the table for treating youths.

I'm puzzled about where I went on the record saying that transition care requires this or that specific regimen. I thought I was careful to point out that we don't know what treatments the future may hold, and indeed there are things about current transition care that are less than desirable. It's the nature of the problem and it's a bit dysfunctional to wave away the best options as not being "good enough," as if the TERF alternative, just praying the problem away, is a feasible alternative. Even when faced with a number of invasive and potentially dangerous options, trans youth still demand transition care, and the medical community do not have a better option for them right now. For all their problems, current options help reduce reduce one of the worst outcomes possible, i.e., suicide. JKR, and TERFs in general, seem to argue that in this case the 'cure' is worse than the disease, which is not at all a reasonable takeaway from studies showing horrors like nearly 4/5 of those in a study having suicidal thoughts and more than half having actually attempted suicide. Any discussion that isn't grounded on these realities is just diversion, intentions be damned.

So yeah, any reasonable person knows that there are downsides to transition medical care. And it is an indictment of our medical system that people can't get access to hormones if they are the best option, just as the loss of abortion care rights are a calamity, just as it's an incredible disaster that people are dying rationing insulin. All very bad things! But conversion therapy doesn't seem to work, nor does 'just give trans kids no care and they'll grow out of it.'

I mean, have you ever seen the Ex-Gay videos where unconvincing dudes claim to have been cured of the gay? It's hard to watch them and not feel sadness, bemusement, a bit angry, at least as far as I'm concerned. "Wait it out" is more of the same but you'll bet there are some enterprising entrepreneurs ready to peddle their own forms of Ex-Gay: Trans Edition for low, low charges.

The key thing to note here is that a big part of what's driving this are essentialist or innate characteristics philosophies, which are more or less theology. I don't claim people are wrong to their feelings but that there's limits on how much they get to determine what another person gets to do in order to make their own decisions.
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by Durandal »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote:
Durandal wrote:I don't really think that "you must have sex with us" is the main takeaway or intent here
Unfortunately, you are wrong. Laying the groundwork so that lesbians can be guilt-tripped and shamed into having sex with heterosexual males is entirely the point here. The people who've made comparisons of this to incel culture are not off the mark here. Here is the iconic Magdalen Berns responding to a heterosexual male insisting that lesbians who reject him are bigots, and laying out why he's full of shit.
As I said before, many trans lesbians already have sex with other trans lesbians with whom they are already in a long-term relationship with, so what do they stand to gain from shaming cis women into having sex with them? My guess: they're not comfortable with trans-exclusionary rhetoric being normalized because it inflames trans discrimination and legal oppression that is very much happening right now, much in the same way that people against public racial preferences in dating do so because they don't want that rhetoric be normalized, not because they want to shame the other into having sex with them. What is generally meant here is not "have sex with me", but rather that you shouldn't put up a big sign saying "no blacks/transies/French/Martians allowed" on your Grindr page. Of course there's nothing stopping you from rejecting said people in private for some other (made-up) reason, but that's kind of the point: "don't go about those preferences publicly, else you'll end up normalizing it, at which point it becomes other people's problem."
And before anyone tries to pull the "Respect her pronouns!" card; sorry, but no. Regardless of what identity he may claim, people are under no obligation to respect the desired pronouns and engage in gaslighting when they are discussing someone who is acting as an abuser.
Shitheels taken to court cynically hiding behind civil rights issues is not new (see: the OJ Simpson trial), nor does it automatically make the civil rights issues in question automatically less valid. Intentionally disrespecting one's given pronouns for the pure sake of hurting and demeaning them doesn't hurt (even if deserved) only your abuser, but also everyone else of that group--including both your loathed autogynephiles and those suffering from crippling gender dysphoria, because it reinforces a rather uncomfortable precedent that one's tolerance for the group is a mere privilege that can be revoked at any time--that a little bit of otherization is always justified in some situations, like a sword always hanging above your neck, ready to plunge once you've outlived your welcome. Just because you're a victim of a black abuser doesn't automatically entitle you to a free N-word pass either, so why would this be any different? People can sympathize if you feel some reluctance to engage with a minority group your abuser was part of, but that sympathy runs out once you start judging the entire group for the sins of your abuser. The English vocabulary has a thousand other free-to-use insults that do not involve the otherization of entire minorities--there's no need to go for the nuclear button. If, as you say, you truly do care some degree for "trans people who suffer from crippling gender dysphoria and are not necessarily autogynephilic", should you really be fine with letting misgendering be a standard practice?
BareKnuckleRoo wrote: However, there are a lot of autogynephiles who get off on the idea of being in a woman's space and being begrudgingly tolerated, which they see as providing them with validation. We know this, because they are talking about this online in public spaces where it can be documented. This gives them a sexual gratification, which the community often refers to by sanitized terms such as "euphoria" or "validating". I do not think women need to feel as though they just have to shut up and accept that their presence is being used for someone else's sexual fetishism, because even if they're not being physically touched or spoken to, their presence is still being used and demanded as part of the performance. That's extremely fucking rape-y. And since not every place has single stall, private bathrooms, it's not something a woman can necessarily opt-out of.
This only makes sense if you operate off the assumption that the grand majority of trans women are autogynephiles (in the Blanchardian paraphilic sense, for that matter) and should be judged as such. However, I haven't seen you or anyone else even try to prove that this is the case, because we're talking what's going on inside the heads (or the reddit post histories) of a rather not insignificant part of the population, and as far as I can till mindreaders do not exist yet. A lot of other problematic subgroups exist in other larger groups, but it would be intellectually dishonest to paint the larger group under a broad brush of the problematic subgroup until it can be proven that the problematic subgroup is highly representative of the larger group. Which is not what I'm seeing here (other than that a lot of trans people hate J.K. Rowling).
BareKnuckleRoo wrote: I also recognize this is a difficult and thorny issue because there are trans people who suffer from crippling gender dysphoria and are not necessarily autogynephilic who will be negatively affected by discussions about this.
Have you never considered that it's pushing this Blanchardian idea of autogynephilia that's in part what's causing the crippling gender dysphoria? I implore you to lurk on 4chan's /lgbt/ board for a while and see for yourself the self-hatred and brainworms that comes when people conclude that their identity is a mere sexual fetish and regard it with shame rather than validation; the image of Yaniv and the AGP (or the "hon", to use local slang) living rent-free in their head, forever going "this is you, this is what everyone else thinks you look like".
BIL wrote: This isn't just about trans athletes, unfortunately. If you are a man who wants to best women in feats of physical prowess, you will be looked at askance by most. If you want to outright beat them into submission, you'll be regarded with outright disgust by same. Is it the dread hand of PATRIARCHY at work? Or is it some evolutionary adaptation, to ensure females are kept suitably un-bludgeoned and in pristine breeding/child-rearing order? Either way, The Science™ is currently nowhere remotely consistent enough to mitigate the ugly reality of sexual dimorphism.
True enough, the presence of trans athletes in women's sports that rely a lot on physical strikes is rather hard to sell. Bone density is what it is. Cis women would be at increased risk of physical injury, and trans women are unlikely to find many willing opponents precisely because of that. It's an arrangement that benefits nobody. For grappling-heavy martial arts sports, and other sports that do not involve physically beating eachother into submission, this is (hopefully) less of an issue, so I hope The Public Discourse on trans athletes in general doesn't get fixated on solely what's happening in strike-heavy martial arts.
Xyga wrote:
chum wrote:the thing is that we actually go way back and have known each other on multiple websites, first clashing in a Naruto forum.
Liar. I've known you only from latexmachomen.com and pantysniffers.org forums.
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Ed Oscuro wrote:I'm not sure what that single source is intended to prove, nor the use of trying to pit the American medical establishment against Swedes (who you don't cite) and the French.
How many times do I have to keep reposting the same things for people who apparently can't read the things I've quoted from?

I'm done with this thread.
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by Ed Oscuro »

Roo, There is a simple explanation for that: I got Swedes and French confused. I'm sorry.

An easy way to avoid such things happening is not to refer to two viewpoints and only cite one of them, because I previously had no idea about the specifics of these viewpoints and I am not very keen to take talking points for granted when they're invoked vaguely. Speaking of not reading things, you could have noticed that I specifically say "The only thing in the French statement which raises my eyebrows..." which should have been a clear sign I actually did try to read and respond to what you had actually linked in good faith. Additionally, I wrote "Swedes (who you don't cite) and the French," which normally isn't read as "neither Swedes nor French were cited."

Boundless apologies and platonic kisses all around! Can we all still get along?

I hope this doesn't come off as mean, but really now :)
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BIL »

BulletMagnet wrote:considering the reaction that the social media bans have elicited, do businesses, or at least some kinds of businesses, have less of a right to choose their customers than their customers have to choose them?
I wouldn't say so, no. I often half-jokingly attach apologies to master BLOODF in my raunchier posts. I've only had a tiny percentage of messages deleted here over the years, typically while participating in arrantly shitty threads (I seem to recall posting something about Scooby and Shaggy dying tragically in a backyard jenkem laboratory explosion, which also cost Fred an eye). Still, if he gave you orders to disappear me and my posts off the site 4EVER, that's that. It's his joint.

I don't use Twitter beyond keeping up with a handful of favourite devs, who typically post exclusively in Japanese, which I am illiterate in. I don't use Facebook or Instagram or any other service at all. So I can't really empathise with someone like Nick Fuentes, who openly grieved the loss of his Twitter account. But as long as it's a business, and they've not violated constitutional/statutory protections (IIRC he was not banned for being Mexican or gay), they can chuck you out on your ass for whatever, as far as I'm concerned.

I do like the argument of treating these services more akin to utilities, ala the telephone. Ugly reality of the world, that more and more people genuinely need their twatters or fannybooks or whatever, for Business Reasons. If they'd taken away Trump's phone along with his Twitter account, I'd think that was fucked. (I'm not a Trumper, I hasten to add. he's just an easy example)
An entirely different kind of social ill, to be sure, but the refusal to so much as acknowledge reality (report it, even) is unmistakable, after a couple decades' this side of the pond.
I must admit that for me this is a particularly difficult subject; on the one hand I like to consider myself a proponent of always reporting the unvarnished truth without embellishment, but at the same time I've had a front row seat, along with everyone else, to how easily "raw" news items, especially headlines without context, can be massaged into something incredibly misleading or outright false ("Al Gore said he invented the internet" comes readily to mind). I've mentioned it here before and it's not an ideal parallel, but one of my most consequential "political coming-of-age" memories is how voicing opposition to the Bush-era Iraq war immediately caused scads of people, with pretty much zero pushback from anywhere within their ranks, to declare me a terrorist sympathizer and hater of freedom itself; experiencing much the same thing anew when encouraging people to get the Covid vaccine has certainly kept the sensation fresh in mind.
The 2003 Iraq invasion and its disgraceful aftermath, precisely. It was more or less the same in England, with local soulless ghoul Tony "Yo" Blair serving as GW's gurning cheerleader/catamite. Reams and reams of confected bullshit, and a million-plus dead Iraqi civilians. Great job. And people wonder why Biden's Super Real Truth Ratings Board isn't being greeted all that warmly, with that cunt one of several dozen heads conspicuously lacking a pike.
As much as I'd love to be able to say "always just give it to us straight, the fact that it's the truth will eventually ensure it all works out", in case every individual human's frustratingly-innate tendency to see what they want to see when looking at the same thing wasn't enough (along with our shameful lack of civics education), unfortunately there are also plenty of people, sometimes very well-compensated ones, simply acting in open and gleeful bad faith...and they in turn have plenty of fans who not only know exactly what they're doing but loudly demand more. As the saying goes, a lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes, so any effective means of resisting the torrent of nonsense is almost certainly going to get uncomfortably close to chipping away at free speech as an institution...though when so much of society has seemingly rejected any desire to follow the truth where it leads anyway, one wonders why anyone would even bother. Certainly not a subject I can even pretend to have sussed out to any meaningful degree.
Incomplete data and rancorously differing takes are inevitable, just part of the human condition. It's the outright lies (of omission or otherwise) and their purveyors that can and should be fastidiously nailed to the wall.

I realise it may sound ridiculous, but I don't distinguish between Juicy Smouliet's faked hate crime, and the Blair/Bush alliance's faked WMDs. To me they're the same malady - politically unassailable liars pissing on my shoes and telling me it's raining - just on differing scales.
To bridge my tangent to your point (hopefully! obscenely late here), I think cases of white victims being singled out and preyed upon by non-white offenders should be treated identically to ones in which their racial characteristics are inverted.
I don't think too many people would disagree (though I'm sure a handful do) that when it comes to outright criminal behavior, or anything close to it, neither race nor racial history should be a mitigating factor (i.e. a black person can't use slavery and Jim Crow as the excuse to beat up a random white person);
Some do indeed. (hideous)
I'm talking more about the sort of situations that could ostensibly lead, not to prosecution, but "cancelling" in some form or another, like the use of racial epithets I used in my examples. To what extent is someone being "singled out and preyed upon" if others treat them differently, albeit without "actively" inflicting harm, when their views elicit offense, and moreover are there cases where the specific race/gender/religion/etc. involved would affect how severe an "acceptable" reaction should be?
I think the notion of some racially-motivated attacks being less actionable than others is inherently unjust. As far as I'm concerned, the principle here is not the amount of damage done by Bigot X versus Bigot Y. Both are cunts.

This racist apologia came up last year. I've not changed my opinion on the author. I think she and her ilk are myopic fools.
hopefully it's safe to say that a baseline of good faith along the lines of "what I say here, even if disagreeable to you, is not purposely intended to offend or provoke, and I am willing to assume the same of disagreeable things you say to me" certainly helps. Naturally, since both groups and individuals have different notions of where something crosses past "I'm uncomfortable" into "I'm being attacked", just getting there involves a lot of prep work on everyone's part. And yes, treating communication like work can royally suck, but I guess you might say it's the difference between "talk" and "conversation" is the difference between casual and score play; you can't just instinctively react to everything anew every time, you've got to know the route and have a plan. And if you don't consider coming to an understanding with someone else as worth the effort on your part, that's your decision, but don't expect to make any significant contributions to the proverbial leaderboard.
Certainly, humiliity and a baseline level of knowledge are fundamental to non-shit discussions of any sort. Again though, this is why I despair at notions of legally enforcing (almost typed Lethally Enforcing, bwaaa it's late again Image) such standards. It sounds like a rather difficult line to walk... how to distinguish the merely mistaken from the maliciously untruthful? That's a fundamental problem of online discourse.

I'm sure you're aware of those who say social media is an innately malignant thing, roughly along these lines. Maybe it is? \(O_O)/ I never truly thought so until now. It really is a potent vector for humanity's insatiable tribalism.

Some dark shit bro. Image
Durandal wrote:
BIL wrote:This isn't just about trans athletes, unfortunately. If you are a man who wants to best women in feats of physical prowess, you will be looked at askance by most. If you want to outright beat them into submission, you'll be regarded with outright disgust by same. Is it the dread hand of PATRIARCHY at work? Or is it some evolutionary adaptation, to ensure females are kept suitably un-bludgeoned and in pristine breeding/child-rearing order? Either way, The Science™ is currently nowhere remotely consistent enough to mitigate the ugly reality of sexual dimorphism.
True enough, the presence of trans athletes in women's sports that rely a lot on physical strikes is rather hard to sell. Bone density is what it is. Cis women would be at increased risk of physical injury, and trans women are unlikely to find many willing opponents precisely because of that. It's an arrangement that benefits nobody. For grappling-heavy martial arts sports, and other sports that do not involve physically beating eachother into submission, this is (hopefully) less of an issue, so I hope The Public Discourse on trans athletes in general doesn't get fixated on solely what's happening in strike-heavy martial arts.
I should stress, 99% of my interest in this subject concerns full-contact or combat sports. Things like swimming, cycling, weightlifting... I still think it's shameful to force females to compete with males, but then this world is full of disgrace. As you say, endangering life and limb is a different matter.

(if anyone thinks I'm being patriarchal here: you're quite correct. women are shit at fighting, and shit at sports. it's why we wall them off into their own little sections, which don't attract a fraction of the audience or profits their male counterparts do. however, women are incomparably excellent at other things, like homemaking and child-rearing and giving me boners, so don't have a big cry over it, ok. how do you think male porn stars feel? Image)
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by Mischief Maker »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote:You mean other than the specific examples I've already provided?
I... thought these were flavor text, not the actual arguments. There's so little here:
BareKnuckleRoo wrote:On a related note, the same groups that target [JK Rowling] also find it fashionable nowadays for homosexuality to be cancelled. This specifically happens to lesbians [as in females who are same-sex attracted], who are told that their same sex attraction is insufficiently inclusive and therefore bigoted.
That's it? A twitter hashtag?

Let's do a thought experiment. Black men on twitter are complaining about white women who have a blanket refusal to date black men. They say it's racist to turn down all black men as a category. Stormfront gathers giant collages of tweets to insinuate that black men are saying white women are obligated to sleep with black men whether they want to or not.

Twitter is a giant pillow that people collectively scream into because we don't have universal access to therapy. People frustrated with their love lives posting whiney cringey shit is nothing new. Your mountain is a mole hill.
seriously, stop acting like I didn't already give you examples wrote:Morgane's exploits include defunding a women's rape shelter for strictly being for those of the female sex. Considering that there are numerous reports out there of men self-identifying their way into women's prisons and then raping the women in those prisons, Vancouver Rape Relief seems well justified in providing sex-based services [as in to those of the female sex] (and does indeed provide them to women who identify as trans men).
Were all the cis female sex workers the shelter was also excluding going to rape the other cis women?

Also do you not think trans women get raped?

It wasn't a total defunding, just the 30K from the city out of their 1.1 million annual budget, and the city gave the shelter a one-year grace period to make whatever changes were necessary to accommodate sex workers and trans women and keep the funding. The shelter chose TERF and SWERFdom over women. There are other shelters in Vancouver that don't put bigotry above helping women.
BareKnuckleRoo wrote:I'm also not going to dignify your gross mischaracterizations of Bailey's writings with a response. I seriously doubt this is your field of study/expertise, and people can read his writings as I've previously linked and decide for themselves.
From "The Man Who Would be Queen"
Bailey wrote:I start upstairs to get the panoramic view and I see Kim for the first time, on the stairs, dancing, posing. She is spectacular, exotic (I find out later that she is from Belize), and sexy. Her body is incredibly curvaceous, which is a clue that it may not be natural. And I notice a very subtle and not-unattractive angularity of the face, which is also not clearly diagnostic on this tall siren. It is difficult to avoid viewing Kim from two perspectives: as a researcher but also as a single, heterosexual man.
Ironic that this is referred to as "soft science" because professor fuck-saw definitely wasn't!
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by orange808 »

Ah yes. A subject that doesn't involve you and won't cost you anything. Perfect! So much engagement when there's no theat of sacrifice. :lol: Culture wars are such fun!

Letting someone else be isn't complicated, but debating the difficulty of (literally) doing nothing sure is a great distraction. The entire political spectrum thanks you for playing in this mudhole.
We apologise for the inconvenience
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BIL »

Regrettably, we have arrived at a point where being female, or having female relatives, or simply having children at all exposes the average first world Westerner to a spectrum of insanity ranging from trivial public shaming to outright professional ruin.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/201 ... der-prison

Point out the cock on the convicted rapist airdropped into a women's prison, or the hulking bone structure of the "woman" cracking her opponent's skull open like so much battered wife, or merely opine that Baby Bunny Boy Finds His Prostate may not be the best reading material for preschoolers, and whoops! Mudholed.

It's a little different in the third world, which tends to be atrociously homophobic, and in thrall to oldschool fire n' brimstone Christendom. Ultraviolence & Religion, goes together like a match and friction. Still, I was dreadfully amused to see emissaries from our famously estranged Mother Country try it on in wealthier, safer parts of my gaff. The lesson learned was that while West Indian people removed from poverty and gang warfare tend to be an easygoing lot, they're no less intractable than their ghetto bredrens re: not teaching eight year-olds how to beat off.

Unbrutalised women and unsexualised children, a faraway dream. :/

The entire political spectrum can choke to death on my cock - please convey this to them however you see fit, orange. Image
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by Mischief Maker »

BIL wrote:Regrettably, we have arrived at a point where being female, or having female relatives, or simply having children at all exposes the average first world Westerner to a spectrum of insanity ranging from trivial public shaming to outright professional ruin.
...insanity...

Image

...insanity...
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BIL »

Bingo. Image Can you imagine a bunch of middle-aged white women getting together for wine o'clock being reported on with such breathless horror at any other point in our lifetimes?

"A boozy TERF lunch," shudders the organ that brought you (and subsequently denied all knowledge of) Todd Nickerson, the Virtuous Pedophile.

But I think I'll photoshop that picture with the faces of women like the ones who were locked up with and subsequently raped by Karen White, and the 15y/o girl raped in the bathroom in Loudon County, and maybe a few of Rotherham's forsaken daughters, passed around as halal meat by The Rape Gangs Who Must Not Be Named, aaand... shit. Just three merciless indulgences of masculine depravity upon helpless females - children, mostly - at the altar of Woke, and I'm already out of places.

:idea:

I suppose I can google "women luncheon; more in attendance.jpg," to fit in all those other test cases that our Right Side Of History™ have so charmingly laughed off. Haha, no, I know. It wouldn't matter how many have their dignity ripped away, would it? Not when it's all for such a very good cause.
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by Ed Oscuro »

I personally think we should just protect people against bad people. Republicans aren't precogs and we don't have a future crimes division. This is just more in the realm of racial profiling - point out a few bad apples and use it to set back the rights of all people we don't like. Sideline: The Russian President's recent rhetoric against "cancel culture" and trans ideology does little to paper over the reality that Russia is still one of the worst places in the world for preventing and prosecuting child abuse - and I don't think it is the trans people are likely to be the worst offenders. When you spend all your time worrying about what the sky fairy thinks or your legacy it is easy to miss the bread-and-butter questions of daily life, and that seems to me the direction the radical right is heading in here in the US, too. The whole genesis of the American right-wing agenda (and the anti-ERA movement before it) was just a campaign by professional activists to keep their fundraising going. Phyllis Schafly wasn't the only archetype of this; there's plenty of guys on our K street who knew (and know) the libs are right on some issues but it pays to whip up the base.

Alright, you say - but what about protecting the girls from the boys in full contact sports?

Tennessee's Republican lawmakers recently were embarrassed when it turns out they didn't think through the consequences of their own transgender youth sports ban, which ended up protecting high schoolers from, er. female-to-male trans youth participation on the boy's golf club. My God, that could have been a bloodbath! And one of the TN legislators had the audacity to say "gee, never thought that would happen." No, these people never let reason get the better of their emotions when drafting laws with sweeping consequences.

OK, but how about protecting the girls from the boys in full contact-sports? Juxtapose two articles from Texas:
Exhibit A: Texas lawmakers ban trans youth participation in sports
Exhibit B: A positive article on girls playing on the boys' football team

I've noticed an uptick in articles (universally positive) specifically about girls playing on boys' football teams, to the point it's a genre! It seems that the Texas lawmakers did not think to ban this willing participation by the girls, so the argument is reduced to a question of consent from the rest of the team. In the case of the boys on the football team:
The male players are inclusive, but Mia concedes there are natural differences. “They’re accepting and supportive, but they’re also teenage guys, so I think it’s kind of weird for them at times,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to relate to some of the guys, but at the end of the day it’s just sports.”
To be honest, if an opponent decides not to tackle quite as hard because it could be a girl...that probably is all for the better because TBIs are a real problem.
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BIL »

I grew up with a few girls who played on our youth football ("soccer") teams. One went on to do very well at CARIFTA in the long jump. I don't think this is very comparable, though. If girls and women elect to get on the field or even in the ring with men, and are able to perform... I admittedly don't think it's a very smart idea, and tbh, I suspect you and I and 99.1% of other men would encounter an ingrained reluctance to assail a woman as we would a fellow male competitor. In my rueful observations, it takes pathogens like blinding rage, and inebriation, and sometimes just pure (and thankfully uncommon) depravity to override that. Not the elements of a healthy competitive environment. Maybe I'm wrong.

Regardless, the risk of bodily harm that comes with challenging those generally bigger and stronger than oneself is being taken on willingly. It's not the same as forcing it on a bunch of unsuspecting girls.
"The government and Greg Abbott think that I’m good because of how I was born, but really, I’m good because I know how to do the form, and I’m good because I practice my ass off," said Julia, a transgender girl who attends high school in Central Texas and has requested to use a pseudonym and remain anonymous to protect her privacy.
During the offseason, Julia said she’s been practicing by running around her neighborhood and sometimes going to her school’s track. Her coaches have applauded her talent, she said, but she’s made it clear to them that the only team she feels comfortable being a part of and competing with is the girls track team.

“I don’t see it as a ‘me’ problem. I see it as other people’s problem,” she said of the Texas law. “I kind of accepted that I’m not gonna be able to [compete]. I kind of just deal with it. I mean, it sucks, but that’s kind of the harsh reality.”
"Force" is unfortunately always going to be deciding factor for me, and I'm pretty comfortable assuming most people of all political persuasions. It honestly hadn't occurred to me to look at these matters in partisan terms. Sexual dimorphism leaving women and girls with a specific set of disadvantages and vulnerabilities opposite men is a pretty key human constant, I would've thought.

I've my own misgivings about a character like Fallon Fox, a nobody who snuck into women's MMA competition undeclared, and later enthused openly of the thrill he felt cracking Tamikka Brent's skull ("Just so you know, I enjoyed it"). Regardless, taking all these ugly details away wouldn't change my opinion.

Much the same of prisons and outright sexual predators. Monstering trans people isn't helpful. Neither is absolving them. That should go without saying, I hope. Phillip Garrido, Ariel Castro, Josef Fritzl, they're my triple crown of predatory depravity, and they're all garden-variety heterosexual men.

ANECDOTE CORNER: My head exploded, again, a couple years ago. Woke up blind in one eye, couldn't keep down so much as a small cup of water, rushed to hospital for a week on the moon courtesy of the highest-grade taxpayer-funded Ching Chong Chinaman Charlie.

Was like heaven. Near-empty ward, dead silent 95% of time, virtually a private suite with my bed in a corner nook behind the nurse's station. Slept and slept. Can only vaguely recall being wheeled about for tests, and Nice Ol' Granny feeling up my ass now and then ("We've been sued before," she said apologetically in her lovely Nigerian lilt - for unnoticed bedsores, that is, not arrant sexual assault of the semi-cognisant).

Last day, woke up in hell. :shock: Packed ward, SURROUNDED by televisions blaring a diabolical mix of feature films and local news, and yet worse: old men coughing, farting, and for the coup de sade: shitting out a torrent of corn-ridden liquid faeces. (a warning klaxon sounded as the cleanup crew rushed in, I was amused to note even in my great annoyance. dude that's shmuppin as fuck!)

"What is this place?" I asked Nice Ol' Granny, when she dutifully materialised. "Well, they converted your ward into women's-only, so we had to move you." "Oh right" I said, and quickly made arrangements to leave, because I felt better, and just like fifteen years ago, the diagnosis was "IUNNO ROFL, EAT DEEZE IBUPROFENS." Also, the elderly man's shit had smelled bad, and despite the cleanup crew's fine work, the disinfectant was only reminding me of it. :[

Sorry for indulging like this old buddy! My point is, like the majority of civilised males, I'm a nice cat. I won't rape you or your womenfolk. Or anyone. Gimme 24hrs to live, imma find a rapist and do Kill List IRL. But as relative strangers, you'll never know if any of that is true or false, until it's all academic. And as usual in our harshly dimorphic species, force is grotesquely on my side. I'd move me out of a women's-only ward too, every time.

Maybe I've seen too much atrocious shit and become calloused. Or hypersensitised. It's possible. I think a man has to put up with shit sometimes, because women and children are pitiful things, and life is abjectly pitiless. That's the best I can do with my animal brain clouded by delusions of morality.

Hopefully I've not monstered myself too badly here Ed, you know I rove u even if I do internet war crime. 3; My head will asplode for good soon enough anyway, probably. :o
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BulletMagnet »

I do like the argument of treating these services more akin to utilities, ala the telephone.
Getting slightly off topic here, but in any event before we get to that point I'd posit we'd need to first seriously discuss treating internet access itself as a utility, which at least here in the US is a lost cause for the moment, since ISPs can legally carve up the country into their own personal fiefdoms so they don't even have to compete with each other (and the free-market diehards, naturally, obediently keep their big greasy traps shut).
Incomplete data and rancorously differing takes are inevitable, just part of the human condition. It's the outright lies (of omission or otherwise) and their purveyors that can and should be fastidiously nailed to the wall.
Methinks this is about as perfect a poster child as there is for yet another of my "figuring out where exactly the line between the two exists is a tough nut to crack" statements, especially since intent is so frequently part of the equation; as you posit later on in your reply, did he intentionally lie or unintentionally misinform?
I think the notion of some racially-motivated attacks being less actionable than others is inherently unjust.
Again, though, I'm having trouble nailing down precisely what you'd consider an "attack", as well as what manner of motivators might end up in the same category as "racially motivated" (politics? social stances? preferred ice cream flavor?); as I said, almost everyone would agree that something blatantly violent or otherwise criminal should be treated the same no matter who does it, but the events that most inevitably get the "cancel culture" folks howling are the ones that stop short of that point, and moreover have the peanut gallery frequently calling for precisely the sort of governmental intervention ("free speech protections") that you're so leery of.

You commented directly on my theoretical "customers leave, store closes" scenario and related buyer-seller items, but I'm more curious what you think about, I suppose you could call them "citizen to citizen" interactions that pop up when "divisive" issues rear their heads in any group of people: you've previously expressed disdain for digging up similar past comments in an effort to "paint a more complete picture" of someone who makes a "controversial" statement, which itself demands a number of mitigating factors be applied (were those statements part of the public record? Is appropriate context cited, or even available? Has the person been asked to respond?) but what about simply spreading word of the single recent thing they said to others and stopping there? Or just refusing to personally socialize with someone on account of it, is that an "attack"? Is organizing a (non-violent, in case I need to say it) protest against a local official? And that's before you even get into the digital realm.

This is the sort of stuff that really gets the "lynch mob" crowd's knickers in a twist, arguably even moreso than anything involving a corporation and/or famous figure, and where the guiding principles of those sounding the alarm strike me as decidedly murkiest.
I'm sure you're aware of those who say social media is an innately malignant thing, roughly along these lines. Maybe it is?
Speaking as a non-user, I tend to consider it as largely akin to the internet, television, the printing press, and spoken language that came before it; a way to spread ideas quicker and wider than before, which can be most readily exploited by those with bad ends until everyone else learns, hopefully sooner than later, to wise up.
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BIL »

BulletMagnet wrote:
I do like the argument of treating these services more akin to utilities, ala the telephone.
Getting slightly off topic here, but in any event before we get to that point I'd posit we'd need to first seriously discuss treating internet access itself as a utility...
Pretty much, yeah. I think we reached that point a while ago, in the West. I know my bank, my power/water companies, and lately my doctor all blithely assume I have 24hr internet access complete with smartphone. I only acquired the latter because I was worried the atrocious telephone wait times at my GP might cost someone their life in an emergency.
I think the notion of some racially-motivated attacks being less actionable than others is inherently unjust.
Again, though, I'm having trouble nailing down precisely what you'd consider an "attack", as well as what manner of motivators might end up in the same category as "racially motivated" (politics? social stances? preferred ice cream flavor?); as I said, almost everyone would agree that something blatantly violent or otherwise criminal should be treated the same no matter who does it, but the events that most inevitably get the "cancel culture" folks howling are the ones that stop short of that point, and moreover have the peanut gallery frequently calling for precisely the sort of governmental intervention ("free speech protections") that you're so leery of.

You commented directly on my theoretical "customers leave, store closes" scenario and related buyer-seller items, but I'm more curious what you think about, I suppose you could call them "citizen to citizen" interactions that pop up when "divisive" issues rear their heads in any group of people: you've previously expressed disdain for digging up similar past comments in an effort to "paint a more complete picture" of someone who makes a "controversial" statement, which itself demands a number of mitigating factors be applied (were those statements part of the public record? Is appropriate context cited, or even available? Has the person been asked to respond?)
The Rogan thing? It wasn't the assembling of an "N-Word reel" in itself that I had a problem with. Historical records are there to be referenced. My issue was the blatant stripping away of context, turning an objective record ("Joe Rogan doesn't self-censor when quoting racial slurs, a controversial anomaly among popular broadcasters") into the usual faux-puritanical cancel brickbat ("Joe Rogan loves saying racial slurs! He's a racist! Cancel his contract, Spotify!")

I didn't watch the reprisal Biden/TYT reels that followed and exclaim "Whoaaa Nelly! These Democrat people really hate the coloured folks!" The entire point was that brickbatting public figures is easy when you sandblast all context off of their meticulously catalogued words.

Celebrity smear campaigns are nothing new, obviously. Their extension to private citizens via social media kinda is, though:
but what about simply spreading word of the single recent thing they said to others and stopping there? Or just refusing to personally socialize with someone on account of it, is that an "attack"?
The NY Times may prove useful here, with their breathily admiring tale of the "reckoning" visited upon a since-excluded college freshman for saying something dumb four years prior, when she was fifteen. Did the college have the right to rescind their offer? Yeah, sure. As I said a few posts back, they're a business. They can choose their clientele as they see fit, within Constitutional/statutory limits.

Does this story stink of petty vindictiveness dressed up in tacky faux-puritanical raiment? Yeah, I think so. Society is surely better-off with a young adult's future irreparably damaged! Black Lives Matter, mirite. What's that? No, we don't talk about the catastrophic damage to black neighborhoods, or the spiralling rates of black-on-black murder post-2020. Golly gee, that would be racist. Such humanity, such principle. Almost like it's all just masturbatory panto performed behind the comfy barrier of a sweatshop-manufactured phone screen.

Do I think some legal protections need to be put in place here, for the next batch of Mimis who commit the mortal sin of blurting something ill-advised into their phones while fifteen years old? Again, no. I don't see how you could, without fundamentally damaging Western society as we know it.

This appears to be an ugly hysteria society will have to mature out of, assuming it doesn't collapse beforehand. Maybe if enough of the right people are turned on and devoured (RIP Ethan Klein's sponsorship), perspective will return. Sad but precedented. You are probably aware of how the Salem Witch Trials were resolved, with the accusation of the governor's wife.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9jCpUMUezzY <-- Microcosmic. Image Virtue masturbation gone real.
Is organizing a (non-violent, in case I need to say it) protest against a local official? And that's before you even get into the digital realm.
Again, that all sounds fine to me. People can and should peacefully voice their opposition to whoever and whatever they see fit.

The line is crossed when controversial figures are outright silenced. This frequently means "going after someone's money," as seen in the attempts on Rogan's platform, or on a smaller but no less illustrative scale, America First's policy of DMCAing critics off of Youtube - the objective being to destroy their channel and ideally livelihood - or, at the very least, bog them down in court, should they contest the claim.

At the extreme end, you of course have cases like Theo Van Gogh and Samuel Paty, both butchered in the street because they said something some religious extremist didn't like. It's all part of the same continuum.
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by Mischief Maker »

Within days of the Roe cancellation leak, Republicans are calling for repeal of gay marriage, civil rights, even the legality of condoms and other birth control.
George Orwell's 1984 wrote:There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.
This is why the struggle for liberation must be universal. Even if you personally think trans people are weird, gay people are icky , black people are scary, and women are bitches, you still have an entirely selfish motive to protect universal rights because they'll come for you next.

Image
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BulletMagnet »

BIL wrote:The line is crossed when controversial figures are outright silenced. This frequently means "going after someone's money," as seen in the attempts on Rogan's platform
I feel like I'm missing some nuance or other here, since you stated earlier that my hypothetical example of a business owner being forced to close because a bunch of his customers left in response to a stance he took was legit; to offer another "what if", say we crossed over into a universe where enough listeners had abandoned Rogan because of his spreading of Covid misinformation (hopefully we can agree to set aside the racial slur distraction) that Spotify was forced to can him? As with the hypothetical owner, he'd still be perfectly free to say what he wants, though he'd have suffered consequences, albeit, importantly, not at the hands of the government, for doing so; why would his case merit any more attention, let alone alarm, than the one I made up?

It remains quite unclear to me, I suppose, as to at what point others' reaction to what someone says or does cross over into "attack" territory, let alone how it's truly even possible to "silence" somebody by openly disapproving of their actions.
At the extreme end, you of course have cases like Theo Van Gogh and Samuel Paty, both butchered in the street because they said something some religious extremist didn't like. It's all part of the same continuum.
This I find difficult to get on board with, truth be told, in part because, as stated above, I'm not exactly sure how, short of the violent acts you describe here, someone can be "silenced" by the disapproval of others while their right to free speech as a citizen remains intact. Calling for someone to be "deplatformed" or whatever term you'd like to use simply doesn't strike me as the same sort of malice and disregard for others as being willing to physically attack somebody.
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by Ed Oscuro »

Newest on the Cancel Culture thread: The air show over Moscow's Victory Day Parade. https://t.co/Hm0tnZWjQW

Shorter me @ BIL: Yes, I am not counting out the question of consent (or "force" and "unsuspecting" but honestly, everybody on the team knows who is trans). My point's that this is not what the culture warriors really seem to care about, since their laws miss banning consented but possibly still harmful girls-boys sports competition, while banning harmless competition like trans boy/boy golfing. Even giving the pro-ban cause the benefit of the doubt it's clear that the balance of interests isn't at all right. Trans kids get excluded from every normal growing-up sports experience, other people get subject to increasingly invasive and needless scrutiny (like the satanic panic and "doctors" touching kids to "prove" they'd been molested).

On the subject of social media, here's Elon Musk advocating the Saudi Arabian and Chinese governments get veto power over Twitter:
https://twitter.com/WillOremus/status/1 ... 0135160832

...at the same time he's been looking to traipse into the Facebook-like field of letting the PR and policy people actually determine how the rules play out, rather than just get input into the process of crafting policies.
https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1 ... 2276690945

Twitter's rule enforcer is a card-carrying ACLU member who heavily resisted Trump getting booted from the platform. She's not anti-free-speech, and indeed Twitter has done a lot better than Facebook by flagging things: Trump's lies got curtained by a message letting you click through to see them if you wanted. Affiliates and agents of foreign governments get flagged as such but they still get to say their piece in many cases. So, what it looks like is gunna happen is Elon is going to say "shit on all that" and just throw everything open to disinformation all the time without even guideposts, be it about TSLA financials, Trump's conspiracy theories, Saudi airbrushing of journalist murder and terrorism links, etc.

And it is very important in the context of American political debate to note that the attempt to overthrow our government on Jan 6th 2021 was preceded by a lot of highly visible discussion on Twitter and elsewhere. So if the goal is to prevent people being butchered in the streets, spare a thought for a few Trump voters who died at the Capitol, either victims of or believers in a lie about the election and the resulting plans to violently overthrow the government.
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BIL »

Mischief Maker wrote:Within days of the Roe cancellation leak, Republicans are calling for repeal of gay marriage, civil rights, even the legality of condoms and other birth control.
George Orwell's 1984 wrote:There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.
This is why the struggle for liberation must be universal. Even if you personally think trans people are weird, gay people are icky , black people are scary, and women are bitches, you still have an entirely selfish motive to protect universal rights because they'll come for you next.
The Peckerwood/BNP/ISIS sorts with enmity for women, gays and racial/ethnic others won't be moved. They're happy to see a tolerant world burn, regarding it as beyond saving, and not theirs to begin with. Classic Dar al Islam / Dar al Harb mentality. As for their own reckoning days... many think they're living in the end times, or will be very shortly, and have visions of righteous asymmetric warfare and Days Of The Rope dancing through their heads.

Violent subcultures aside, though (I know you're probably not thinking of their ilk, I just like typing "Peckerwood") - is "I tell you hwat, fuck them darkies/homos/bitches" really mainstream, nowadays? The usual pockets of bible-thumping, contraceptive-banning Christendom (and lately Islam) aside. ("What does the crushing AIDS-ravaged poverty of sub-Saharan Africa need? NO RUBER")

RE: Trans rights, bargaining won't work on personally-invested dissenters. Women have made themselves heard. And family men will never okay sending their unconsulted women into the arena (octagon, gen pop, ladies' room, wherever) with other males. These demographics will be woefully unfazed by threats to them, however oblique or direct, from quarters federal or private. It's human nature to guard one's family jealously.

This is a surreal, reality-denying overreach. Most people want to get along. Old enmities and injustices over race and sex and religion can be gradually left behind, especially in a world as pampered as ours. But you can't leave behind millions of years of evolution and baked-in socialisation. And so it's also a doomed overreach, if for no better reason than sheer numbers. The only response an encroachment on women's spaces will receive from the uncompliant masses is a hard backlash.

The same principles may actually move otherwise-conservative sorts on abortion access. It did me. Even in my infinitesimally progressive gaff, where unlike poor Africa, we were showered in free rubbers and TV spots and first-rate dancehall riddims aimed at keeping us off the Unplanned Parenthood & HIV Express, abortion was and is illegal country-wide. "Except to preserve the mother's physical or mental health," says the statute. Not to be relied upon - fire and brimstone rule the establishment (and much below). Born and bred, love the place, but it's merciless. Only moreso as I got older and looked to starting a family. Much the same for Ireland, incidentally, yet another option young Biruford enjoyed due to being quarter Potato (that's my great-uncle on the left in the ol' Phrenology 101 illustration, there).

So I staked my dreams on Cuck Island, and now both Mangoville and Potatoford are missing out massively. :o
BulletMagnet wrote:
BIL wrote:The line is crossed when controversial figures are outright silenced. This frequently means "going after someone's money," as seen in the attempts on Rogan's platform
I feel like I'm missing some nuance or other here, since you stated earlier that my hypothetical example of a business owner being forced to close because a bunch of his customers left in response to a stance he took was legit; to offer another "what if", say we crossed over into a universe where enough listeners had abandoned Rogan because of his spreading of Covid misinformation (hopefully we can agree to set aside the racial slur distraction) that Spotify was forced to can him? As with the hypothetical owner, he'd still be perfectly free to say what he wants, though he'd have suffered consequences, albeit, importantly, not at the hands of the government, for doing so; why would his case merit any more attention, let alone alarm, than the one I made up?

It remains quite unclear to me, I suppose, as to at what point others' reaction to what someone says or does cross over into "attack" territory, let alone how it's truly even possible to "silence" somebody by openly disapproving of their actions.
Declining to patronise a business - or even organising a boycott, to convince others to do the same - is all well and good. The business is entitled to neither your money, nor your endorsement. Whether these actions are taken because the business provides poor service, or because you discover the owner is vocally supportive of honour killings, or FGM, or some other barbarity, and you wish to publicise that to fellow citizens, in the hopes of lost sales forcing them out of your community? Again, I don't see the problem.

Coming around one night and burning the business to the ground, or jumping the owner and beating him into a coma? No comment needed, I hope. Cross that line, and we might as well call time on civil society as we know it.

Rocking up to a Muslim-owned bakery, requesting a cake decorated with marzipan figurines of Mohammed being spit-roasted by Jesus and Abraham over a defiled koran, and then, your custom predictably declined, attempting to have the business bankrupted not by fellow boycotters who find this presence of religious conviction in secular society deplorable ("The fuck is the problem? I pay you, you give me cake! Could have fucken Batman blowin' Robin on it for all you need to know!") - but by abusing statute designed to protect vulnerable minorities, and dragging them into ruinously costly, disruptive legal proceedings?

In similar cases (cf Masterpiece Cakeshop of Colorado), an unsuccessful plaintiff generally has to worry only about being ordered to pay the defendant's legal costs, or perhaps having their action struck down as vexatious litigation. They won't face the retribution an arsonist or a batterer would. Still, their intentions and the way they pursue them are firmly in the same ballpark. Identify someone with a belief you dislike, and set out not to persuade public opinion against them to the extent they may be forced to rethink their presence in your community (this is perfectly legitimate expression - peacefully picketing a store, say), but by unilaterally ruining them outright, having appointed yourself the arbiter of what may and may not be said or thought.
At the extreme end, you of course have cases like Theo Van Gogh and Samuel Paty, both butchered in the street because they said something some religious extremist didn't like. It's all part of the same continuum.
This I find difficult to get on board with, truth be told, in part because, as stated above, I'm not exactly sure how, short of the violent acts you describe here, someone can be "silenced" by the disapproval of others while their right to free speech as a citizen remains intact. Calling for someone to be "deplatformed" or whatever term you'd like to use simply doesn't strike me as the same sort of malice and disregard for others as being willing to physically attack somebody.
You can silence someone metaphorically by confiscating their platform, whether that's via the abuse of legal instruments such as DMCA, or concocted smear campaigns, or some other skulduggery. You can silence someone literally by attacking or outright killing them.

Silencing mechanisms vary widely in nature and severity. The objective remains effectively identical. Don't debate, or reason, or compromise with dissenters. Just remove them outright, as if tearing an offending stump out of your dream lawn.

Civil society as we know it has always been a balancing act; that's why I stress I'm not for legislative protections against mean tweets and the like. "UR CAKE SHOP SUKK DIKK ROFL" Yeah fine, no probs. But such an arrangement has to be reciprocal. ie, if I opine that it is unacceptable to force females into the same ring, or prison, or toilets as males, and you report me to my professional standards board on some blatantly confected charge of "transphobia" in the hopes of seeing me fired?

This isn't something I have to worry about personally, I should say. Blighty bends over backwards for its ambiguously off-white boys, and back home... this tack isn't really a thing. We're a world-infamous horror show for anyone who's not visibly hetero-protestant, I say with resignation. It's a shithole.

Still, I'll be forced to inform you that it's not cricket. If you'd asked me why I believe what I do, I'd have told you it's because the average man can bludgeon the average woman into a broken vegetable drowning on her own blood with an ease you may find startling, but I find about as novel as sunrise, or a fulcrum, or a grapefruit crushed in a vise grip. And maybe one or the other of us might moderate our stance. Strangle the other party into silence and, well. The Anglosphere's relative civility represents only a razor-thin slice of human history, as I'm sure you know. Maybe this'll all become academic sooner than any of us would like. :/ In the meantime it's worth holding onto imo, even if we sometimes annoy one another wheedling away like this.
Ed Oscuro wrote:My point's that this is not what the culture warriors really seem to care about, since their laws miss banning consented but possibly still harmful girls-boys sports competition, while banning harmless competition like trans boy/boy golfing. Even giving the pro-ban cause the benefit of the doubt it's clear that the balance of interests isn't at all right. Trans kids get excluded from every normal growing-up sports experience, other people get subject to increasingly invasive and needless scrutiny (like the satanic panic and "doctors" touching kids to "prove" they'd been molested).
In all honesty - I get what you're saying about the golf and such, not meaning to gloss over, just exactly the hamfisted cockup I'd expect of a school board :mrgreen: - as I said to Durandal, once it goes beyond forcibly exposing females to male violence, whether in the ring or in the pen, I rapidly lose interest. Lia Thomas's opponents evidently had no problem competing against and mostly losing to her. That's their right. OTOH, I liked seeing those British cyclists boycott that recent event - not because I've some burning hatred of trans people (I've a burning hatred of home invaders, rapists and pedophiles, that is mostly it), but because it's what I'd have done, in their shoes.

For as I've always maintained: Women are shit at fighting, and shit at sports. >;3

Crumpetshire Cycling Board: "Yo sup, we're airdropping this elite male cyclist into your meet, good luck ladies ;3 ;3 ;3"
Crumpet Broads: "WTF? Eat shit!"
CCB: "OMFG! Transphobia! >83"

^^^ Here is where you boycott, ladies. This is neither prehistory, nor the post-apocalypse. Men can't do shit for you here! Well unless you get hitched and knocked up then split with his kids and a lifetime meal ticket. Damn! :o
So if the goal is to prevent people being butchered in the streets, spare a thought for a few Trump voters who died at the Capitol, either victims of or believers in a lie about the election and the resulting plans to violently overthrow the government.
A striking contrast of social media-driven carnage, are Ashlii Babbitt and Samuel Paty. One marched off to her internet-spawned death, shot dead by Capitol security. The other's was unleashed upon him, an Islamist who'd seen his framing as a gleeful tormentor of Muslim pupils sawing his head off in the staff carpark. Atrocious violence traveling in opposite directions along the common vector of social media.

Maybe Babbitt and her fellow cod-WORVERINES might've been saved with better social media policies - I don't know much about her background, possible radicalisation and so on. Assuming she was the random MAGA mom-gone-QANON she appears, I have to think there's a better chance of dissuading such misadventurers than there is of stopping diehard radicals just waiting for prime targets, like Paty's murderer.
Last edited by BIL on Tue May 10, 2022 3:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by Ed Oscuro »

The main thing is there must be balance. The golfing ban was due to a state law - in Tennessee - which affected all students in the state regardless of their sexual identity or the sport, and ended up doing a lot more damage than a narrow measure would have done - because moderation and reasonableness are not guiding these policies in the least. It's worth underlining again that the academic sports orgs have their own standards - and the two US competitive swimming bodies (academic and Olympic) have different standards, so it is an area of active research and controversy. No-one says "it's fine to declare you're a woman and compete without having undergone a medical transition process." The South Park skit, funny as it may be, isn't close to reality because everybody knows that wouldn't be tolerated, despite what you may hear on Twitter, Parler, Facebook, Google+, etc.

Regarding Paty, I think everybody's clear (except Musk and the right wing) that social media standards can help or hurt drive extremism. Elon Musk's statements seem headed in the direction of getting rid of practices that defang and dispel viral myths like the ones that doomed Paty. I personally have no tolerance for those who agitate for violence, including leftists. In the aggregate, the decades since Lockerbie there have only been a very few mass-casualty terrorist attacks in Britain (the Underground and the Manchester Arena bombing being the biggest spikes). Police in ol' Blighty have gotten things tightly controlled enough that there isn't a violence epidemic by American standards, social media or otherwise, and probably not even by British historical standards even ignoring the Troubles. A very different thing from America where we have a political party and a news organization both dedicated to pushing the view that the violent attack on the Capitol was just a normal protest, or that vigilante justice is a norm to applaud rather than a depressing reality of gun-crazy America. It's worth underlining another Q-Anon follower at the Capitol got trampled to death by the attackers trying to get at police, and two others suffered fatal misadventures - all three deaths on Team Coup besides Ms. Babbitt. A policeman (Officer Sicknick, who had voted for Trump!) died of a stroke the day later, and at least a couple (including Officer Fanone) were very close to dying at the hands of the mob. But again, the right wing don't talk about the scores of very serious injuries on the Very Normal Day.

I would highlight here how positively idyllic Britain is in terms of violent extremism compared to the US. Additionally, Americans suffer stretches of time where just in a week we have multiple mass shootings bringing just a weekly death toll encroaching on the territory of those worst of British mass attacks, and it's just a matter of time for the frustrated political minority to start really ramping it up with guns, bombs, and truck attacks. The post-9/11 anti-terrorism industry is slowly shifting to recognize that the major threat of violence in the US isn't from Muslim extremists, but from right-wing political terrorism. And once again we have an effort to aid and abet the political movement to label the violent Right as "very fine people" and try to whitewash their violence. I still don't have to go very far on Twitter to find right-wing Reply Guys pushing the argument that really nothing too bad happened on January 6th, even today.

Of course Safety comes at the cost of random acts of police misconduct that don't seem as widespread in Britain either. The recent scandal about undercover police detectives marrying leftist activists as part of surveillance operations was crazy, but considerably limited in scope and seriousness to the American industry of Muslim entrapment, or plain police misconduct like the guy taken to a hospital for numb legs who shortly found himself being punished by the hospital, a judge, and police with a 'rough ride' that left him paralyzed, because he had been legally prescribed an opioid at some time in the past.
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Re: The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

Post by BIL »

Ed Oscuro wrote:Regarding Paty, I think everybody's clear (except Musk and the right wing) that social media standards can help or hurt drive extremism. Elon Musk's statements seem headed in the direction of getting rid of practices that defang and dispel viral myths like the ones that doomed Paty. I personally have no tolerance for those who agitate for violence, including leftists. In the aggregate, the decades since Lockerbie there have only been a very few mass-casualty terrorist attacks in Britain (the Underground and the Manchester Arena bombing being the biggest spikes). Police in ol' Blighty have gotten things tightly controlled enough that there isn't a violence epidemic by American standards, social media or otherwise, and probably not even by British historical standards even ignoring the Troubles.
You may well be aware of this already, and apologies if so - it's just a bit of a startling leap from him to the England, and also, I'm back to my #1 vice of obscenely late-night internetting - but Paty was a Frenchman murdered in France. Which (owing largely to its former colonising of Algeria) has its own catalogue of horrors. The Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo, of course, but also a rash of attacks on Jews and Christians like this and, missing from that timeline as it only starts in 2015, this.

Which sticks in my memory for the imagery of a schoolgirl chased down and caught by her hair before being shot in the head point-blank. Which is about what I would expect from an asymmetrical warzone, yet it seemed particularly unfortunate, given her murderer had been under police surveillance for six years prior, and was known to be a violent, mentally unstable criminal. I'm not French in the slightest, and know nothing of their state of discourse (I imagine Xyga might scold me for bringing these infamies up, an admitted point-tallying exercise... I hope he's doing ok) - but that institutional lethargy sounds familiar.
I would highlight here how positively idyllic Britain is in terms of violent extremism compared to the US. Additionally, Americans suffer stretches of time where just in a week we have multiple mass shootings bringing just a weekly death toll encroaching on the territory of those worst of British mass attacks, and it's just a matter of time for the frustrated political minority to start really ramping it up with guns, bombs, and truck attacks.
On the other hand, the US has some 260 million more people than either the UK or France. Comparing London to NYC (roughly 9million apiece) gets dubious plaudits like this.

Regardless, where "cancel culture" is concerned, it doesn't matter to me if it's one or a million cases being scrubbed from public discourse. As with being forced to partake in fantasies of a post-dimorphic humanity, it's about suppression. "Don't believe the evidence of your senses, oh and also, keep your mouth shut or else." Hard to ignore, like a burning dumpster!

I have not heard of anything near the scale of Rotherham (there are many towns to name; this is merely shorthand) coming out of the US. If you're unfamiliar with recent events on this formerly important little isle: around the mid/late 90s (in the aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence scandal, and roughly coinciding with New Labour and "Cool Britannia"), England became officially fixated on "diversity." This was not the authentic, organic diversity you might find in places like my gaff, where one's betters and lessers come in all colours and creeds, political correctness be damned. That took centuries! It was instead a shortcutting, performative facade pursued for its own sake, as some badge of honour - a Much Mature Grown Up Big Boy Rainbow Country.

As for all juicers, systemic damage was inevitable. And so it became police policy in a number of economically depressed towns to write off the (uniformly white) underaged victims of (uniformly Pakistani) organised sex traffickers as "little slags" who were "up for it." This was due to an entrenched terror of "appearing racist," and shattering aforesaid dream. It extended to arresting the parents of victims who attempted to confront said traffickers. There are related stories, but this one's a particularly handy digest of just how deranged a place can become under the spell of extreme IDPOL.

I don't know if I'd call a place with this sort of entrenched rot an idyll, really. More of a deranged cod-Huxleyan dystopia. :lol: It's lovely if you and yours live outside the fallout of aforesaid mad dream - the organised sex traffickers, murderous gangbangers and the odd Truck Of Peacer, along with a whole underclass of dispossessed native Britons (RIP dear Blackpool) - but it can be quite alarmingly shit for those who don't. Like Sasha Johnson, a rising star snuffed out overnight, when it became clear that boring old reality had once again reared its restoratively ugly head.

I detect a slight lessening of the usual "hear nothing see nothing say nothing" strictures in recent times. I suspect it's down to the sheer horror and shame of what's come out. Maybe that is what it takes to shatter a state-mandated collective delusion? Reality does have a way of insisting upon itself, eventually. :/ Or maybe everyone's just fatigued after the last couple years.
Of course Safety comes at the cost of random acts of police misconduct that don't seem as widespread in Britain either. The recent scandal about undercover police detectives marrying leftist activists as part of surveillance operations was crazy, but considerably limited in scope and seriousness to the American industry of Muslim entrapment, or plain police misconduct like the guy taken to a hospital for numb legs who shortly found himself being punished by the hospital, a judge, and police with a 'rough ride' that left him paralyzed, because he had been legally prescribed an opioid at some time in the past.
Welcome to Kingston! Patrolled by unaccountable heavily-armed killers with badges, AKA, the other side of the pendulum from England's dickless, gutless Bobbies. Kicking suspects' doors in and machinegunning them and their families in their beds like the end of The Godfather is no good to any supposedly first-world nation, either.
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