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Comment by nathan_compton | Hacker News Reader

Eh. 1) Slime molds are cool 2) queerness is cool 3) waxing poetic is cool => 4) this article is cool.

Queerness ain't cool fam. I mean, I would explain why actual cool people laugh at those blue haired weirdos, but everyone's life has taught them that.

No, actually, I'll say that queerness cannot be cool on its own terms. Queerness is that which rejects normality[0]. Coolness - to analyze it so deeply I reveal myself as deeply uncool - is to be at the peak of social aspiration. It's normativity so easily achieved it makes people feel envious and desirous. It is, in that sense, the antithesis of queer.

[0] queer-as-identity allows individuals to transcend or outright reject normative labels https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-queer/

What bubble must you live in to believe youths aren't actively encouraged to be queer and treat it as a social aspiration? To be gay, nonbinary, even trans, is essentially worshiped, especially online. Have you seen the content on the apps these kids use?

"Actual cool people." Give me a break.

In some circles queerness is cool and in others it is reviled and, indeed, still dangerous. That isn't hard to understand. I know a lot of queer people who were beaten by their parents, kicked out on the street, harassed by landlords, whatever, still.

It is frankly bizarre to say gay, nonbinary or trans people are "worshiped." It seems like around 40% of people actively oppose the normalization of queerness. Anti-queer laws are being passed all over the place in the country. This doesn't seem like a culture that worships queerness to me.

The notion that LGBT ideology[0] is mainstreamed, backed, and promoted by the American regime/media-corporate-government-education complex and readily absorbed by a growing portion of certain segments of the populace is not controversial. Indeed, it is rather obvious. It is even explicitly stated by those entities. Even assuming that 40% of Americans are "actively opposed" (though I'm not sure how you define "active" as the political activity of the vast majority of citizens is confined, at best, to voting and tweeting statements of defiance), that leaves 60% who are ambivalent or onboard; the ambivalent will predictably go with the flow of what's popular. So, yes, there does exist opposition to the normalization of the LGBT stance, but it has generally been quite weak and disorganized given the ease with which things like "gay marriage" have become normalized. The victim mentality that often characterizes grievance and resentment movements can produce a distorted picture of what's actually the case.

It remains to be seen whether those opposed can mount a successful defense.

[0] Before someone comments with something like "LGBT isn't an ideology; they're PEOPLE!", I will restate that, yes, LGBT is an ideology (or family of ideologies). It is an anthropological position taken on what it means to be human, what human sexuality is about and therefore on sexual morality, the social relations that can licitly follow, etc. People can accept or reject the position. People can experience same-sex attractions or whatever. What LGBT offers is a particular interpretation of those experiences, and a political program that appeals to and makes use them, that, to put it mildly, are controversial. They are contested and challenged and quite rigorously by, e.g., natural law ethicists (who draw on a long intellectual and ethical tradition that has already dealt with such questions throughout history). LGBT ideology cannot be understood outside of the liberal tradition; with liberalism comes the notion that freedom is the unfettered indulgence of any desire ("do what thou wilt"), save for those that contradict the ideology, of course. But the classical tradition has responded to such and similar views throughout history; to act against reason and to be a slave to one's passions and to any disordered desires is not freedom. Freedom is the ability to do what one ought, to do what is objectively good, to act according to human nature, and it is the nature of human beings to be rational. By that rationality, they can discern what is objectively good. (There are also interesting connections between LGBT and transhumanism and gnosticism, ones which reveal how unwittingly appropriate the choice of the "pride" slogan is, but those I leave to the side for now.)

I think its interesting that you conflate sex and gender liberation with liberalism. In fact, most of the queer people I know aren't liberals and pretty much revile liberalism in favor of things like socialism or, to a lesser extent, anarcho-capitalism (you might conflate that last one with liberalism).

But also: having the opinion that certain kinds of sexual relations and gender expressions' morality should be re-evaluated is not the same as believing "do what thou wilt." This seems obvious. Eg, those who wished to abolish slavery before the civil war did not wish to abolish society. It is possible to want to reform without wanting to utterly dispense with every moral fact. I don't know a single queer person who expresses or believes in this kind of moral anarchy. Indeed, the very ideal of queer liberation is to assert _moral status_ for a class of people that have previously not had it, not to eliminate the idea of moral status all together.

In fact, the only place I've ever seen moral chaos conflated with queer stuff is among conservatives, who do so because it makes queerness seem more scary than it actually is.

I would like to pose a question to you. If, as you state, 60% of the population is ambivalent to or supports queerness, how do you distinguish this state of affairs from a genuine social evolution compared to what you are implying, some kind of sinister plot imposed by "them." If "them" is 60% of the country or even just 40% of the country, and, as you suggest, opposition is actually smaller than 40%, then isn't the acceptance of queerness just a social change like any other?

> to a lesser extent, anarcho-capitalism

You must know very different queer people than I do, because queer communities in my experience tend extremely anti-capitalist. I see various flavors of anarchism, but anarcho-capitalism is not typically one of them.

I'm quite interested to hear about the connection between LGBT ideology and Gnosticism / transhumanism. Care to elaborate lo_zamoyski?

That’s just James Lindsay’s pseudointellectual tripe, and has further roots in some early twentieth century political theorists. You can’t trust Lindsay because he’s a political operative first and a scholar second. I don’t know of any scholars of gnosticism who think gnosticism is connected to LGBT in a serious way.

Being queer on the internet is a pain in the ass. You get a constant stream of hate engagement, no matter how small your platform is, and it scales up dramatically with platform size.

It's also weird of you to assume that anyone who is popular on the internet and also queer is popular because they are queer.

The peak of social aspiration is not the the same thing as being normal. In fact, you can't possibly be cool and be normal at the same time (otherwise the average person would be cool which isn't the case).

The uncool are all uncool in more or less the same way, but the cool are all cool differently. This is why you can have cool queer people, cool conservatives, cool liberals, cool socialists, cool communists. Coolness has an inevitable character of transgression against norms. It is an expression of the basic human need to rethink and revise normal behavior, presumably in search of other ways of living that might be more productive, pleasurable, just, aesthetically pleasing, whatever. This is a necessary part of a functioning society. Queer people, among others, are a part of it.

Analyzing coolness doesn't make you uncool. Getting bent out of shape because someone wrote a fun little essay about being queer and slime molds might.

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