Growing Up Alyssa
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As a registered independent who finds both major parties unconscionable, this line of argument worries me. Frankly, members of both parties can ascribe the worst possible motives to those who vote for the opposition, precisely because both parties are a massive tangle of complex social, economic, political, and administrative issues, not necessarily all consistent with each other, and very often only invoked when it's politically convenient.
I'm not trying to engage in false equivalence here, because it is absolutely possible for one party to be worse than the other. But what I'm saying is that ascribing the worst possible motives to those who don't vote like you is only going to inflame our already polarized political discourse, and my great fear is that if the flames are fanned enough, we're going to end up how Rwanda ended up when the hatred between the Hutus and Tutsis boiled over.
It's actually the opposite, they're trying to speak to the people who might vote Republican and who may not realise what they are voting for.
I had been willing to believe that they simply put other issues first, which was merely selfish and short-sighted -- the kind of thing a democracy can be moderately robust for. But the culture war is front page news every day in every medium, and I simply cannot believe any more that it's not a deliberate choice.
The main point is that one party in particular is pushing discriminatory legislation against a minority group and demonizing them. That counts as oppression to me. People who vote for said party are therefore voting for those things - voting for despite not supporting such policies is still enabling said discrimination.
Your response seems victim blamey. Yes, the post is ascribing the worst motives at times. The cynic in me sees the anti-trans campaign as a political distraction from other issues that actually affect the voting base's lives. Doesn't change the fact it's hurting and likely taking human lives.
You compare the situation to Hutus and Tutsis. In this case she is a Tutsi, warning about the increasing threat of Hutus - whose rhetoric becomes more violent by the day - and is asking for help.
The genocide was the culmination of a hundred-plus years of power shifting from one group to the other. When the Tutsis were in power, they made life hell for the Hutus, and when the Hutus were in power, they made life hell for the Tutsis. Each group came to see the other as deserving of that punishment because of the way they had been mistreated when the other group was in power.
But my broader point is a criticism of the major-party duopoly, where every single social issue, economic issue, military issue, civil rights issue, etc. gets boiled down to these two choices. And often the philosophy that underpins them is inconsistent. So it's no wonder that each party is able to point out the inconsistencies and evils of its opposition; our political system is designed to make that as easy as possible. And the politicians who run within those parties benefit from that polarization.
In the end the analogy is flawed either way you spin it. Democrat and Republican voters are not ethnic/cultural groups in a country recently ravaged by colonialism.
But again, I am noting that someone is complaining about increasing oppression against their minority group, and you are lamenting about them playing into party politics.
Human rights are more important than the issue of having a healthy political culture. I thought it was inappropriate and out of touch to focus on the latter in this context.
I'm not sure it even matters currently. I've got friends who vote Republican, knowing stuff about their party/candidate which makes the uncomfortable (or worse). They still keep voting Republican, mostly because "democrats will kill babies and take away my guns and social security!". They've had more than a decade of "worst motives" ascribed to the opposition.
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Republicans: decades of "they'll take away our guns!"
Democrats: "that's not going to happen."
Decades later, doesn't happen.
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Democrats: decades of "they're going to take away your access to abortion/contraception"
Republicans: "meh... nah... why are you so paranoid?"
Decades later... access to abortion heavily restricted, on track for total bans in many regions.
Decades.
It's really hard to put a starting date on it. I think of it as beginning in the 1990s. But that's a follow-in from the late 60s, when civil rights caused the re-orientation of the parties. And before that, the anti-communist movement which upset the post-Civil War alignment.
Regardless... I have memories of the 80s and early 90s when it felt competitive and rude but not utterly hopeless. Since then it has seemed to me that it has grown monotonically worse -- and I see no reason to think that the direction is going to change.
Pretty much nailed it: the 1990s is when the new partisan alignment had pretty much shaken out, the 1960s and particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was the trigger for the second part of the double realignment leading to that new alignment from the one that had held basically from Reconstruction; the first trifger starting with the Great Depression and more specifically Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition.
Trump's populist tribalism stuck the knife into the conservative movement. The heart's still beating, but it's faint.
Since Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the Republican Party decided to seize the opportunity it had failed to exploit in previous splits between the Democrats’ White supremacist faction and the rest of the broadened post-New Deal party by offering the former a new partisan home that would focus on the issues the Democrats had become inconsistent on.
I hate to risk Godwinning the argument; it doesn't (yet) look like that. And you've already said that you don't want to draw false equivalences. But I think it's worth considering that sometimes the motives are the worst possible motives, and it's not up to the victims to reduce polarization.
This isn't just about "people who don't vote like me". It's about people who are actively voting to oppress me, to make harmless behavior illegal and to diminish my voting power to prevent it. Voting isn't harmless; it's ultimately a matter of compulsion.
That can often be benign. We'll never be unanimous and sometimes minorities on any issue will be compelled. That works when it's not done with malice. But malice is a real thing, and it only takes one side to have it. And it really looks to me as if it's being done out of malice in the US, right now. Maybe not genocidal... but I don't think it's up to the trans people or any other group to avoid inflaming Republicans just by existing.
We justifiably get annoyed when uninformed lawmakers make sweeping laws without understanding the technical issues involved. It's frankly bizarre to have some 80 year old fossil who can barely understand using a cell phone be involved in something like deciding net neutrality or AI regulations.
We should be equally annoyed at the current trend of throwing medical issues into the public sphere. There's no reason whatsoever why random people like my mom whose education is in textile design and mostly watches cat videos all day should participate in the public drama of who should get what medical treatment when. We have professionals who specialize in medicine for a reason.
And at the federal level, many of the older congressional members are not as uninformed as you might think. They have a big information machine around them.
...But, in general, yeah. Its absurd how uninformed the debates can get these days.
Having "random people" participate is a cornerstone of democracy. As others have pointed out, it's what separates democracy from elitist technocracy - and, ultimately, oligarchy.
The problem is that another cornerstone is the public's responsibility to educate themselves. Nobody seems to do that any more, including here. This is the foundation that's failing. Fix the broken cornerstone, not the one that's still intact (though under assault in the form of gerrymandering and disenfranchisement).
Having "random people" (or people without specific domain knowledge) in a democracy doesn't really do anything to prevent oligarchy, it's tangential at best and orthogonal realistically.
> The problem is that another cornerstone is the public's responsibility to educate themselves.
That seems like a tall order in a culture that consistently promotes ignorance as a virtue for the wide masses.
Only assuming you can process information from the real world correctly, which isn't a given. Not a judgment on you personally.
> We probably can't fix the organizational dynamics that lead to this accretion of power, but we can prevent it from being our basis of government by keeping the franchise broad.
Is there any evidence that keeping the franchise broad is the most effective strategy of running a country over multiple generations, where knowledge of organizational dynamics gets lost over time? That's a very strong claim, without much supporting it.
> Limiting franchise has always been a favorite tool of dictators, oligarchs, and supremacists - not of people who actually believe in democracy.
I don't particularly believe in democracy (one of the reasons being an extremely broad, misused catch-all term for whatever the speaker means themselves), but I do believe in strong institutions and separation of powers to the degree that it's possible.
But again, that's kind of orthogonal to whether this is an effective way to enact change by the broad franchise.
You realize this claim can be made about you too, right? You might believe you process information correctly, but that's a very strong claim, without much supporting it.
The fact that you don't have access to that empiric information is just unfortunate, but ultimately nothing that makes a difference.
I simply told him I had no obligation of doing so.
But you keep misinterpreting everything you read for hot takes or whatever.
> My experience in being correct and good outcomes are the support that I need.
Chaser:
> antisthenes 1 day ago | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: A rant on bus stops
> Some points in the article are hit and miss, but mostly correct.
> For example, Istanbul is flourishing because it's the Turkish capital, so it necessarily is the most dense and rich city in the country.
Just to make a note about this separately.
I will privilege my opinion in discussions, because I generally tend to give concepts a lot more thought than the average person. It is also my prerogative to defend what I believe in and I try to do that with evidence and astute observation.
To ask someone not to do this is absolutely ridiculous.
Yes, on the level of franchise, it is good that everyone is involved.
Its bad, on the other hand, that the form of the debate in this concrete instance has been directed to trying to make decisions on specific medical procedures as electoral politics issues.
Belief in democratic franchise does not imply belief that all democratic decisions are equally correct, or that all possible framings of debate within a participatory system are equally correct.
> There's no reason whatsoever why random people like my mom
I very much doubt that their mom is a legislator, or on any regulatory agency's board, where these decisions are actually made. They were sneering at the common voter, suggesting there's "no reason whatsoever" for them to participate even at that level. I happen to believe that high barriers to participation for voters or even legislators undermine democracy, and I believe so quite strongly, hence the equally strong response.
It's not in any way reasonable for a random person to make specific decisions about what kind of medical intervention is appropriate for what people in what conditions. Figuring out tricky details is what we have experts for.
Just like 99% of the time, it's not appropriate for the CEO to decide which framework, algorithm or programming language should be used to solve a problem.
Nor can we even try successfully. There's too many deeply complex subjects for the general public to have time to research them well enough not to make completely stupid decisions, let alone good ones.
From a purely statistical POV, this is absurdly bizarre.
They have a small team: https://asahilinux.org/about/
People like to team up with others like them, so the fact that they're more likely to collaborate with other trans people is not weird at all.
The only graphical subystem she is on the list for is the Panfrost driver. I don't think that counts as "on the board overseeing Linux graphics", not at all. This is one GPU driver. She is on the board overseeing the general graphics for Linux for the Asahi project, so I think that's what she was referring to.
> X.Org Foundation's (or X.Org for short) purpose is to research, develop, support, organize, administrate, standardize, promote, and defend a free and open accelerated graphics stack and the developers and users thereof. This stack includes, but is not limited to, the following projects: DRM, Mesa, Wayland and the X Window System.
Pretty neatly describes "I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics.".
Statistically there will be weird coincidences completely naturally. It's also quite arbitrary which we see as meaningful. If say, Linux networking has unusually many people called "John" that probably will be unnoticed because nobody pays that much attention to common, unremarkable names. If they all randomly turn out to have green eyes, then that's more visible. It's completely subjective which of those is more remarkable.
There are also likely social effects -- people stick together, and some side interests align with some fields. Eg, I think it's reasonable to guess there's going to be more furries than average in VR development. Part because VR allow you to look like whatever you want a lot of the time, part because people will invite their friends in.
The logic seems to be not conforming to masculine stereotypes ==> must be a woman.
There are more cis women (>50% of the U.S. population) than cis men. Trans women are still like ~1% of the population, and that's being generous.
And there are more trans women than cis women in these spaces.
I don't know what it says (feminism failed? pre-transition heteronormative programming?? bIoLoGy???), but bizarre's the right word. (The smartest programmers I know are trans women too, fwiw.)
Much of the difficulty of being trans is social, which makes it more likely for people to come out / actively transition in environments with less social consequences. Programming, as an activity which can be anonymous and online fits that bill simply because there's less socializing at all.
And speaking of social difficulties, most people don't want to be social trailblazers. They don't want to be the first trans person in a group and deal with the potential existing prejudices, or more likely ignorance. So if you see a group that already contains trans people, you're probably seeing a group you can slide into without much difficulty.
I'm not sure what they're going to do when there aren't any groups left to "other." They might have to argue for their ideas and policies on reason and merit. That's gonna be hard. It's a lot harder to convince the neocortex with reason than to rally the limbic system with outrage porn.
It's gross of course. It's using people for political cannon fodder. At least the left mostly just tries to scare me and make me hate right-wing politicians, which is like striking a military target rather than a civilian target.
I hate the culture war in general. It's a godsend to incompetent politicians. All they have to do is grunt correctly on culture war issues and they don't have to actually deliver anything of substance or solve any real problems.
For example, the Women's Liberation Front (WoLF), which brands itself as a left-wing group, has been working with the people pushing bills: https://twitter.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1634287701896712207...
ETA:
Oh, also, because it's basically predicated on a homophobic conspiracy about gay people all being out to groom your children.
> any parent to sue to the teacher for mentioning basically anything involving sexual orientation
"prohibiting a school district from encouraging classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a specified manner. ..... to adhere to standards developed by the department of education."
Presumably they can only sue if the teacher is going against whatever the normal standards are.
> little repercussions for a parent lying or embellishing
I don't know what you mean here, but presumably if the parents take a teacher to court and lose (because they lied/embellished) they would have just wasted their legal fees.
> homophobic conspiracy about gay people all being out to groom your children
Not sure about this. I think the bill came out before the whole groomer thing.
[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/559840370/House-Bill-1557-Do...
I'm not 100% sure what that means though. What if a kid draws a picture of his two dads or two moms; does the teacher just not allow him to present to the class because that might lead to a discussion of sexuality? It's not clear, and as a result it will probably lead to "othering" of gay parents.
> I don't know what you mean here, but presumably if the parents take a teacher to court and lose (because they lied/embellished) they would have just wasted their legal fees.
Yes, but then (I believe) it's up to the school to actively countersue to retrieve legal fees for a frivolous lawsuit. Again, it's not really clear.
> Not sure about this. I think the bill came out before the whole groomer thing.
Simply not true: https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/597215...
> Simply not true: https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/597215...
This is what I was trying to say, the law was written, and then when people objected there began a discourse (which i don't agree with) that the only reason people would object to this is because they must be groomers. Seems like it was the law first and then this "groomer" thing.
I appreciate you explaining your criticism to me.
It's open to interpretation, but in some cases it's actually more bluntly horrible. For example, it seems like conservatives are clutching their pearls about the possibility of a math problem mentioning two moms [1].
From the article:
> The legislation could also impact how teachers provide instruction on a day-to-day basis. At a Senate hearing on Feb. 8, Republican Sen. Travis Hutson gave the example of a math problem that includes the details that “Sally has two moms or Johnny has two dads.” Republican State Sen. Dennis Baxley, who sponsors the bill in the Senate, said that is “exactly” what the bill aims to prevent.
This seems to imply that my fears of othering of gay families is founded.
> This is what I was trying to say, the law was written, and then when people objected there began a discourse
I feel like the LGBT grooming conspiracies have been around for a long time. There are 50's era PSAs about how gays will show your kids porn and then try and molest them [2]. I don't think these sentiments ever really went away, at least not completely.
In more recent history I don't know if the "gays are trying to groom your kids" came before or after the bill.
[1] https://time.com/6155905/florida-dont-say-gay-passed/
[2] https://youtu.be/3bPZxRD1GJQ
EDIT:
I think I linked the wrong video. https://youtu.be/EqIIeGmhL2Q
Consider how much work you're doing to ignore the right's own self-proclaimed objectives and orientation in service of false lofty neutrality. Here is a tweet[1] from Desantis's press secretary on 2022-03-04:
> The bill that liberals inaccurately call “Don’t Say Gay” would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill.
The bill was first filed on 2022-01-11 and signed on 2022-03-28.[2]
> It seems like a very straight forward reinforcement of a parents rights to oversee the education of their kids.
These bills are written precisely to allow people like you to draw this conclusion.
[1]: https://twitter.com/christinapushaw/status/14998866192597770...
Sadly, this will never happen. We've been at this for tens of thousands of years, and we always find "others."
There's always going to be an "other". If necessary, some arbitrary social divide will be invented. Most of the "groups" we've split ourselves into are not particularly meaningful to begin with, and it doesn't take much to become an outsider when people really want there to be outsiders.
You and me both :(
With you being young and hopefully on social media, I hope you can help turn out the youth vote. I hate to say this, most people of my generation are about as close minded as a person can get, and sadly they turn out to vote in large numbers. And many of them vote only for hate.
I think the future of the US rests on your generation shoulders, and I hope your generation is stronger than mine is/was.
A significant part of the population is against against trans rights basing their arguments on religion and "morality". There are great efforts to ban even talking about it in schools.
brazil is the country with highest number of trans people killings in the world[2] and homophobia is the rule rather than the exception.
There's is a reason why most women and LGBT people in brazil vote for left-wing politicians.
[1] https://www.riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/modern-day-censor...
[2] https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2022/01/23/brazil-continues-...
Not surprising when Brazil is a very dangerous country with a very high number of killings, period. It just naturally follows that the number of gay/trans people killings is also very high.
I mean, we can probably concoct some statistics to prove that Brazil is also one of the countries that kill more cis/hetero people too.
None of this to say that the right wing in Brazil is okay. They engage in this cultural war nonsense to try to stay relevant after Bolsonaro ridiculously lost the last elections even after all things he did to try and steal it.