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I mean, if you look at a person who looks white, you might be looking at a person who's "white" (the most likely case) or "Jewish" (most Jews in the US have light skin color) or "Hispanic" (Hispanics basically have any of the various skin colors) or "Native American" (a number of Oklahomans, including some members of Congress) or even "black" (GK Butterfield, among others) based on their official racial designation. Racial categories are sort of a mess; they're generally based on heritage, but the fact that different ethnic groups can and do interbreed with each other kinda says that any attempt to try to draw one single line will end up with strange categorizations happening.
And in turn, the things that people say that races "are", like "[race] people are [adjective]", are similarly rather trashy, because these racial categories aren't anywhere near clean, and those adjectives at best basically amount to approximations upon approximations (e.g. "black people are (roughly) [people that have such-and-such traits]" + "(many) black people (usually) act in [a certain] manner"). Some people then try to back-reason these things but that's just putting the cart before the horse.
Now, if we're talking ideas, then ideally we'd all be ageless raceless faceless genderless idea pods
and I'm a dragon girl, but that's clearly not happening anytime soon.Also, mechanical engineering has taught me that the amount of bodied something(s) is/are is a social construct. Sort of. Edit: On second thought, there isn't much "social" in the construct I'm thinking of. But laminar/turbulent flow and elastic/plastic deformation are.
* There's also the reverse: people claiming that something isn't a social construct because it's real and/or important.
Edit: spelling.
Just because some people have assigned meaning to it as opposed it being a thing in and of itself doesn't mean it's not a thing.
However, it is prudent to understand where that meaning comes from, and how it was assigned.
Culture, traditions, societal contracts, etc. Eliminating all those words makes "social contructs" sound like a much more credible thing than it is.
Society is most certainly not something us humans created, it is something that was created for us to thrive (this is one of those occasions where I feel my words aren't exactly right, but you get it). I mean, however you believe it was created (I go by natural selection, evolution and all that jazz) all we really do is choose how it's organized.
I was wondering when the secular transhumanism would come in.
I mean, to be brief; I [expletive] love men. I love the idea of them, and the reality of them, as a man. Like, all that religious "holy union between [man and woman]" stuff, but with two guys (and without the explicit religion, because that's just my brain overloading on hormones, and even though I know the mechanics of it, I cannot deny it).
In your ideal this would be entirely erased.
It's one of the things that I also wonder about the afterlife. Even if (going by Christianity) people would remain in their current forms as deemed through being "God's image", everybody would lose their "sinful" urges. Desire, greed, ambition, etc. What is a human without those things?
I mean, even you have to have had times where you looked back (via the experience of age) and thought "young GMH was a stupid idiot", whilst coming to find you love that young stupid idiot.
Life is suffering, life is accepting who you are and (conversely) what you will never have, life is learning, and life is beautiful because of these things.
Rather, it's a model for comparison regarding how people may behave when discussing things on the internet, because everyone -- despite being flesh-and-blood human beings -- appears as just a username and an avatar anyway, disconnected from their age, appearance, gender (unless they choose to suggest one, but then it's still basically an informed trait), voice timbre, culture (aside from language and dialect), etc., and all they're doing is posting thoughts in an information data format on the internet.
https://www.vox.com/2020/6/8/21242003/trump-failed-coronavirus-response
Though, honestly, this isn't much of opinion but rather just a timeline.
Also, even if the WHO really is a bunch of dolts (which I doubt), Trump should have instead used his oh-so-vaunted leadership skills to co-opt them into doing his bidding to confront and contain the virus, and waited until after the crisis to pick a fight with them and do so from higher ground after the results bear out success. That would have been the actual genius play.
meanwhile: to no one's surprise, given the twin factors of people banging on the door demanding a "reopening" and the ongoing mass protests against excessive use of force by police, the US is having another increase in cases. (I'll refrain from using words like "surge" but honestly who tf cares at this point lol)
meanwhile:
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-coronavirus-swabs-puritan-maine-thrown-out-2020-6
(the above article references the below article)
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/05/trump-maine-puritan-throw-away-coronavirus-swabs/3153622001/
The guy can't even do a photo op right.
Frankly speaking, he should have just donned a lab coat, mask, and plastic booties, just like everyone else in the facility, then gotten his entourage to do the same. Even standard photo op procedure involves dressing up as one of the workers, because that looks better, to say nothing about the technical (i.e. epidemiologal) benefits of doing so in this case.
I previously mentioned the city of Camden, New Jersey, which disbanded its city police force and had the county take over police services.
The following tweet chain is from Stephen Danley, from Rutgers University. Rutgers is a public research university in New Jersey; Danley is a public policy professor who works at its campus in Camden. In these tweets, Mr. Danley remarks that Camden's story is often oversimplified, and provides more details.
Paraphrase + my commentary:
* The process of deciding to disband the city police force was undemocratic. (This was also mentioned in one of the articles I linked.) Also, it was greatly influenced by state budget issues.
* The new police jobs paid a lot less than the old ones did (which is also in an article I linked). I was wondering how this would affect police services, and Danley says that this caused the force to become younger and whiter, and also get used as a training ground for officers to get experience before moving back to their prior hometowns.
* There was still a significant amount of excessive force complaints for some time, as the new police force explicitly applied a "broken windows" approach. One incident in 2014 went viral locally, despite outreach efforts Danley describes "tokenistic" (e.g. ice cream parties).
* More policing reform work was done by local activists and the NAACP, and resulted in the police moving away from the "broken windows" approach and more toward deescalation. Excessive force complaints fell as a result.
* The police force apparently still lacks diversity compared to the old one, but it's improved since the disbanding of the city force.
* Citizens disagree on whether police are more trustworthy now, but some have pointed out that the new police force is more willing to listen to people than they used to be.
https://www.startribune.com/officers-slashed-tires-on-vehicles-parked-during-mpls-protests-unrest/571105692/
(Yes, Mother Jones is a biased source, but this local paper indicates that the agencies themselves admitted to it.)
TL;DR during protests a week-or-so ago in Minneapolis, a number of people had the tires on their cars slashed. Videos surfaced of what appear to be heavily armed police going around systematically slashing all the tires of all the cars parked in a K-mart parking lot. A variety of people including reporters (even at least one from Canada) were victims of this action.
Minnesota State police and Anoka County police admitted to issuing orders to officers to do this. (N.B.: Minneapolis is located in Hennepin County; Anoka County is another county nearby. Meanwhile, Minneapolis police, Hennepin County police, and the National Guard have denied responsibility for this.)
The justification given was:
Except
1. The vehicles were unoccupied and stationary. They presented no threat at the time, and the police were in control of the area at the time. If they wanted to prevent civilians from accessing those vehicles, they could arrest the civilians who tried to do so.
2. Slashing all four tires is unnecessary to disable a vehicle. If you want to disable a vehicle, you slash two tires -- so that you can't just swap out one with the spare, but you can still tow it. Slashing all four tires just makes it more of a pain to tow.
3. I read someone's comment that the only threat posed by a stationary vehicle is a bomb threat. So, slashing all four tires just makes it harder to remove the bomb. If that's what they're concerned about. So that justification doesn't make sense either.
4. If the point was to prevent protesters from going home, the police did not do due diligence to figure out whose cars they were slashing the tires of. They ended up hitting journalists' cars.
5. This doesn't make sense as cost-saving measure, since now someone's going to be paying for all those new tires. It'll be some combination of the cars' owners, their insurance companies, and probably the police departments responsible for this since I fully expect property damage lawsuits (and this in turn just means it goes back to citizens themselves paying because they pay taxes). So whatever they did this for should have been worth this potential backlash and expense.
I'm trying but I can't figure out a good reason for doing this. Slashing two tires, maybe, if I'm being really generous to them, but not slashing four tires.
Tom Cotton is a Republican senator, and his op-ed involved the Insurrection Act. I'm not a guru on this thing, but the point was if police and the national guard needed assistance stopping the protests, the military could be called in.
This, staffers claimed, made black NYT staff feel "unsafe" (I guess because it was anti-BLM combined with military boots on American soil). Not other staff, just them. I mean, if somebody I worked with claimed words made me feel unsafe and not them, I'd think they thought I was super fragile, but I mean nobody believes that. At least I hope not, otherwise they're delusional.
Anyways, the op-ed has not been amended due to factual errors, but does now have a giant editors note about how it should have never been published for [vague vague vague].
This is more hilarious than the time Vox staff supported AB5 so hard that they didn't realize it would cause all California-based freelance Vox staff's jobs to disappear.
Or that time (of literally weeks ago) when journalists were like "we're pausing the economy" and then BuzzFeed shut down it's UK operation amongst others and then they were like "important industries are disappearing before our very eyes!"
It might have been oversimplified, but it was not dangerously so. Words are rarely ever actually dangerous, especially not in this case of policy discussion.
Seriously, it's exhausting reading Vox and possibly most things upstream from it, because you have to filter out all these words before they slowly lose their real meanings.
Isn't the Guard already military? So if it's not enough to the point that frontline military forces need to be called in, does that mean it's pretty much open combat?
Reading the thing for myself, it's basically what I said a few days ago, but written in a really NYT way. I'm actually starting to wonder if people actually write these things or there's an NYT bot they feed their opinions into and then it fills the lines with NYT language.
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People who have actually been let go/have actually resigned for Opinions (amongst other things) in the past month or so:
Sometimes I think there's lots of internal stuff happening and ambitious people take their shots when they can, but it's still always ridiculous.
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Meanwhile, the Great War against J.K.Rowling continues...
Mr. O'Meara is not the chief of police of New York (neither city nor state). The Superintendent of the New York State Police is Keith M. Corlett, while the New York City Police Chief is Terence A. Monahan.
As for the stuff he says, he's right to point out that interactions are mostly positive. But that doesn't mean there aren't problems or room for improvement.
> "Stop treating us like animals and thugs"
I should note that this is essentially the same message that the protesters and various black folks are saying.
Except that the power of law enforcement is not typically on their side, so it's more typical that they get more than just social embarrassment heaped upon them.
As for the rest of his video it's mostly just flaming others and an emotional appeal to people's pride in working as law enforcement officers. I agree that there is great merit in police work, but again, that doesn't mean that it's devoid of problems. Though the video doesn't exactly go into substantive detail, so I'll leave it at that.
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Y'know one curiosity/irony is that your posting more about politics has actually gotten me to further examine the issues and made me more actively care about this stuff.
If not for having to respond to you I'd probably mostly have ignored this stuff rather than keeping up with it -- which in turn means I'm seeing more of the good and bad in this stuff.
I could post a bunch of videos of police mistreating protesters and/or black people, but I figured that everyone's already seen them, and I'd rather people focus on efforts to improve things, with peaceful, meaningful dialogue between cops and other citizens. Though unfortunately that's often nonsexy stuff involving boring public meetings and programs with big words in their names and statistical analyses that no one bats an eye at after the fact until things go wrong.
A thug is literally a criminal. If somebody is engaging in criminal activity, they must be treated as such. This weekend, Chicago experienced it's worst murder rate in years. A similar thing happened in L.A., specifically because either police were otherwise occupied or being neutered.
There is no compelling evidence of what the protesters are claiming unless we look at problem areas where police are under duress to start with. Also, when the protesters are hanging out with rioters and taking down statues and starting autonomous zones (as in, trying to subvert the rule of American law), they're going to get caught in the crossfires.
Speaking of the autonomous zone, they were one letter off from the right acronym.
As far as I can see, he's saying "please stop painting us with this brush, it's inaccurate and detrimental to our work, our forces a
Yes, that's why states have basically cancelled COVID-19, House and Senate Democrats have engaged in various kneeling displays, defunding law enforcement is currently being tabled. Or actually worse, "reform" (community organizers guys, they'll stop the murders for sure).
Meanwhile, TV shows that and movies going away:
*These two are both terrible reality TV so who cares.
I've also updated the list above there with some British personalities.
(Unrelated: I was trying to figure out the shortcut for lists but I ended up discovering the keyboard shortcut for URLs instead).
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I genuinely never expected her to keep against the tide this long:
This stuff is quite scathing.
The main thing I'll always think about this is that it never, ever had to get this bad. Nobody minds the existence of trans people, but this radical concept of inclusionism at all costs, becoming the baseline acceptable opinion was a mistake.
Things like "the only acceptable sexuality is pansexual, all others are exclusionary" or trying to redefine homosexuality as "same-gender attraction" rather than "same-sex attraction" (and trying to do the same for heterosexuality) aren't going to fly for very long.
Meanwhile, those responsible for enforcing the law should abide by the law just like everyone else should.
There was a case in my city last year and we are hardly a "problem area where police are under duress to start with".
Also I would go back to the piles of studies I was poring through earlier (and picking through specifically checking that they fit the criteria you picked even though such criteria don't necessarily make sense) but unless this argument blooms further I don't feel like doing it.
Those aren't just random statues that they're taking down opportunistically.
They were put up for a reason (or else they wouldn't have suddenly started popping up several decades after the Civil War ended), and they're also coming down for a very closely-related reason.
Meanwhile I just hope that everything is well-documented. Because, like Pfeilspitze might say, someone needs to live to tell this tale.
And that goes for everyone.
Actually a bunch of other unrelated people had already been clamoring for cancelling COVID-19, assuming that by that you mean all this "reopening" of stuff.
How is reform worse than defunding?
Both terms are basically just aspirational labels that are nearly meaningless in the absence of specifics, but reform indicates a prioritization of intent to improve.
And guess what? You do need community organizers. Simply throwing the police at the crime rate isn't going to stop the murders. (That's how we got into this problem in the first place!) They can demand respect and/or display force all they want, but that ain't gonna work without the community backing them up. You wanna de-escalate this conflict? You need buy-in from both sides. And community organizers are the people who can give you that.
lol I've popped open YouTube uploads of that while bored at 2am, every so often
Honestly it is quite satisfying to watch police corner an unruly perp causing mayhem.
I have a feeling that at least some of those are a bit more complicated than you're descriptions but I'm too lazy to research them because fuck all these spats about whatever %random_possibly-but-not-necessarily-famous_person% said.
Frankly I do in fact think that you have been spending too much time reading social media posts and thinkpiece commentaries for you to actually think that there are a problematically large number of people who seriously espouse ideas like "the only acceptable sexuality is pansexual, all others are exclusionary". And also various other wild ideas like the notion that looting is a good idea. I've seen far worse on the internet and yet somehow most people still have a level head on their shoulders most of the time.
Also, quick reminder that people (usually) don't check each others' private parts before getting the hots for them, so it's all a matter of social cues and proxy symbols anyway.
If those two people engage, what happens after that when pants do come off? Why can't we be honest with each other before things go too far?
And you can ignore this:
For as long as you want, but it'll always still be there.
By Stonewall. Last I checked, Stonewall was the United Kingdom's #1 LGBTQIAAP+ charity, and it advises not just companies but schools from the lowest grade possible and the government as well. You're not a conservative, but you're making that same mistaken assumption that culture doesn't matter and that we should allow bad ideas to flourish because they'll be taken down by good ones. That has not happened in a very long time.
Anyways, what do you call a publishing environment where JKR is called the worst names possible for her opinion and has to self-publish (J.K.Rowling! Who was allowed to write scripts for movies having never done that before and showing how that was a bad idea more than once!) and one where everyone in mainstream media basically decries her for this?
These are ideas I've seen in Teen Vogue, which is aimed at well, teens.
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This is a mainstream publication, owned by WaPo.
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EDIT: I was going to post this in the toy thread, but I think I'll keep that whole thing apolitical.
When the Blackout Tuesday social media phenomenon came about, a lot of companies I have a lot of goodwill towards bent the knee. A position that everybody conveniently forgets was born to be used against the American flag, and posted some critical race theory gobbledygook.
LEGO got in a tizzy, not advertising police sets (and the Architecture White House) for whoever knows how long. This was, in all honesty, when I was having one of my super weak phases since the new Summer sets had just come out. That incident gave me serious pause.
I never thought I'd be the guy who couldn't buy something because a company held positions I disagreed with, but this isn't just that, these companies are genuinely funneling money to organizations like BLM (which I'm starting to think is just a giant protection racket) and so when I give them money, it goes to them.
As of now, the only companies I'll probably keep engaging that do these things are Crunchyroll (because I literally need it no matter what) and Amazon (because it's a monopoly).
I'm not going to keep a list or anything, but I'll always pause if I remember something.
As far as I'm concerned, the biological machinery -- not just the sex organs but also the other details such as biochemistry -- continue to exist regardless of whatever people call them, but people are simply arguing over what to call them. You've picked your label, while others dispute that choice.
(My position for now is "whatever".)
Okay, so here's an example of where you're wrong: you seem to think that I fit neatly into those boxes for figuring out what people are like, boxes that you've acquired one way or another, my best guess is by reading too many bad takes on what people are like, though it's quite possible you just came up with some of them on your own anyway. And so you're saying to me "you're making that same mistaken assumption that culture doesn't matter". And I'm sitting here scratching my head trying to figure out how the hell you came up with that idea from what I posted because I'm not even sure what it means with regards to the situation (well, either of the two current topics of dispute) for "culture" to "not matter" and I'm having trouble figuring out close far or close it is from my actual position because I can't even can't even figure out where to pin it on my radar.
Sometimes I get the feeling that you and I aren't just in two different spaces but two different dimensions.
(Also I furthermore also don't get the "You're not a conservative, but" part of the sentence.)
Anyhow, as for the rest of it, that just looks like your justification for why you care to take a stand/push back/make a big deal/etc. about (at least some of) this stuff. Well, that, combined with your being a lot more opinionated about this than I am, though at this point I've basically taken the opinion that I shouldn't be forced to care about it.
...which, incidentally, is the actual attitude characterizing the conservative backlash against people pushing for LGBTQ rights.
I have no specific name for such a publishing environment, but my response to seeing would be rolling my eyes and promptly going back to doing something I find more important or pleasing.
And if you actually listened to that podcast (which I did and I'm annoyed that they don't have a proper transcript), you would have noticed that:
* they clearly do not like violence, and describe it in a variety of negative ways (e.g. calling it "chaos" and asking when it'll end)
* their point is that peaceful protest alone does not work and those who object to protest will object no matter how peaceful it is (for example, even kneeling, of all things, was so heavily objected to)
* the example they brought up was Martin Luther King Jr., who was known for nonviolent protest but who also had his home heavily defended with armed guards, and the lesson they (the commentators in the podcast) took away from this was that nonviolence is "offense" in the conflict over social change while violence is to be used for defense.
So, no, this is not an advocacy of looting.
But even if it were, I should remind you of the countless articles that human civilization has published that advocate going to war. Even within the past hundred years, wherein human civilization had already learned a nasty lesson that war is a very bad idea.
And what's wrong with kneeling? It's a posture that's been used since forever, long before current political fads, as a way to express humility. It just wasn't in the news since the practice wasn't unusual enough to be newsworthy. Still though I'm rather surprised you don't seem to have seen it before.
Besides, even if it was made up just for this, what exactly is so morally objectionable with expressing disappointment at the American flag?
i blame my clicking on fourteenwings's tweet for leading me to this lol
Because:
a) Colin Kaepernick started this movement and I've explained why I don't agree with that
b) In the new context shows subjugation. It's a ritual and visual image of subjugation. And sometimes (not all) it appears to be the subjugation of white people to black people, which is racism. It's not done in modern Western society outside of religious contexts.
I think America is cool and great and a wonderful place, I think the Western world is cool and great and a wonderful place. At the same time, I don't think any of it is inundated with all the adjectival racism that people claim, and I believe the claims to the contrary have become so loud that I can no longer safely ignore them in believing they are not gaining power.
So, I will personally no longer contribute to anybody who is so blinded by the pursuit of audience that they cater to those that hold this belief.
Everybody else can do what they want, which is what I prefaced practically all of my statement with. I've already said that this is essentially the way of the hermit.
I think I'm going to tap out for today. This is getting big and expansive and is basically unending.
I'll try and tap out more in the future.
I genuinely never expected her to keep against the tide this long:
Man, I should have said this months ago. More fool me, I suppose, but I guess I'm finally at the end of my rope with this continuous, unabashed bigotry wrapped in a sugary sweet facade. You (and her) have both been constantly spouting pseudoscientific drivel under the guise of "just asking questions", and I'm sick of it. I will not deign to speculate on the reason you didn't face any significant pushback here sooner, but that's beside the point.
So here we go. You don't get to freely lie about us anymore. You don't get to pretend you "don't mind the existence of trans people" when you've spent months denigrating every step we take in lip service to a poor, maligned billionaire. You absolutely mind our existence. As does Maya Forstater, whose lack of a renewal of her job contract was for creating a hostile work environment for her colleagues, not for, as Rowling puts it, "lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets."
Acting as if autistic teenagers are being "pressured" into transition is, frankly, disgusting. We're not mindless shells incapable of self-determination, we're not idiots.
Lisa Littman's study into the non-existent phenomenon of "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" was completely devoid of scientific rigor and suffered from gross self-selection bias. Her interviews were with parents who frequented ~gender critical~ forums, and were, by that very nature, disposed to claim that their children had "suddenly" become trans.
The unsourced numbers she cites for detransition are unsourced because they're pulled out of thin air, and even if they weren't, a range of 30% is worse than useless.
There is literally no evidence that suggests that letting trans people into bathrooms will cause an uptick in sexual assault rates. As it turns out, bathroom signs already form a poor deterrent to rapists.
I should note at this point that I'm not writing these for your benefit. I'm writing it for others, so they can educate themselves on the facts. Because I know you don't actually care, that you made up your mind long ago. The fact that you consider us little more than play actors, that you're more concerned that a world-famous author might have to, horror, self-publish than with the many trans people who can't get jobs at all proves that just fine. I have to self-publish, I don't see many pity parties going on for me!
Frankly I'm disgusted at myself for ever considering you a friend. I always hoped I was a better judge of character than that.
Stonewall was a riot, Pride is a protest, we aren't going to shut up and sit down because you and yours think we're being too loud.
The meaning of this gesture, in the current context, is to honor/respect/grieve for/mourn the victims of police brutality, especially those who are black, since (as is known from both anecdotes and statistics, even in spite of the limitation you specified earlier, which is a concession itself already) they are disproportionately represented among such victims.
This gesture could be criticized as being disrespectful to the flag during what are intended to be displays of patriotic pride, but the furthest extent of this argument is that it is unseemly conduct that dampens the celebratory nature of a public event.
However, it is really not much different from a variety of other actions people take to honor victims of various issues, ranging from breast cancer to police killed in the line of duty. Other such topics have been highlighted in sporting events too.
Meanwhile, you're upset that this issue that you didn't know about has, in recent years/months/days, seemingly suddenly eaten up a large part of the social conversation. I agree that it has, though I'd also note that the immediacy of social media has greatly amplified this focus. This is certainly not the only thing going on in the United States right now (not that social media, particularly that of international prominence, is a good way of knowing what's going on). But it's also an issue that's been on and off the back burner for literally decades, if not more.
Why can't the United States of America both be "cool and great and a wonderful place" and also have a racism problem? They're not mutually exclusive, especially at the very broad level of using a label to describe this entire country.
Sure, it doesn't make sense to think "America is now bad because other people tell me there's a racism problem", but saying that is predicated on the idea of making a sweeping moral judgement of an entire country of three hundred million people. There is really no need to do that (even if people do keep doing that in the way they talk about stuff, which irks me to no end). The whole idea of whether America is "good" or "bad" ends up being pretty much just a feeling -- and especially so when it gets to thorny but entirely unnecessary questions like whether to be "proud" or "ashamed" of it.
Similarly, that's why I've kept on saying that there's good and bad in policing, because it's possible to have both good and bad police officers, police departments (and departmental practices/policies/procedures/culture/etc.), and policework, in the United States. Heck, possibly even within the same officer's record. The bad does not obviate the good, nor does the good obviate the bad. Any suggestion of either is inaccurate. (There are literally thousands of (Wikipedia says 17,985) police agencies in the US, and the hundreds of thousands of people they employ -- which isn't just sworn officers, by the way -- are people too.)
Seriously, if I had to pick a
hill to die onmoral imperative to campaign on it'd certainly be neither "the police are bad" nor "there is no racism problem". But I don't think I'd get anywhere with a big sign saying "IT'S COMPLICATED".And as much as I actually enjoy trashily exciting police chase dashcam videos with voice-over dramatizing commentary, I'm aware that police work is much more than just that, and also often nowhere near as ethically clean-cut; the interpretation of it as "cops vs. robbers" (or substitute your choice of criminal class as desired) is a potentially very dangerous oversimplification.
Um, no.
1. Given that racism is indeed a thing in the United States, your attempt to claim that is isn't is simply wrong. (And one could say "it's all in the mind" and just a matter of perceptions, but then again so are basically all social phenomena, which makes them no less real.) If you want to actually de-escalate and solve the problem then the right approach would be to encourage peaceful dialogue. But the position you've staked out here is not one of "it's complicated; let's get together and sort this out." Instead, you're taking the position of "I need to push back against this!", along with "this isn't a problem!". The position you've taken solves nothing but instead feeds the conflict by misrepresenting the other side and denying the reality of the situation.
2. "safely"? I don't see how this affects your safety at all. Unless you live in the USA and I didn't know about it. Though, like I alluded to earlier, an overwhelmingly powerful police force with no buy-in from the community is also a recipe for disaster, so don't pretend like simply siding against the protesters is going to solve the problem. At most it just sweeps it under the rug...until the next time something happens.
Hmmm... let's see... what would be right thing to say now... gck, Naas, help
Can I add one thing though? I do feel the need to reply to this part: I think you're underestimating the amount of transphobic vitriol out there (maybe due to being involved in LGBT spaces?), I can only speak in terms of personal experience but said personal experience overwhelmingly tells me the people who do mind (negatively) about trans people are far from negligible.
I'm going to try and de-escalate.
I'm way past the "just asking questions" phase. I was there for a long time when I was willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. Haven't been there in ages.
I've said this elsewhere:
I genuinely currently have friends who, when they expressed certain political positions to me, I abhorred those positions. I still do. However, I still hold those friends dear, because fighting over politics is dumb.
I really liked being friends with you, and it's okay if you don't want to be friends anymore. I mean, we haven't spoken in ages, but I'm glad to know you still thought of me as one.
....
Oh actually I did have an update on this:
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I made a Valley Girl Speak misstatement here. I mean, in terms of when we elevate things to this level of the argument.
I mean when I say "Nobody minds the existence of gay people" I'm not including the vast majority of Africa, literally all of the Middle East, most of East Asia, a bunch of Eastern Europe, a lot of the internet, etc, or even that one National Review commenter who wouldn't stop mentioning about how Pete and Chasten Buttigieg's marriage was invalidating her own marriage every time the Democratic primaries came up.
In this context I am talking about, people who hold views like Alice's have already won quite bigly. I've accepted the loss (others haven't, like J.K.R., Colin Wright, Claire Lehman, Arielle Scarcella, Graham Linehan, Fair Play UK, LGB Alliance, 4th Wave Now, The Kelsey Coalition, and so on), and the world moves on.
In terms of the LGBT+ message that will be repackaged and shipped out to the world over the next decade, this is it. I can't stop that (I mean, in just one respect, think about the dough the pharmaceutical companies are raking in on hormones for teens, a bunch of the time via government funding). However, I don't have to agree with it either. I certainly will never capitulate to it.
If the metric for "winning" is simply putting the issue of social acceptance on the table, then yes, then yes, something has been "won". On the other hand, if "winning" means social acceptance, the way we don't bat an eye today at, say, a woman owning a business or wearing pants, then clearly there's quite a long ways to go.
I'm assuming the NR commenter is an American.
I've literally explained that:
That's it. No more, no less. The pamphlets that are handed out, the message that'll be streamlined by TV shows, movies, books, and all popular culture, the outline of acceptable procedures, etc. It's a big scope, the key to changing the world, but it's not even the door, let alone what's beyond the door.
To be cynical; there's no way everybody's opinion on everything changed in ten years.
IIRC there was a thing about Muslim Americans joining Democratic coalitions because of the Republican approach to them post-9/11 and slowly becoming alarmed by their offspring's staunch pro-LGBT views.
My point was that I think you overestimate the degree of social acceptance.