Why does it seem the world is all of a sudden concerned about sexual orientation? Especially America. Did I miss how far we came as a society to see it take a 40 year step backwards?
Exactly. Its no coincidence we went from Occupy Wall Street and national level discourse about actual healthcare and UBI, to such debates as 'is genocide okay?' and 'are nazis bad?' Purposeful misdirection that in it's staunch opposition to anything left of capitalism, created fascism.
You know, it's perfectly OK to group voters by identity, so long as that identity cannot exclude "Normal" people. Soccer Mom, Six pack Dad, Middle class, working poor, labor, Small Business owner, Rural, Urban, and Suburban are all perfectly fine to promise these groups political power. But you do the exact same thing for queer people or black people and that's identity politics all of a sudden.
Astroturfing.
Also, look up the genesis of the conservative media apparatus - specifically, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and how that whole thing came to be in the post-Nixon era. There’s a lot of context, and none of it was done in good faith. The intent was always to game social norms and leverage populist appeals to emotion into tribal ideologies (I.e. us-vs-them/ingroup-vs-outgroup). That’s ultimately the fundamental basis for conservatism.
These days, foreign influence operations (often based in authoritarian countries) aimed at increasing the polarization of a target population also play a major role.
You had me in the first half. All this foreign influence talk is hugely overblown. Not non-existent, but so small that it may as well be. It’s a convenient excuse for Clinton’s embarrassing election failure, and it’s convenient for manufacturing consent for heightened belligerence toward Russia.
No need to manufacture that, we have a surplus inventory already
Hey folks, nothing to see here. Just the .ml account telling us that Russian influence in the US is overblown! (Just as the DOJ shows us the tip of the iceberg of Russia desperately trying to get Trump elected.)
But the right loves Russia they're super right wing, putin is even offering people free citizenship if they're fleeing 'woke western politocs'
Belligerence to Russia comes largely from the fact they invaded a neighboring nation
Conditions have gotten worse and the ruling class has chosen a scapegoat to distract people from the ongoing class war.
So I am a class? Feel so blessed and afraid at the same time.
You've gotten enough good answers that I think it okay to address a tangent.
Things are definitely at the point where christofascists, and other hate driven ideologies are getting louder.
But, and this is vitally important as to why the pushback is making it a matter of public discourse at the level you're asking about, there's more allies now than ever.
Be ready for old man talking here, and ignore if not interested. Disclaimer: I have arthritis, and it's easier to type gay than LGBTQ, so I'll be using the shorter word for that reason, not as an exclusion.
Back in the seventies and eighties, gay rights was a thing for mostly gay people. Before that it had been gaining minor support, and the eighties were when social restrictions started changing enough that gay people were allowed to have some degree of public awareness in both news and fiction.
I keep bringing it up in various places, but Billy Crystal played the first recurring openly gay character on television. That was in 1977, and ran until 1981. I don't think it can be said enough how huge that was in bringing awareness of gay people as just people was. That role brought gay into our homes and lives in a way nothing had before.
When something makes a group real to the majority, makes things stop being a dirty secret and just another part of life, you get kids growing up that are more open and accepting. As acceptance grew, so did the amount of people coming out.
As people came out, the straights realized that not only had they always known gay people, but they liked them, and even loved them for years, sometimes a lifetime. When that starts spreading, you have more people that are willing to support gay people and their rights as fellow humans.
Instead of being pariahs, gay people became part of life, part of our hearts. Eventually, more and more people that didn't have direct relationships with someone gay became allies, supporters.
However, the more gay people became a part of life, the more noise bigots made, in their own homes and in public. So, instead of it being a dirty little secret nobody talked about, that way of thinking got nastier and louder. Before, it wasn't something everyone would even know about until much later in life, but as the gay rights movement in the seventies started building up steam, you had more hatred being spewed as well. There had been before, but it was more likely to be handled with dismissive or contemptuous remarks rather than outright venom and bile in the open.
Now, us folks that were kids during the late 70s and early 80s didn't just accept gay folks. We would often defy elders that opposed gay rights or bad talked them. As time passed and we grew up, the segment of that generation that became allies tended to be more and more vocal in our support. By the nineties, my generation was moving into adulthood and willing to vote our conscience. We were willing to put our time and money into the cause. Sometimes, we'd put our bodies on the line when things got ugly.
Move forward to now, and you've got two or three generations actively and loudly opposing the bigots, and not just the gay people. The bigots are smaller in number, but have been pandered to by political groups around the world, so have more weight than their numbers should give them.
Mind you, the bigots also include people of every generation too. Don't imagine that there aren't kids even that spew the same kind of nastiness that's been used since before the 70s. But there's more in direct opposition to them, and plenty of passive dismissal of the bigotry. Bigotry is not a relic of the past, nor is it limited to older generations; some of the loudest and most obnoxious hatred gets spewed by younger adherents. But the seeming percentage of hate is lower in younger generations, and the seeming percentage of outright support is higher.
That puts us in the situation we're in, where hate has a bigger voice than it should, and love/acceptance has to shout louder to oppose it.
Hey.
I really enjoyed your comment. It's very well written. Nice job. That's it; that's all.
Thanks :)
Things are definitely at the point where christofascists, and other hate driven ideologies are getting louder.
Good time to bring up how their numbers are drastically thinning. This is a big win and part of why we need to fight them hard as their fear of marginalization causes them to switch from dirty tactics to outright fascism to cling to power.
Survey: White Christianity is declining while the religiously unaffiliated keep growing
they are popular because they provide simple answers to complex issues.
People like that. Esp younger folks.
Just like the alt right is so popular with them, because it gives them simple answers.
Left doesn't have simple answers. Wants you to listen to a college course type of lecture on every issue... people don't care about that. They want a simple soundbyte they can emotionally respond to. Left is very poor at that... there are some examples, but they dont' really get much traction outside of leftist/socialist circles.
That bump in 2020 is kind of interesting. The reason seems obvious, but correlation does not equal causation and all that. It does make me wonder if a big chunk of people claiming to be unaffilated are doing so because they think it's the correct answer to give, not because it's actually true. (My theory being that the pandemic made them decide they better stop denying Jesus for awhile or whatever)
it really feels like it's at a boiling point though right now. World governments have all shifted more to the right on average than they have in the last 80 years.
governments have all shifted more to the right on average
it appears to be the case. though afaict none of it appears to be organic.
There's been some surprising upsets recently though! We were all bracing for a fashy-wave but lots of progressive leaders have been elected lately, after it looked like their hardline iron-fist nationlist counterparts were gaining ground.
By no means a reason to take it easy and give them a breather, oh no! But we should definitely acknowledge every little bit of dystopia we manage to collectively avert. Even if only a little.
Because the right offers people stability, authority, etc. People like that.
They don't like left because it's too vague and complicated to understand their points of view.
Trans people = bad is a lot easier for the average person to understand, than explaining to them what a transsexual person is and isn't, and the various types of trans/queer identities. That shit requires a dictionary and hours of time to understand.
A little late-80s perspective: when I was growing up, "gay" was an insult we'd call eachother jokingly. Nobody "was gay" because that's a (light, funny) slur. Hell, it wasn't till I was 28 I realized it didn't "have a dating-girls phase" that I never grew out of, I was just bi.
The homophobia is still pretty deeply ingrained even in people who aren't that old and are really trying. I can only imagine how bad it is for those who aren't and don't.
I still have a hard time digesting "gay" as a slur. We simply didn't use it that way, ever. F@g could go both ways and my gay friends happily slung it at each other. An attempt to take the word back from the haters I guess. At least that word was sometimes used as a real insult.
We're of an age, and I too try to bring perspective to younger readers. All true, I was there, I saw it.
Equal rights for
regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity are something that we, as a society, actually solved decades ago that aren’t even a question. They were brought back into public discourse by corrupt people that seek to keep us distracted while they rob us all blind. The two party system in the US (and any nation that uses a FPTP voting system that limits us to a MAXIMUM of two viable parties) is a HUGE reason why they still exist.
The reason we still argue endlessly about these solved issues is that the two parties are so similar in their other policies that they have decided to highlight those issues (as if there’s even a debate about them) because the two parties align in lockstep behind the other issues. The super wealthy people at the top don’t want us talking about things that will cause ALL of us to stand up and demand improvements to our material conditions so they have their demagogues loudly trumpet the absolutely miniscule differences between them and the conservative parties to whip their voters into a frenzy in support of voting against their best interest.
Then, I have to fight with unwitting dupes in the comment section that have fallen victim to the marketing gimmick that the black female version of Reagan is “fighting for good” despite her being politically aligned with Reagan on virtually every issue other than identity politics.
I’m calling the DNC technique of wrapping Reaganomics in a friendly identity politics outer shell “woke-washing” because of how similar it is to “green-washing”.
Chomsky proved this conclusively.
I’m calling the DNC technique of wrapping Reaganomics in a friendly identity politics outer shell “woke-washing” because of how similar it is to “green-washing”.
Some More News did a segment on how Regan forced the Democrat Party to go further right in order to achieve power. Same thing happened in the UK after Thatcher. The Labour Party swung right to get votes.
I don't have the data however I would imagine, that after the the conservative 80s, a lot left wing parties moved to the right to capture votes.
Also Regan elevated Jerry Falwall and the Christian Religious Right.
Coverage naturally gravitated toward Lynchburg, Virginia, preacher Jerry Falwell, who had supported Anita Bryant’s 1977 anti-gay-rights crusade, and Virginia Beach television mogul Pat Robertson, who was involved with the Washington for Jesus rally of April 1980 (scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of the first landing at Jamestown).
Falwell, head of the Moral Majority (another nod to Nixon), was more eager to enter the political arena. He thus became the first anointed spokesperson of what was then commonly called the “Religious New Right.”
During the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan and the evangelical conservatives engaged in a very public courting ritual. Evangelicals had entertained possible GOP alternatives to Carter since at least 1979. Options abounded— ranging from right-wing purist Philip Crane of Illinois to early front-runner John Connally of Texas—but Reagan, long a darling of conservatives in general, was an especially compelling choice. By the time Moral Majority executive director Robert Billings signed on as a Reagan campaign adviser, the deal was pretty much sealed.
Truly Regan was a piece of shit.
That’s actually a bullshit talking point used by the Progressive Policy Institute (which are not even remotely Progressive) and other right wing think-tanks. They pushed right because of the DLC. They used the “capturing votes” thing to excuse the rightward push. They STILL love that talking point despite Bernie having the most bipartisan grassroots support in the last 40 years..
They had to move heaven and earth to cheat him.
IMO, Clintonites and neoliberals were even more nefarious since they successfuly pretended to be leftists while purposely pushing the Democratic Party rightward to what we see today. Coupled with regulatory capture in the form of Citizens United, they now have a virtually-impenetrable corporatist stronghold in the US.
Further reading: https://www.salon.com/2016/04/30/clintonism_screwed_the_democrats_how_bill_hillary_and_the_democratic_leadership_council_gutted_progressivism/
That fucking rock was installed a few years ago to keep homeless people from sleeping. Very inclusive 😡
Yup. The DNC should use that in an honest rebranding.
Equal rights for all (except the poor).
That rock is inclusive! It doesn't let any homeless person sleep there. The rock does not care about skin color, race, sexual orientation, gender, etc.
exactly. and bigotry isn't limited to sex or race stuff.
people pretty much hate anyone who is different than them. even so called progressive inclusive hippie types... will express crazy bigotry towards groups they don't like based on crude stereotypes that are largely not true.
our brains love to generalize. They don't like treating people who are different than us as worth our acknowledgement and esteem.
According to the GSS, only 10% of Americans reaponded "Agree" or "Strongly Agree" to the statement "Homosexuals should have the right to marry" in 1988 (first year the question was asked).
In 2004, it was 30%.
In 2022 it was 67%.
Also according to the GSS, 40 years ago a third of Americans thought homosexuals shouldn't have the right to speak.
We've made remarkable progress in a very short period.
Yeah, trans people are just new targets. DOMA wasn't that long ago, but regressives lost the battle against gay people, so trans people are just the next rung on the hate ladder for them.
Is that why I had to fly to a different state to marry my gf instead of my home state who does not recognize same sex marriages?
these things come up whenever the right wing needs a distraction. they have to keep finding new groups to blame society's ills on, so that conservatives don't realize it's their politics that lead to those.
whenever a group inevitably becomes too accepted (or at least not feared enough) to be a distraction, they move on to the next group. sometimes they bring an oldie back because that's fashion for you.
If that were the case, the Dems could just stand up and say, “You and I both know that those aren’t even issues. They are open and shut case of right vs. wrong. Here are the issues that actually matter to people on both sides of the political spectrum:
and they would win in a landslide (if elections were even fair in the first place).
But they don’t because they know that it allows them to give the donors (who are considered PEOPLE with ability to funnel ANY amount of money to a candidate because of Citizens United) what they want (more money) while doing ANYTHING to distinguish themselves to their sheeplike electorate.
The 1% needs to endlessly divide the working class against itself. It's an old game with new tricks.
Well to be fair a lot of those politicians aren't in the 1%, they just want to be. And they're more than happy to toe the party line and step on everyone they can in order to get to the top. And then there's the true believers, but let's be honest anybody who's a true believer or anything is crazy.
Especially America? There are countries executing people for their sexual orientation.
Well in america it seems to seems that people are theologically do things against LGBTQ and enacting them. The news we get and i preface this while knowing America is on the brink of it. That other countries or instutions are savages. Not my opinion but what we see daily.
My guy, there are entire countries controlled by Islamic Extremists where you're lucky if all they do is kill you when they find out you're LGBT, and it's entirely for "theological reasons."
I put this in quotes, because I'm not nor have I ever been a Muslim. But Islamic Extremists will kill gay people for supposed "theological reasons."
It's most definitely not just America doing it because "mah holy book says it's wrong."
Honestly a lot of it is just that trans people entered the popular consciousness and as the conversation started becoming mainstream a bunch of the already shit folks decided to capitalize on the deficit of people's understanding on the topic to smear and discredit progressive spaces as a whole.
It's all very vibes based on their side. They took a topic that has a lot of nuance and flattened it to take advantage of a view of the world that invents problems that feel true.
Like "There are trans rapists in women's prisons"... Out of the current 5000 trans people incarcerated in the US only 15 of them are currently in prisons that match their gender identity. The transition requirements are so high that there is no guarantee that being on estrogen for 10 years, full sterilization and bottom surgery is enough for a trans woman to meet the requirements.
Or
"Our lost lesbian sisters are getting sterilized in mass transitions to become trans men"... When hysterectomy isn't even a common gender affirming choice. Testosterone tends to halt menses so a lot of the time trans guys who want biological kids particularly can and do keep the bits and detransition (which just means a change in transition status not a full conversion to cisness) temporarily to meet that life goal if they see fit. Basically having fertility is a matter of going of testosterone for a couple of months.
But who is going to actually check this stuff. They know people won't.
it's mostly that it is social wedge issue that drives up ratings, outrage, and politicians can grandstand about it. And make up crazy bullshit about kids being forced to transition by evil doctors or something.
and therefore we can ignore real issues in the country while the media/pols rant on about total nonsense that affects hardly anyone and mostly isn't real or relevant to trans people or any people at all.
Oh man, I'd never even considered the fact that all these supposed "male rapists in female prisons" have had bottom surgery.
Like, what man cares so much about being able to rape women that he gets his dick cut off? That's so much easier to believe than the idea that trans women actually are what they say they are (i.e. they are trans women, not men with a fetish or whatever other grossness)?
After damn near a decade of discourse with cis people I think I have an insight into the problem.
We as trans people assume cis people have an internalized gender that matches their sex... But in talking with cis people I actually think it's something else. I think the vast majority of cis people's experience of gender only comes from external influences... I have met cis people who recognize what we're talking about when I talk about this sort of internal compass that sends feedback completely isolate of any social influence but like it's actually rare.
So we are in the unfortunate position of having to explain an internally experienced phenomenon that cis folk literally do not experience to a bunch of skeptical people who's entire experience of gender is performance based... So they fill in the gaps with motives that makes sense to them that involve the nessisary involvement of some kind of external social or stimuli because they cannot conceptualize anything different while we have to render the problem using analogs cis people are likely to understand... But are also based off of externalized influences and thus completly imperfect.
The transition requirements are so high
what are the requirements?
Honestly depends on your state and institution and overall is incredibly vibes based. Like depending on the state the system might be on the hook to allow a bottom surgery... But whether or not you "fit the requirements" won't be determined until after the fact. If the people running the system are anti-trans you will be lucky as a post op trans person to be allowed horomones at all. There's documented situations of trans women basically entering a sort of menopausal state and having their horomones witheld indefinitely by wardens basically because there isn't a lot of oversight or consequences for doing so.
It's also taken as kind of a given that sexual assault of trans people is just a thing that is accepted as a cost of doing business. This is something actually that Trans men stuck in women's prisons also report as a common experience. The system as it is designed raises the risk for a lot of trans women in prisons seeking transition because if you get bottom surgery and you are denied transfer your sexual assault chances skyrocket to "expectedly matter of course" .
So while the 15 people who have made it all are fully medically transitioned, fully sterilized and been on hrt for longer than the required time for athletes the answer regarding requirements is generally "at the pleasure of the administrations in question which is most often not at all"
Part of the problem with arguments like that is if you say 'trans women are not widely represented in women's jails' they can say 'yeah but the left want to change that with self ID and all the other things they push for' so really the only point you've made in their mind is that its good the people pushing these things aren't in power.
Surely no one can deny that the lefts messaging has been that a trans person should be able to enter any gendered space without question? You never see trans advocates say 'yes creepy men pretending to be women to gain access to female spaces is a legitimate problem which we intend to protect against by...' they say 'its not a problem, will never be a problem and anyone who says it might be is evil and stupid and bad'
Everyone knows a lot of men are creepy, everyone knows that there are rapists who if able to get put into a woman's jail would jump at the chance - if one side is going to pretend these aren't true simply because it makes the rest of their belief on the issue difficult to explain then that's not on the normies who don't accept it without question.
Up until the run up to the election the UK labour party for example pledged self ID legislation would be made law and there was huge outcry from trans advocacy groups when they changed their mind - you can't argue that something you're trying to make happen isn't a problem because it doesn't yet happen.
You see but here's where how you're putting this works together with other things. You are looking at trans people on the whole as a safety issue to the population at large. The framing of trans people on the right always places us as a problem l. That is an outright dehumanizing tactic and the answer is always left kind of purposefully vague because the answer is "we aren't supposed to exist."
The outcome of all this discussion is basically to raise the hurdles of being trans in a pubic space. To be frank, they know that basically making life miserable enough for us will solve their "problems" because when life gets too hard and devoid of joy and relief death becomes viable.
So they frame us as a public safety problem, a categorical problem, a mental health problem, a medical problem, a "ruining your fun" problem, a freedom of speech problem because they know every time they do so that you will think of us as a group a little less in terms of being people and a little more as a sacrifice that deserves what we get.
It doesn't matter that prisons don't change their design to fit us because as long as we're the ones getting raped the system is fine.
It doesn't matter that public toilets don't change their design to make everyone safer as long as we never go out in public long enough to use one.
It doesn't matter that basically it only takes six months to dial in what your dosage of hrt and from then on it's just a prescription like every other you pick up monthly for any other medical condition . As long as we're interpreted by the system as an 'undue medical burden' we can basically just allow stress to ruin our bodies so we die faster and voters can feel like they've saved resources.
It doesn't matter that we have kids of our own because us "not being safe to be around children" means that we are banished from parental and teaching spaces and the child protection services can be empowered to take our children away to raise them "safely" .
The arguements that never frame systemic solutions that include trans people are paving the way for our genocide. They are designed to get you to stop thinking right before you ever consider us worthy of accomodation. You are supposed to look at us as taking YOUR resources away, making YOUR spaces less safe, ruining YOUR culture so that you feel unsafe and attacked even when those things aren't actually happening. This effect is called creating a "Moral exclusion" and it is the first steps to creating outcast sections of society who you are not supposed to question where they SHOULD exist because you are primed to only think about them as in terms of where they should NOT exist.
There is good reason why we do not soothe your fears about evil creepy cis men in women's bathrooms. Because it's bad faith rhetoric designed to give us no recourse to argue that we should have as much a right to be safe. The fact is the numbers are in. In the ten plus years in my city where trans inclusion is the norm there has been no uptick in stalking incidents regarding bathroom use. Just because you are being engineered to feel less safe by politicians doesn't mean you actually are less safe but you are making US less safe. But that's not a problem because you aren't supposed to value our safety or comfort even a little. Your not caring is useful to specific people so they are going to keep training you to do that and to never ask where the trans people went. Because unless you have the misfortune of being one of us or loving one of us enough to care we are just a problem.
It's so dumb, like of all the challenges facing us as a species now, THAT'S the shit that people are getting worked up about? Life on Earth for humanity is in the process of going through a set of major environmental changes that we're probably not ready for and is going to have catastrophic results for some... and there's people out there getting bent out of shape about pronouns and sexual orientation. We need to be doing alot more preparing for what's coming over the next few years and a lot less bitching about things that don't personally affect us. It seemed like we had made some big strides for awhile there, and that seemingly got erased within the past 8 years.
But those other things is stuff which askes a sacrifice of you personally, while someone else's sexual orientation only needs you pointing at them. In the Netherlands where I live it's a lot less about sexual orientation (but still some), and a lot more about foreigners, be it asylum seekers or people of Moroccan descent who's grandparents were brought over in 1960's because of labour shortages.
human brains are dumb.
takes a lot of effort and work to train your brain to not be dumb.
just like it takes lots of effort to keep your body fit and healthy.
cognitive biases are very very hard to overcome for highly educated people, let alone uneducated ones.
Conservatives have been furious about that progress this whole time. They will never accept progress. If permitted, they will undo every bit of anti-bigotry progress made in the last 100 years and return us to a slave-based economy.
Conservatism is a deadly social cancer. It always has been.
I suspect the truth is a lot more jarring/disruptive to your worldview than you might be ready to admit. I’m positive that you’ll shoot the messenger. You’re so close to the answer. It’s staring you right in the face.
The unfortunate truth is: The people (tribe) that you’re (rabidly) in support of are merely using those identity politics dogwhistles so that you’ll continue voraciously gobbling up the increasingly miniscule table scraps from the ruling class while thinking to yourself that you’re the last bastion of resistance against some great encroaching evil. When conservatives accuse the DNC of running the media, they’re not wrong. The DNC and their stable of “diverse” demagogues are masters of stage-managed, focus-grouped mass marketing. If they tell the truth, they are quickly disposed of.
Please read some Chomsky, my friend.
Your commitment to analyzing all of this through a small hole of ideas that are relevant to you is preventing what you’re saying from making complete sense. You’re omitting things and skewing the perspective with a lens.
This is because you’re both correct to some degree. Yes there is a large tribe who is using identity politics to gain support. However that support is less than equal to the other camp who uses scapegoating of said identities when you compare support on said social issues.
For all of time this has worked in politics and as always it is, as you point out basically, used to obscure the actual dealings.
Here’s where you’re completely off the rails. The DNC are masters at very little and especially are not masters at mass media marketing. Their slogans fail, their advertisements are bad, and they have failed to instill ideas that counter those of the right. The line about “conservatives are good for economy” still exists and they have no counter. The DNC are incredibly weak compared to the RNC.
Make no mistake, the DNC is scraping by because they do not represent exactly what the elite class believe as much as the republicans do. The media has mostly turned on them and criticizes their candidates about 10x more. Most of the media, owned by the elite class, does not belong to the DNC. Every major news network, including CNN now, goes against them and works counter to them.
And when we talk about why lgbt issues are present now, it has little to do with the tribalism you’re referencing. Little to do with identity politics. What’s even more rough to hear is that lgbt politics don’t matter to most voters. They matter to an LGBT crowd. Which is far smaller than the fundamentalists that the anti-lgbt are attracting. The DNC are not pro-LGBT in the way that we think of. They are pro-LGBT in the opposite way. The way where the other party has forced them to be.
Okay, but even if that's the case, what do we do about the very real consequences for trans people?
20 years ago we were killing people for being gay, 10 years ago that was the worst thing you could be, what are you on?
The prosecutor argued that the murder of Shepard was premeditated and driven by greed
McKinney's girlfriend told police that he had been motivated by anti-gay sentiment but later recanted her statement, saying that she had lied because she thought it would help him.
Price said she had lied to police about McKinney having been provoked by an unwanted sexual advance from Shepard, telling TV journalist Elizabeth Vargas, "I don't think it was a hate crime at all."[9][37] Rerucha said, "It was a murder that was once again driven by drugs."[9]
Doesn't seem to be a hatecrime. Just a crime against someone that happened to be gay.
yea yea saw the movie. It just kind of seems today more blatant then ever before. And on my off days I am usually on weed and alcohol. While I search for a new state to be stationed at.
There are 8 billion people in the world. If 10,000 people on Xwitter are upset about something, it's statistically insignificant.
This is what pisses me off about people that go on about I’m sick of this woke society or sick of these “crazy trans people”, or whatever else.
And I’m like brother I do not care and most people do not care. Let people do what they want it ain’t that deep. I’m off the view if it doesn’t negatively affect me then what business is it of mine how people live their life. The things they get outraged over is just from some minority of loons on Twitter and not everybody.
Because social media amplifies and incentivises minority, hateful views to make it seem like everyone is concerned about these things.
The reality is, it's the same small group of hateful idiots who are always in the spotlight.
In real life, even in small towns, people either don't care or they celebrate how far we've come as a society.
All the comments saying it's a distraction from how the working class is being oppressed by the owner class are right, but also...
There have always been bigots, small town small minded people who don't "know any gay people" but there was that one skinny boy in their class that didn't like sports so he was bullied until he left town at 18. And now, that generation of bigots is finally dying out. Not only due to age but due to an increased connection with the greater world. A small town bigot might not know any LGBT people personally but they are aware of their existence, due to television and the Internet. So quietly ignoring people who are different than you doesn't work anymore. And a dying animal fights harder than ever.
These death throes are useful to the owner class. But they are still dying out. And if we can exterminate capitalism and figure out a way to survive in a post-warmed globe, we might just see the end of (this particular type) of bigotry.
Dude, plenty of Democrats in their 30s who say they are progressive are raging bigots and support racist policies.
They are just quiet about it. They aren't saying crazy racist nonsense on tiktok, but if you talk to them about issues like housing or schools... they make it very obvious what they think. Using polite language, of course. Black people are great, as long as they don't live near them, or go to the same school as their kid goes to! These are the same people who are NIMBY because they don't want 'people who haven't worked as hard as I have' from living near them.
They are just quiet about it. They aren’t saying crazy racist nonsense on tiktok, but if you talk to them about issues like housing or schools… they make it very obvious what they think. Using polite language, of course. Black people are great, as long as they don’t live near them, or go to the same school as their kid goes to! These are the same people who are NIMBY because they don’t want ‘people who haven’t worked as hard as I have’ from living near them.
my favorite version of this "identity politics" minimizing the very real and tragic harms that our hegemony has done to its minorities.
So you see something that concerned 2% to 15% of the population use to hide in the closet and or we didn't talk about it or know.
Now people are done hiding. Which impacts tons of people who barely understand their anatomy let alone their wives. When school never taught intersex and gender despite it being a thing that was understood in science in the 60s and 70s. A lot of people are suddenly confronted with a reality they don't understand. When peoples bubbles are popped first comes rejection of thing then comes fear and anger. Issue is with 8 billion people there is constantly people learning about sexual orientation, gender, and sex.
Let's not even talk about the internalize confusion of you people either. This is just current existing people learning about this stuff today.
In my 36yr life it isn't any greater or lesser of a concern than it has been before, though I'm quick to think of the euphamism-treadmill as being constantly turning.
—To me It seems like sexuality is easy-pickings for politicians that don't want to write legislation that benefits the lower-classes. It's a big part of the "circuses" metaphor in the phrase "bread and circuses."
The US isn't any more concerned about sexual orientation now than any point in the past. Back in colonial times, it wouldn't have been safe to be anything other than straight with all the hyper religious colonists. They were even forcing their gender conformity and the straight sexual orientation on the Native Americans. Baron Friedrich von Steuben got a pass for being gay, probably because he was the one in charge of training the troops for Washington. 100 years ago, you could be killed on the street for being anything other than straight or denied jobs. The Lavender scare of the mid century brought this more to light. The AIDS crisis that started in the 80s and bled through into the 90s and 2000s as new medicines were being invented, further brought negative light to sexual orientations outside of straight. The cause of all of this attention to sexual orientation has been the religions brought over by colonists.
In recent years, sexual orientations outside of straight are finally being seen in a positive light with Lawrence v TX (2003) legalizing same-sex relationships and Hodges v Obergefell (2015) legalizing same-sex marriages. In Bostock v Clayton County (2020) legal protections against job discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity were finally put into place over 70 years after the start of the Lavender Scare.
The attention to sexual orientation has always been part of North American history. It has just changed from acceptance with the Native American peoples to hate, death, and intolerance under the colonists, to a more accepting present day. With some of the positive news in recent years, it can be easy to forget (if you're surrounded by progressives in a blue state) that the hate of sexuality injected into North America in the 15th Century still has hold over large portions of the population today.
Do you perceive this as a brand new issue in human society?
Well romans were fine with it. And the US people like to compare themselves to Romans at the height of the empire. But now it seems totally unforgiveable .
That's... disingenuous. Lot of stuff happened between those points, including the murder of homosexuals for the crime of existing.
The LGBT community keeps the fight up because complacency gets our rights taken away. Justice Thomas has explicitly stated that gay marriage is on his list of wrongs* to right. To say nothing of Project 2025.
lol they were fine with it as long as the queers were whores and such. they could not be citizens.
only people who had any power in Rome were male roman citizens, and the wealthy ones at that.
and lots and lots of folks blame the downfall of Rome on it's 'decay' of allowing homosexuality and such
literally russian bot farms
🤦🤦🏾♀️🤦🏻🤦🏽♀️🤦🏼♀️🤦🏿🤦🏾♀️🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽🤦🏿♀️🤦🏾♀️🤦🏽🤦🏽🤦🏾🤦🏽
All of a sudden? Where have you been the last 80-100 years?
Not that old yet.
Right, fuck, my bad. Welp, yeah, I’m sorry to say but I think it has more to do with your progression into understanding more about the world and perspectives outside of your own experience. In no way am I trying to be mean or discouraging. You asked a really valid and important question, and i guess i impulsively reacted and forgot there are people less jaded than me. For what it’s worth i admire you and hope that learning some people are STILL stuck being shitty doesn’t make you think everyone sucks. And I’m proud to learn that another person younger than me just ‘gets it’ that people are people deserving of love and respect regardless of bullshit like who they themselves love.
Yea but wasn't that moron Kim Davis denied a same sex mariage on religious belief even thought the constituions says a seperation of church and state? And the SCOTUS ruled in the gay couples favor? And now is trying to fight against paying attorney fees for the gay couple that she denied? That kim davis?
The internet has given global voice to people that would otherwise only be able to bounce those ideas back and forth across the barbershop floor
there are a lot of barbershops and we would never have known how fucked up so many of them are w/o the internet.
Why are people so interested in defining themselves along sexual identity and orientation in relatively recent western culture?
Why now? Why is it so different from most of human existence?
Because we are no longer facing famine. The Green Revolution has made our relationship with food so secure we no longer define ourselves in relation to it.
Throughout most of history people are farmers or ranchers or shepherds or bakers or butchers or millers.
So, we climb the Biological hierarchy of needs looking for our next characteristic that needs fulfillment.
not even. 1950s we had this idealized version that everyone was heterosexual, owned a home and had strict gender roles.
That shit is now all blown apart. And for most folks the complexities of it all are beyond understanding.
And it cuts both ways. I don't care about other people's genders and identities, but boy they care about mine. Gotten plenty of sexist slurs from queer/trans people based on my gender and lots of shitty assumptions. I'm bi, but I 'present' as a heterosexual dudebro, and it makes non-gender conforming people angry at me for some reason, also many insecure straight men and women. Only people who don't seem to care are people who are bi, or secure in their sexuality. Way too many people feel the need to do that though.
I'd just like to say that I'm not defining myself at any point, I'm describing myself.
A trivial point, maybe, but there's still plenty of bigots around and the ones around me use phrases like "defining yourself" to minimize and erase lbgtq+ people's experiences.
Are the Dharmic faiths particularly inclusive of queer folks? Or just by comparison? I don't know about Buddhism but China is somewhat antigay, and it's not like the Kama Sutra had any gay stuff in it, and with all the erotic Hindu temple art I've never seen any gay stuff going on. Happy to be corrected if I'm wrong in my amateur assessment here
I can't speak for Hinduism, but this Wikipedia article goes into some of the history of Buddhism in regards to sexuality. Generally, sex of all kinds, whether heterosexual or homosexual or sex with celestial beings, was seen as another one of the 10,000 things that could distract one from the path - but otherwise there was nothing particularly immoral about it. Monks and nuns generally had to follow rules that prohibited both, in order to remove distractions, but those rules were never meant for the general public, aside from the precept against the "misuse" of sexuality, which is ambiguous but thought to refer more to things like SA.
When we're talking about modern China, or the present day state of other historically Buddhist countries, it would be reductive to say that their current attitudes towards homosexuality are a product of religion, because it ignores more recent events and currents, and other historical factors. China was also historically influenced by Confucianism, which was more homophobic, but it was also influenced by a bunch of other philosophies, and today it's not very religious at all. Japan was historically very gay, and the 11th century Tale of Genji has a bisexual protagonist fucking everybody.
However, every historical tradition had to adapt to contact with the West during the age of colonialism. China at first tried hard to cling to its traditions and stubbornly refuse to adapt to new, Western ideas, but the "century of humiliation" happened and they realized they had to adapt or die. Japan was not directly colonized, but they still had a massive revamping of their society with all these new ideas coming in. Every country in Asia has a story like that. And then you have another 100 years of stuff happening after that.
China's modern day homophobia does not come from a place of "The Buddha said this was bad," rather, it comes from seeing homosexuality as a Western invention, and a symptom of "bourgeois decadence." Sadly, such brainworms are common in many socialist countries. There is a stereotype many people have that gay people all live in cities and spend all our time partying at nightclubs, because that makes for better TV than the reality does. Ironically, there are many countries in the world that once had their own more tolerant traditions that were replaced with Western values during colonialism, who now hold those values up as their own against more progressive, modern day Western values.
Michael Parenti addresses this well:
Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between worker and owner is essentially an exploitative one, involving the constant transfer of wealth from those who labor (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labor). This is how some people get richer and richer without working, or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing.
Those who occupy the higher circles of wealth and power are keenly aware of their own interests. While they sometimes seriously differ among themselves on specific issues, they exhibit an impressive cohesion when it comes to protecting the existing class system of corporate power, property, privilege, and profit. At the same time, they are careful to discourage public awareness of the class power they wield. They avoid the C-word, especially when used in reference to themselves as in "owning class;' "upper class;' or "moneyed class." And they like it least when the politically active elements of the owning class are called the "ruling class." The ruling class in this country has labored long to leave the impression that it does not exist, does not own the lion's share of just about everything, and does not exercise a vastly disproportionate influence over the affairs of the nation. Such precautions are themselves symptomatic of an acute awareness of class interests.
Yet ruling class members are far from invisible. Their command positions in the corporate world, their control of international finance and industry, their ownership of the major media, and their influence over state power and the political process are all matters of public record- to some limited degree. While it would seem a simple matter to apply the C-word to those who occupy the highest reaches of the C-world, the dominant class ideology dismisses any such application as a lapse into "conspiracy theory." The C-word is also taboo when applied to the millions who do the work of society for what are usually niggardly wages, the "working class," a term that is dismissed as Marxist jargon. And it is verboten to refer to the "exploiting and exploited classes;' for then one is talking about the very essence of the capitalist system, the accumulation of corporate wealth at the expense of labor.
The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the soothing adjective "middle." Every politician, publicist, and pundit will rhapsodize about the middle class, the object of their heartfelt concern. The much admired and much pitied middle class is supposedly inhabited by virtuously self-sufficient people, free from the presumed profligacy of those who inhabit the lower rungs of society. By including almost everyone, "middle class" serves as a conveniently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actuality of class power.
The C-word is allowable when applied to one other group, the desperate lot who live on the lowest rung of society, who get the least of everything while being regularly blamed for their own victimization: the "underclass." References to the presumed deficiencies of underclass people are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy and justify the unjust treatment accorded society's most vulnerable elements.
Seizing upon anything but class, leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinctiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.
Identity politics resonates with brain dead public.
We got the government we deserve.
Because gay rights have more and more support so they decided to pick an easier target.
They moved against the gays when abortion stopped being such a wedge issue, which itself replaced school integration to turn out the bigot vote.
The forces of reaction never went away, they just weren't as narketable for a few years, there. Companies are trying to increase their marketshare among bigots while also not alienating the people that don't hate gay people. So you get pinkwashed corporate logos and genocide along with cancelled gay shows and an increase in false history nouveau Westerns.
Wut. No one has an interest in depopulation but a few Malthusian kooks. The capitalist class certainly certainly doesn’t: who would then perform the labor from which they leach their wealth?
It's all about distraction. All of us seek entertainment because our lives are usually quite dull. So the media feeds us things to have opinions about. Politicians, big tech psychos, gender issues...
It's all pointless and keeps us from actually making any real difference. People here on Lemmy fight over which words to use, gender issues, or god forbid, someone admits they are not vaccinated...! Wow. Nuclear bomb right away.
None of this matters at all, it's just entertainment.. Nobody changes their minds from getting downvoted either. Sometimes it feels like keyboard warriors here think they are fighting some kind of fight. But nobody changes their mind guys, even if you downvote them.
So it's actually pure entertainment and distraction from what matters... :) We don't have to be so serious.
It's finally reaching such widespread acceptance that 1. Actual bigots are getting concerned they can't be bad people anymore and 2. Assorted people are getting tired of the discourse.
So how do we deal with the biggots?
I don't think the site admins would be appreciative of my suggestion :^)
In reality, forcing higher standards across the board raises the floor and can prevent enough bad behavior to be useful. Education and experience also encourage good behaviors. Basically, make it illegal to be a bigot, and let people learn why they don't want to.
american school system. decades of wrong education by specialising while not having broader knowledge and making education a side hustle while college football is their slave business.
this has led to a mostly degenrated society. an idiocracy.
Honestly a lot of it right now is the American election cycle, coupled with external cultural manipulation by bad actors abroad influencing social media, and making LGBT issues an affront to traditional cultural values ( like Russian networks framing Russia as a bastion of traditional social familial roles ). A lot of the culture war is amplifying existing tension on LGBT and 'woke' and turning it up to 11.
you're like the 4th person (American I guess) to blame Russian troll farms for the hatred coming out of America these days, absolving yourself from the actions of your fellow countrymen is understandable but pinning it to a foreign nation state is another
has'nt it always been American to hate and put down anyone who isn't white, straight and christian?
"Keep your private life private" Okay so I can't hold my gf's hand in the street but if I had a bf it would be normal. In some countries I wouldn't be allowed to marry her. Are those issues of making my private life public? A lot of people do care and hate us. Im getting weird looks everytime I'm with her in the street. So shut up about issues you're not concerned with.
I don’t think it’s good to just generalise a whole country of people. I’m not American but I realise we only really see the lunatics and crazy opinions. The regular people are as boring and uninterested as the rest of us, it’s just that doesn’t drive engagement.
Edit: Dudes complaining about mods here being as bad as Reddit stating no alternative opinions allowed. Strikes me if you’re having comments removed on multiple sites, that you’re the issue and not the mods. Perhaps conduct yourself better.
Aside from what everyone else has said, one of the big leaders to this scenario is that the world has gotten so much safer and so much less violent and so much more accepting that people have to literally scrape the barrels to find something to be outraged about.
We all of us know that the Republican playbook of taking rights away from people is a thing that is intended to target people and punish them for not adhering to the moral code of the people doing the targeting.
But the fact that we can spend so much of our national resources on arguing over morality is a side effect of the world being so good that we don't have to argue over worse things.
I'm not attempting to apologize or forgive anybody for their stance, but it is true that we are arguing over whether or not it's okay to have an abortion or whether or not it's okay to be gay rather than whether it's not okay to let have the country starve to death or whether or not it's okay to kill everyone all the time always.
I've said this before and I will inevitably say it again, human history is a pus filled boil on our consciences.
The only way to fix it is to lance it and to deal with all of the pus. We are in the pus clean up stage of human history, and in time with enough constant patient care, it will get better.
Have you seen the Russian psy ops instructions?
Got a manual?
Family sizes are down, birth rates are now 1 per family, maybe 2 children.
This is due to many reasons but mostly
Basically, there are better things for women to do then just have kids. This has a been a huge force multiplier for the economy
However, this means that family lines, genetic lineage, family names, dynasties... All rests on the shoulders of a single child. That's a lot of pressure.
When you had 10 children, and one or two were "special", it may have caused some drama but the lineage was still being secured by the other 8.
When there is only one child who then chooses a alternative life style that does not reproduce that means the END of a genetic line, the end of a name, the end of a dynasty, the end of a family. These things are hugely important to people.
I think people are more angry about sexual choices now, because they're more important, because people have less children.
END of a genetic line, the end of a name, the end of a dynasty, the end of a family. These things are hugely important to people.
Ohhh noo...
Anyway.
Do your research. Birth rate declines as cultural stability and wealth increase. Period.
Birth rate declines as cultural stability and wealth increase. Period.
Does this mean that birth control doesn't prevent teenage pregnancy?
CIA and maybe collaboration with Mossad. Pink and rainbow washing is used to justify regime change operations abroad.
Cultural progressivism has been used as a shield to implement bad economic policies.
Edit for those who do not understand:
Why does it seem you have all of a sudden started to look at information about sexual orientation? Did you miss that in the current information overload, everyone gets exposed to different information and no one can tell you why you are getting exposed to whatever you are getting exposed to?
As a lesbian I have had to overcome hatered but still don't understand why the whole world seems all of a sudden in the past decade to take all their hate out on gays and transgenders
That 40 year step backwards comes from good intentioned politicians making deals with homophobic devils so to speak in order to save other people.
good intentioned politicians
homophobic devils
😂 It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.
The capitalist class has class consciousness, and they understand that this is a class war. Until you develop class consciousness, the capitalist class will continue to take advantage of your false consciousness.
Rich shitbags funding divisive propaganda to make the plebs fight each other and vote against their own interests.
Any war but a class war...
Musk and JK Rowling come to mind, specifically.
JK Rowling is just mad that gender doesn't fit the sorting hat.
They both genuinely hate trans people though. Hell, Musk disowned his own trans daughter. Like if he was just in it to divide the population he wouldn't be treating his trans child so horribly.