promethea.incorporated

conductivemithril:

argumate:

nuclearspaceheater:

sinesalvatorem:

NRx blog: The latest push for transgender activism is designed to inculcate trans acceptance in the most intellectually vulnerable among us and to undermine parental authority.

Me: Haha. Silly reactionaries, thinking that upbringing affects children’s long term behaviour.

It’s actually all a front, on both sides, to deflect the true blame away from Big Plastic, a partly-owned subsidiary of Big Oil.

I want to see the plastic-makes-your-kids-gay meme take off in my lifetime just because of how frickin’ hilarious it’s going to be to watch.

Yo promethea. @socialjusticemunchkin

Plastic makes your kids trans, not gay. Srsly guys we’ve discussed this exact shit already.

3 weeks ago · tagged #not sure if more or less funny this way #because on one hand #transphobia cw #and on the other #delicious reactionary upsetness · 124 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink

shlevy:

genderfluid-ranma:

shlevy:

I often worry about what Drew Summit calls the “bourgeoisification” of socially liberal activism, wherein some policy or social shift is justified by emphasizing how normal and uncontroversial it is, often while explicitly throwing more “extreme” acts/people/situations under the bus. Gay people want to settle down, be monogamous, have 2.5 kids and a dog and a white picket fence just like you! Marijuana is really safe, safer than alcohol, and has some medicinal benefits too, it’s not like it’s *heroin* or anything!

On the one hand, the things this kind of activism focuses on are true. And they do address some of the concerns of people who would otherwise be opposed. And there’s a plausible case that over time this kind of strategy can lay the groundwork for the more weird cases to be accepted too (though I’d love to see concrete historical analysis here), and that even if they remain outside of the realm of the socially acceptable/legal they are at least not really much worse off for the change that’s being pushed.

On the other… These issues are totally besides the point. Marijuana should be legal even if it destroys your brain and kills you in 10 years. Gay people should be able to make arrangements about child care, shared finances, medical decisionmaking, etc. even if they’re living lives of constant drug-fueled sex parties in broken-down tenement homes. And not everyone can pass for normal, and not everyone wants to, and their legal rights shouldn’t depend on that.

I don’t have a solution here. I don’t know that this worry is justified; it may be that this kind of incremental change is exactly the right way to go. It feels like betraying my principles and letting values I don’t hold set the terms of the discussion, but feelings aren’t conclusions.

Marijuana absolutely should not be legal if it destroys your brain and kills you in 10 years. One of the key reasons for a government’s existence is to protect people from irrational choices. 

Re: gay marriage: prima facie the objection people have is “gay people are hypersexual fetishistic degenerates and thus tolerance for gay people is tolerance for moral decay”. Factually, “being gay” and “being a hypersexual fetishist” are orthogonal for the most part, which is what’s important here, because “actually hypersexual fetishistic degeneracy is great unlike your puritan morals which are based filthy lies that must be destroyed” is a discussion for a different day and a terrible objection to raise if you’re trying to make gay marriage legal.

It’s kind of like communism.

Did you know that people are pretty receptive to workers’ rights as long as you don’t mention Marx? “For each according to his ability, to each according to his need” sounds almost like a politically neutral phrase. People’s opposition to communism is mostly about, like, gulags and revolutions. Which is why internet marxists say “well, the bourgeoise must be of course slaughtered when we come to power. Join us now, and maybe we won’t kill you later.”

Respectability politics is the only reason anything ever gets done.

First, on the object level issues: I think that, possibly modulo some uncertain concerns about age and mental capacity, you have the right to do whatever you want to your own body. I also think you have the right to delegate financial, medical, childcare (modulo uncertain concerns about child abuse etc.), etc. concerns however you wish, regardless of the specific nature of your relationship with the person/people you delegate to. If you disagree with those things, fine, but this is not the post for you then.

Second, I think there’s a difference between incremental progress/aiming for low-hanging fruit and what I’m talking about here. You could look at the situation in, say, 2008 and say “hey, we’re pretty close with gay marriage, let’s focus our efforts on this” without specifically emphasizing “they’re normal, they fit into our existing social and economic system just fine, don’t worry this isn’t a gateway to polyamory or anything” etc. You could say “gay people are just as entitled to make decisions about their lives as anyone else, the legal institution of marriage is currently how our society mediates certain decisions people make about their lives, so as long as that’s the case gay people should be extended the right” and not simultaneously distance them from more extreme cases.

Finally, I acknowledged in the OP that it may in fact be the case that this is the best way to do things (though I am still interested in detailed analysis here). I acknowledged that this is just a feeling, and is not something that should guide decisionmaking. There is no reason to shove the last two paragraphs in my face like they are somehow news to me. But, if I were a communist and I believed the bourgeoise would need to be slaughtered when we came to power, it would at the very least be fundamentally disappointing that my so-called allies recoiled at that idea and it wouldn’t be completely illegitimate for the working class to consider me a traitor. OK,that analogy is so far from my actual views as to be unhelpful, so let me go to an actual stance: It is fundamentally disappointing that my so-called allies in the fight for drug legalization don’t actually care about bodily autonomy, they just don’t think pot is worth the government forcing us about, and to the extent I emphasize those reasons instead of the autonomy ones I could very well be considered an enemy of those whose drug use falls outside that range. Again, to reemphasize, it may be that this is the best we can do, and once the pot battle is behind us we can move on to the next step, but it feels off.

That argument about hypothetical super-harmful marijuana is way too broad. Any kind of an unpopular and stigmatized choice can be constructed as an “irrationality” that people must be protected from if the powers that be so desire. Gays? Oh no, they’ll be bullied and catch AIDS, we must therapize them straight. Trans people? Oh no, they’ll kill themselves, we must do everything we can to prevent children from expressing gender non-comformity. Suffragettes? Oh no, don’t they know politics will ruin a woman’s uterus, won’t somebody think of the children because these mothers-to-be certainly don’t. Transhumanists? Don’t they know death is a blessing in disguise, we must throw a million bioethicists at them to force them to die against their will.

Autonomy is the only option that can’t be co-opted by oppressors so easily (even then there’s childrens’ vs. parents’ autonomy etc. but at least it breaks less often than paternalism). Anything that can be used to actually prevent people from doing ‘scientifically irrational thing X’ can, and all too often will be used to destroy you and people you care about (pigovian taxes notwithstanding; they still impose a burden but at least it’s not completely insurmountable and/or violent in the same way legal prohibitions are, so if you want to reduce irrational thing X don’t ban it, just tax it (but not so much that you create profitable black markets that are hard to eradicate non-violently)). For example, trans people have spent something like half a century fighting against gatekeeping imposed on us because the establishment wanted to protect us from irrational choices and was, and mostly still is, unable to recognize the harm from doing so. Transhumanists are right now subjected to ridiculous biopolicing to protect the sanctity of repugnance or whatever it is cishumanists fetishize.

It’s obscene that often a doctor can’t do the thing I specifically ask and pay for, to my own body with my own informed consent, because “primum non nocere”; but governments are completely unbound by such rules and violent men with guns will definitely force all sorts of reckless things upon a non-consenting populace because some people think they know better than others and can cook up studies supporting them.

Bans are serious fucking business, they should be reserved for things actually worth using the state apparatus of violence on. Eradicating measles? Possibly worth it if the alternatives don’t work. Preventing people from frying their own brains in ten years? Fuck no.

3 months ago · tagged #primum non nocere: the first principle of responsible government #death cw #suicide cw #homophobia cw #transphobia cw #deathism cw #vulgar libertarianism #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 71 notes · source: shlevy · .permalink