Maybe you haven’t been convinced by a good enough argument. Maybe you just don’t want to admit you are wrong. Or maybe the chaos is the objective, but what are you knowingly on the wrong side of?
In my case: I don’t think any games are obliged to offer an easy mode. If developers want to tailor a specific experience, they don’t have to dilute it with easier or harder modes that aren’t actually interesting and/or anything more than poorly done numbers adjustments. BUT I also know that for the people that need and want them, it helps a LOT. But I can’t really accept making the game worse so that some people get to play it. They wouldn’t actually be playing the same game after all…
Sorry, I won’t cater to the anti-woke majority. They are shaped by decades of well-funded fascist propaganda and complicit media and social media outlets.
This is how “woke” was even introduced in our vocabulary in the first place.
These efforts were never matched in breadth and throughput by those on the anti-anti-woke side. Saying that Democrats should cater more to the anti-woke lynching mob does not cut it. It is the quintessence of the ratchet effect. It only leads to greater success rate of said propaganda efforts.
So to translate your argument, the fascist propaganda apparatus indeed has shaped an anti-woke majority, but leftists should not yield to them under no conditions: it will only normalize bigotry. Plus they already did lower the tones on trans issues. It did not win them the elections. Biden did take on the bigots with pro-trans policies and he had won, on the other hand.
So what leg does your argument even stand on except sharing some of the bigotry? We should push the narrative more and more towards equality, not conceding that absolute equality is utopian. The more you annoy the bigots the better.
The Democrats never addressed the propaganda apparatus that brought us to this. And now we should focus more on organizing rather than retrospectively catering to transphobes and racists to win elections. That is why I think your argument is despicable and comes from a position of privilege. If it was your rights/survival on the line and not someone else’s you wouldn’t be suggesting political trade-offs.
Right enough, you are doing this right now: Because your life is at threat now, you say “shiiit we should have sacrificed the trans pawn to win the political chess after all”. Guess what, this is the dog-eat-dog mentality that fascism instills in people, having its way already.
The answer is solidarity and organizing, not trade-offs.
So, again, I’ll ask a fairly simple question.
Say the abolitionists had included gay rights but back in the 1800s. Unless you have a wild perspective of history, it’s pretty safe to assume they wouldn’t have won nearly as much popular support as they did. So, how much longer would you have allowed slavery in order to be morally right but unable to help either slaves or homosexuals?
Edit: Becaude its not just trans folks at risk, it is the billions of poor people who will die from climate catastrophes. They don’t have our privilege of knowing that even if the climate goes bad, we’ll be basically okay.
We have two vulnerable groups to protect, one is much larger than the other, by orders of magnitude.
I already said no. We have a totally different mind model here. You think that there is a static majority with crystalized opinions, a conservative inertia that we have to adapt to. I believe that the revolutionary powers compete with fascist propaganda to win over the majority, who is bound to different material interests.
When this deceptively mild approach of appeasing the majority used, it legitimizes that the fascists are somehow in the right to a degree.
That is what I cannot stand about centrists. I am an anarchist, there is no middle ground between me and, well, a number of things that are utterly unacceptable. There is no middle ground to nazism, and corporatism, for example. By upholding these standards, I am dragging society towards absolute equality.
With your appeasement approach, you legitimize fascists, which is called the ratchet effect. Without revolutionary powers dragging people leftwards, centrist appeasement pushes the mainstream rightward.
Having said that, the proposed example is completely out of historical context, and is wrong on so many levels. I can’t go into all the details right now, but the very idea of “throwing homosexuals in the mix” is preposterous given the historical context.
Let me direct you to the fact that the British Empire paid reparations to slave owners, but even to this day if you try to mention Reparations to the Caribbean and African nations you will be met with vile harassment from hordes of nazi trolls. So I cannot educate you in Marxist political economy right now, but you comparing abolitionism to gay rights is comparing apples and oranges, and the equivalence is unwarranted.
Only under the concurrent prism of anti-wokeism these are deemed comparable, from the viewpoint of being “not cisgender heteronormative germanic/anglo/saxon Christian male”. So you would not be bringing this even remotely up if you were not ever so slightly affected by anti-woke propaganda yourself.
And if the public doesn’t go along, we just keep killing the planet and billions of the poorest and most vulnerable folks so we can feel good about ourselves?
That seems pretty damned privileged to me.
And yes, it’s a silly hypothetical to illustrate a point, that’s what hypotheticals are. It’s not like we tie people to train tracks and see what trolley drivers do.
Just seems wild to me that you assume everyone is down with what we believe to be right. It’s easy to say you are dragging society forward when the consequences of not winning elections are fairly mild for you while the people at risk live elsewhere and are desperately poor.
And yet again, I don’t actually believe there’s a way for the Left to pitch trans issues in a way that A) wins broad support and B) doesn’t alienate our progressive base, so it’s kind of a moot point. (Even throwing it back to states, which mostly works for Dems as we have the biggest states etc and there’s still freedom of movement probably wouldn’t be enough.)
Then fuck the Left, I guess?
Then fuck “our” “progressive” base?
If the “Left” had spent a fraction of the resources to match the vile torrent of anti-trans propaganda, the situation would be different, with regard to both of your points about pitching trans issues to the progressive base.
Like, John Oliver and Jon Stewart showed exactly how a mainstream progressive media can combat anti-trans demagoguery by Republicans, not to mention Scientific American, the American Psychological Association, and other bodies. You probably weren’t listening because if you don’t think this is a way to “pitch” then you might have been listening to other sources that make the matter unpalatable, like “biological males in female sports” and what have you.
So I take it as a given that you were listening to the wrong sources about it, and you are at least partially anti-trans yourself. On the other hand, you might not be listening to all the analyses after the fact that point to other issues as to why Democrats lost the election. See for example this thread, this comic strip, and this thread also.
In a nutshell, Harris did already try to appeal to the transphobes and she failed. So this should be end of discussion. I am not discussing compromise of the human rights of any group in order to appease to either moderate or extreme bigots.
I adore that your sources were: Yourself, a comic strip and a paraphrasing of a (solid) late night comedian.
Because I don’t watch many late night comedians I’m absorbing the wrong sources? Jesus fuck.
Admittedly, I did watch Stewart’s take and it was pretty silly. The essence was that because Harris said things, the Right should’ve listened. Which is as dumb as people on the Right saying that “trump said he respects and loves women so I don’t get how the libs think he’s anti woman.”
Oliver’s point is similar, Harris was quiet on trans stuff. Which okay but being quiet on an issue just means the other side gets to paint you howver they want on it. Which is EXACTLY what the trump campaign did by running this vile, but effective ad (which I believe was their most frequently run ad in the last few weeks of the campaign) to ZERO pushback from Harris (again, no way to rebut it without alienating our progressive wing, so we just take the L on this.) You might also read this PBS article where a journalist points out that, of the money they tracked, the trump campaign spent more on anti trans ads than on housing, immigration and the economy combined.
To say that trans issues weren’t a thing this election because your side didn’t talk about then is absurd.
And frankly, you are compromising the human rights of a group, it’s the poor billions who will suffer the effects of climate change. I get that neither you, nor anyone you know will be affected. And that the suffering of those who live elsewhere isn’t really a trendy cause so easily forgettable but personally, I think they should be included in our moral calculus.
I mean, before this thread I hadn’t thought about it much but damn, the sport thing would be such an easy bone to throw moderates with almost no real world costs (apologies to the handful of high level trans athletes.) Given that it’s an issue that some 70% of America disagrees with us on it does seem like an easy way to demonstrate we aren’t the crazy party.
Actually people had much less of a beef with homosexuality before the 50’s and the pink scare. Lord Byron was like, an open bisexual. Victorians has nipple rings as a fad.
Also abolitionists and suffragettes and the like weren’t exactly wildly popular.
Your hypothetical scenario is not only uninformed, but also a false equivalence. We don’t live in those time periods, we can focus on more than one thing at a time, and you’re also fixing blame on the movement to make things better rather than on the people who are actively making things worse. You should be blaming the rich for making global warming worse, not the people who are fighting against it and losing because they are daring to say trans people shouldn’t be a problem.
I mean, Byron had to flee England for fear of lynching and Oscar Wilde spent two years in prison for homosexuality.
And the abolitionists weren’t wildly popular but they were popular enough to win a broad base of support in the North.
And I’m sure folks a couple hundred years ago could multi task.
How is it a false equivalence though? The basic notion is that there are things you can be morally right on that may cause more actual harm.
Meanwhile, I only ever started this to answer someone’s question. As I’ve said repeatedly, I don’t think it’s an effective tactic as you’d split the progressive vote.
That being said, culture war shit and immigration is what the Right is running and winning on.
If you want to reign in the rich and corporations on climate change, it ain’t going to come from the Right. So, we need to win elections.
The non-crackers are a much bigger group than the genocidal crackers so from an utilitarian standpoint we should kill all crackers