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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread |
On July 01 2023 18:27 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2023 09:38 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2023 08:55 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2023 07:44 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2023 02:40 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2023 00:09 Mohdoo wrote:
As I always say: There is no legal mechanism for the supreme court to enforce their rulings. It is purely theater and tradition
Biden has the option to just kinda look at the supreme court, flip them off, and do what he wants with student loans or whatever else. The US political system would probably implode rather quickly. Granted Biden could stand to do something drastic since he's currently losing to a fashy insurrectionist. One problem Biden's facing is that the net loss of rights under his administration can't be changed by simply reelecting him. In fact, there's no indication electing him (or Democrats at the national level) will do anything to stop the ongoing decay of people's rights. As it sits I get the feeling Democrats/their supporters are going to basically end up saying "well the rules say that's how it works, so fascism wins. We'll get them next election!" like they have with SCOTUS. If anything, what we have learned is that whoever happens to be sitting in the president's chair at the time of a supreme court justice dying is the most important parameter in american politics. Voting dem, regardless of who, has only become further ingrained. Let's say some fiery socialist dem won in 2020 instead. We just learned their student loan forgiveness would have been shot down. All that matters right now is the supreme court. Abortion, student loans, affirmative action, all of the hot button items are just settled by the court. So all you can really do is camp out the chair for the next time one needs to be replaced. Realistically speaking, you're looking at more than a decade before that has a possibility of paying off and hoping Sotomayor retires at a favorable time, unlike RBG. Losing the presidency just once in the next 3-6 cycles (or failing to fill a vacancy again) could easily extend the time horizon for a SCOTUS that isn't stripping people of bodily autonomy, voting rights, etc. into several decades away. All that assumes the fashy insurrectionist that's polling ahead of Biden and/or his proteges/supporters don't destroy US democracy in the intervening decade(s). "You'll lose even more rights even faster if you don't elect us!" isn't exactly an inspirational message to carry you through several must win elections in a row. What do you see as the way of breaking the impact the supreme court has? What can a progressive candidate do that isn't vulnerable to the supreme court deciding they disagree? As gobbledy points out there's adding Justices. Even if Republicans just do it back when they win, at least then it's a back and forth instead of one loss costing you a decade+ on top of the decade+ it seems people will already have to wait to get their rights back (and maybe stop losing them). As is indicated by plasmids amazing post, it's already immeasurably bad here. If one is relatively comfortable, and doesn't want to truly empathize with people outside a very small circle, it seems passable enough. But if you just scratch the surface a little bit, you uncover a gaping, festering, horrific wound stretching across great swaths of marginalized and oppressed communities. If you focus in for a moment on individuals instead of the statistics, it's absolutely gutting and enough to bring just about anyone tears. That's without even pausing for a moment to consider we do worse abroad. People are still being maimed, killed, and born with various (sometimes terminal) disabilities from the toxic and undetonated ordinance that's just littered around the warzones where we slaughtered innocent families en masse and poisoned the land of those they didn't burn while looting anything of value. The illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians continues under the auspices of US diplomacy, more coups than you have phalanges, and a level of cynical hegemonic domination over so much of world affairs that the current dependence on the dollar that underpins so much of the US economy is something that even I don't think Kwark is exaggerating about when describing how inexorable it is from the existing world economic system. Basically, Pre WWII Germany picked up where the post civil war US left off and post WWII US picked up where Nazi Germany left off. But the US focused on the world domination part first and is now flirting (I can't stress enough how bad it is Trump is even able to compete let alone is leading in polls) with going full mask-off fascism. That's all ominous enough on it's own, but when you realize that Democrats plan is to just never lose again or win back control from what even some of the more moderate among them readily identify as fascists through elections in/over the next 20 years (and maybe you get some rights back then, or maybe just lose more of them slower), it's hard for things not to feel hopeless. It's not easy, but I'm still holding out for a mass awakening of people's revolutionary spirit in the US. Granted this forum hasn't exactly inspired a lot of hope in my capacity to help realize that.
I agree with all of this and I think Frantz Fanon’s perspectives on the issue are a good fit for what ought to be done.
And until enough people are on board, there is value in doing what we can. I think the recent Supreme Court rulings have shown legislation can only be done through the court right now due to political gridlock, so the only real option is executive orders and disregard for the Supreme Court. Would greatly favor more direct approaches, but it seems we have a bit to go before Fanon’s perspectives can be applied to the situation.
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On July 03 2023 02:40 Magic Powers wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2023 02:13 BlackJack wrote:On July 03 2023 01:24 Magic Powers wrote:On July 03 2023 01:00 BlackJack wrote:On July 02 2023 17:05 Magic Powers wrote:And this comment in particular demonstrates BJ's (very frequent) self-victimization on this message board. On July 02 2023 12:46 BlackJack wrote:On July 02 2023 10:10 NewSunshine wrote:On July 02 2023 07:01 ChristianS wrote:On July 02 2023 06:31 BlackJack wrote:
Whether or not you feel like what you’re experiencing is the same as what European Jews experienced in WW2 doesn’t make it objectively true. If pointing out absurdist statements as having “no basis in reality” counts as vitriol then I’m guilty as charged. If you want to vent about your lived experience of being persecuted that’s for the Blogs section. If you want to make bold statements like conservatives are celebrating Nazis that beat trans people or the US is a police state in the Politics thread you should expect people to disagree. Plasmids response to Drone is far more of a non sequitur than my post to Plasmid. Did I miss “the same as what European Jews experienced in WW2” or are you making that up? There’s plenty in plasmid’s post I’m not convinced is true, that’s not what I’m calling vitriolic. It’s shit like “the last time you posted here” and then dragging out an old argument you had – an argument in which, if I remember correctly, you demanded evidence of a claim or else you thought mod action was needed. I thought you were coming on too strong then, and said so; I definitely think you’re coming on too strong now. If you still want evidence, by the way, here, I googled it and found a study. I won’t pretend I have the skills to evaluate that study critically – crime statistics are absolutely not my area – but I will say what I’ve heard from a couple trans friends is that random hostility from strangers is not uncommon, it’s getting worse, and the way they talk is increasingly dehumanizing. And that’s in places like CA, Seattle, or Portland. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be trans in the middle of Idaho or Florida or West Virginia. In a vacuum, it's fine to say that in a discussion forum people should expect some level of rigor. In practice, you end up coming across like a dick when you appoint yourself as gatekeeper of factual debate, forbid any emotions from anyone participating in the discussion, and demand research receipts for everything. Among other things, this is what got people irritated to hell and back with Danglars, now banned. He burned all the good will in any discussion because people were instantly wrong to have any strong feelings on a subject, and being wrong, they needed to be condescended to and patronized accordingly. Here we have an actual trans woman relaying her experiences in the US, which were so bad she had to leave the country, and describing how she feels regarding LGBTQ+ developments in the US. If you're interested in understanding people with differing viewpoints to yourself, this is the part where you shut up and listen, and give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe they know the first thing they're talking about. Blackjack instead jumped on it as an opportunity to question the validity of her feelings, and argue that she can't possibly be justified in feeling the way she feels because it isn't backed up by data that he likes. Way to make her point there, my dude. Calling the US a police state and saying the conservative base is cheering on Nazis assaulting trans people is not “relaying a personal experience.” If you want to relay a personal experience and be free of criticism it can be done in Blogs. If you want to say scurrilous things about a group of people or a country in the Politics thread people have a right to question it. It’s one or the other. To be fair plasmid isn’t even the one using their identify to deflect criticism of their claims, that’s what other people are doing for them. This is everything that’s wrong with political discourse in this country. People in this thread thinking it’s fine and dandy to attack conservatives as Nazi-loving transphobes and then use identity politics to shut down any disagreement. No one here is making the argument that, because someone is a transgender person, they should not face criticism. Absolutely no one. This claim of BJ is completely false and unsubstantiated, and it can only be a result of BJ engaging in bad faith interpretation of people's comments. plasmidghost has presented actual evidence for their claims, which BJ is completely ignoring. He has never addressed any of it and he keeps circling the evidence in favor of his accusation against plasmid. When the evidence is presented, BJ does - contrary to what would be expected from actual good faith argumentation - not address it honestly and incorporate it into the argument at large, but instead paints himself as the victim of identity politics gone awry. Ironic, considering that plasmid has spoken out against identity politics in the past - again something that BJ deliberately ignores in favor of his own argumentation. This is wholly being done in bad faith. I can't possibly consider this a genuine form of argumentation. BJ is not a victim in this board, yet portrays himself as such over and over again. Which I find especially bizarre this time considering the person he's criticizing is a real victim of real perpetration. “Ironic, considering that plasmid has spoken out against identity politics in the past - again something that BJ deliberately ignores in favor of his own argumentation.” First of all, that’s a complete falsehood. I specifically said in my last post that PG is not the one using their identity to deflect criticism and that it’s other people doing it on their behalf. In fact what I actually said was it’s incredibly patronizing to PG to defend them with this “omg how dare you” attitude as if PG is too fragile to have their claims challenged on a politics forum. Second, I never said trans people don’t face any persecution. I said it’s simply not the case that they are being beaten in the street by Nazis that are celebrated by the conservative base. That it’s hyperbole and inaccurate to pretend like it’s only a matter of time before they are sent to concentration camps. Neo-Nazis protesting a drag Queen story hour does not substantiate those claims. Drag queens are not even the same thing as transgendered people by the way. Obviously it can be very easy to muddy the water here to try to foist the position of “BJ thinks trans people don’t face any discrimination” on me. It’s obviously not something I’m arguing. Third, maybe you’ve completely missed the trend here so let me tie this in for you. A poll showed that over half of very liberal people believed the police kill over 1,000 unarmed black people per year. The real number is about 10. Another poll showed that 41% of Democrats estimated your chance of being hospitalized if you caught COVID was 50% or greater. The actual chance was 1%. So to me it’s obvious that Democrats/Liberals overestimate the perceived threats of things and not just by a little bit but by a factor of 50 or 100. You can’t solve problems if you can’t even accurately grasp the magnitude of the problem. San Francisco, probably the most liberal city, considered these problems more grave than other cities and adopted policies that reflected that. Now they have an understaffed police department, countless businesses have closed their doors and the entirely city is spiraling into a shit sandwich in no time quick. I’m always met with the same hostility when I point out the irrationality of how liberals overestimate any of these things. “How dare you belittle PG’s life experience, he fled the country to escape persecution!” “How dare you downplay COVID, my grandmother died of COVID!” “How dare you imply black people don’t face discrimination from police, Black Lives Matter!” Emotional arguments that people think ought to trump objective reality. Good faith argumentation, no doubt. Speaking for myself, my intention when I do respond to you is never that it makes me feel good. I hate reading and responding to your comments, that's why I'm usually shortening my responses to you as much as possible while only getting my main message across. Your argumentation regarding LGBTQ issues is just bad, I haven't seen a single comment from you on that matter that I can mostly agree with. For some reason you think this is our problem. The people disagreeing with you are somehow the problem. I have a very hard time understanding your thought process that leads you to a conclusion like the one of people wanting to protect poor transgender people's feelings. No, your argumentation is bad. It's really, really bad. That's why we're arguing with you. But it's pissing me off and it's stealing my time and energy, so with each occasion that this happens I'm less and less inclined to put quality effort into it. This is also why plasmidghost is leaving. You're completely insufferable in this regard. I got it from you saying I’m “contributing to the pain of LGBTQ people” because I disagree with the notions that conservatives are celebrating Nazis that assault trans people and that there’s not a trans genocide going on. Isn’t that what that means? I’m not causing physical pain, right? That would be impossible through the internet. So I must be causing them emotional pain. Another word for emotions is feelings. If this is another bad faith interpretation of your words then I’m sorry, maybe I just have a poor grasp of English. Of course it's emotional pain you're causing and not physical. But that part of my argument is not priority when I respond to you, it's an addition. You focus on that part and ignore the factual parts because that's more convenient to you. The claims you make about transgender people got blown out of the water, and so far you've failed to acknowledge that - instead painting the discussion as if it were about your general tone or attitude. This is one of the main reasons that causes exasperation in people when they discuss things with you: your strong tendency to shift the argument away from the core point to side issues, to entirely irrelevant issues, and even to straw men.
So you do see where I got that from, your complaint is that part of your argument is not the priority when you respond to me. Has it occurred to you that if people accuse me of harming trans people or spreading vitriol that it is not the “side issue” for me?
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On July 02 2023 22:15 Magic Powers wrote:Show nested quote +On July 02 2023 20:55 Elroi wrote:On July 01 2023 15:08 BlackJack wrote:On July 01 2023 10:29 plasmidghost wrote:On July 01 2023 01:42 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 01 2023 01:11 Kyadytim wrote:For me, the most upsetting part of the Creative LLC case is that the request that triggered the lawsuit seems to be fake. The person who allegedly sent it claims to not have sent it, and also has been happily married in a heterosexual relationship for 15 years. It was also sent the day after the case was filed. This case existed entirely so that conservative litigation teams could give the Supreme Court an opportunity to rule in favor of legal discrimination. www.theguardian.com That might be upsetting in terms of how you view the court, but it could also be encouraging in terms of what impact it'll have. If they had to make up a case it prolly won't be difficult to find a web designer, even for gay couples. I'm guessing today, this is a case where being publicly known for refusing to provide services for gay weddings will cost you more than you gain. Not saying it's not problematic but I'm pretty confident gay acceptance isn't contingent on legislation. I can also accept the argument that a website is more related to free speech than other services are (even if this is disingenuous from the people making that claim), and thus I dunno if this creates a precedent for other services. Maybe it does but I dunno. This post is super emblematic of why I don't post on this site anymore. You and many others have no fucking clue how bad this ruling is for queer people and how bad things are for us or y'all simply don't care and I've come to realize that there is no amount of evidence or experience I can show that will make y'all or other people change their minds. People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. The Civil Rights Act is dead and the Democrats and Biden will not do anything to fix the SC, they'll just send out links to ActBlue. The US is a decaying police state with no revolutionary potential and will not get better, and I've given up hope in general for most everywhere else, so fuck it, I'll just post this and leave for good: [img]https://images2.imgbox.com/54/51/uegyih58_o.jpg[/im] I think the last time you posted here you were saying that trans kids were being removed from homes with loving parents to be put into foster homes. When I asked you for a single example you couldn’t provide one and told me that’s what people on Twitter who you trusted were telling you. A few months ago it was front page news everywherewhen a woman at the cheesecake factory that probably had one too many Skinnylicious margaritas said some nasty things to an LGBT person. The idea that there’s some epidemic of nazis beating up queer people while the conservatives cheer them on sounds a little far fetched. Why is it not all over the news? If saying nasty things is front page news worthy than these assaults should be even more newsworthy and if they are as prevalent as you make it seem we should hear about it. Are they just not getting captured on some of the 300 million smartphones? You’ve been posting for years now constantly invoking genocide and nazism and hitler. It’s absurd. The LGBTQ population is exploding. 20% of gen Z identifies as LGBTQ. That’s 1 in 5. That’s double the rate of millennials and millennials are double the rate of Gen X and Gen X is double the rate of baby boomers. Either your posts have no basis in reality or this is the worst attempt at genocide in history. This kind of language seems to have become quite common. I saw a manifestation against restrictions on sex altering surgery where many of the protesters called it "genocide" and here is a male transgender cyclist calling restrictions on her participation in tournaments "genocide". I'm not denying that there are many legitimate problems to discuss, but throwing around words like that seems to have become a trend. Regarding MTF athletes, for every person who calls their exclusion "genocide" you have a number of (not right-wing) people arguing over the nuances of inclusion vs fairness vs science. Yes, they're having a debate. For people who are politically neutral or left-leaning, they're unsure of what to do and they're having a conversation. For people who are politically right-wing, there is no debate. All of them are completely certain of what to do: strict exclusion of all MTF athletes. The whole of the right-wing is ideologically driven, but only the fringe left is ideologically driven, while the overwhelming majority of remaining people between these two groups is thinking about the dilemma fairly rationally. The distinction is clear: left-wingers are not generally being radical about MTF athlete inclusion. They're debating the issue. They're not just winging it and blindly following the personal interests of a small fraction of the population. We certainly can't say the same thing about many right-wingers. They're just blocking the path and they're never going to budge. It's like arguing with a wall. And this is regarding a tiny issue in the vastness of the transgender landscape. MTF athletes are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the population. "Would transgender women 'take over' women's sport? Harper: Trans women are never going to take over women's sport. First of all, trans people make up roughly 1% of the population. The best example of a population study to look at comes from America. If you look at NCAA sports, there are more than 200,000 women competing every year in NCAA sports. Trans women make up 0.5-1% of the population so we should be seeing 1,000-2,000 trans women every year. The NCAA 11 years ago allowed trans women to compete, based on hormone therapy. We should be seeing 1,000-2,000. We see a handful every year." Somehow an issue that affects very few people in the world is front and center for conservatives regarding their issues with transgender people. How? Why? Is this really such a big deal that it has to result in anti-LGBTQ legislation? The answer is obviously no. The sports associations can figure this out for themselves, they don't need laws interfering with the process. Mistakes will be made on the way to a better solution, but these are not going to "ruin women's sports" in any meaningful capacity. So yet again conservatives (pretend to) care more about a much smaller fraction of the population than about a much larger fraction. This is called a "red herring fallacy". https://www.bbc.com/sport/61346517
I don't really see how your response has anything to do with my post. BJ pointed to comments like this, from this thread:
People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base.
and talk about "genocide" on trans people in the US. And said that it is wildly exaggerated and that you should be able to back such claims up with evidence. I only gave other examples of the same kind of exaggerations (such as calling a ban on trans women in women's sport genocide).
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On July 03 2023 03:26 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2023 02:40 Magic Powers wrote:On July 03 2023 02:13 BlackJack wrote:On July 03 2023 01:24 Magic Powers wrote:On July 03 2023 01:00 BlackJack wrote:On July 02 2023 17:05 Magic Powers wrote:And this comment in particular demonstrates BJ's (very frequent) self-victimization on this message board. On July 02 2023 12:46 BlackJack wrote:On July 02 2023 10:10 NewSunshine wrote:On July 02 2023 07:01 ChristianS wrote:On July 02 2023 06:31 BlackJack wrote:
Whether or not you feel like what you’re experiencing is the same as what European Jews experienced in WW2 doesn’t make it objectively true. If pointing out absurdist statements as having “no basis in reality” counts as vitriol then I’m guilty as charged. If you want to vent about your lived experience of being persecuted that’s for the Blogs section. If you want to make bold statements like conservatives are celebrating Nazis that beat trans people or the US is a police state in the Politics thread you should expect people to disagree. Plasmids response to Drone is far more of a non sequitur than my post to Plasmid. Did I miss “the same as what European Jews experienced in WW2” or are you making that up? There’s plenty in plasmid’s post I’m not convinced is true, that’s not what I’m calling vitriolic. It’s shit like “the last time you posted here” and then dragging out an old argument you had – an argument in which, if I remember correctly, you demanded evidence of a claim or else you thought mod action was needed. I thought you were coming on too strong then, and said so; I definitely think you’re coming on too strong now. If you still want evidence, by the way, here, I googled it and found a study. I won’t pretend I have the skills to evaluate that study critically – crime statistics are absolutely not my area – but I will say what I’ve heard from a couple trans friends is that random hostility from strangers is not uncommon, it’s getting worse, and the way they talk is increasingly dehumanizing. And that’s in places like CA, Seattle, or Portland. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be trans in the middle of Idaho or Florida or West Virginia. In a vacuum, it's fine to say that in a discussion forum people should expect some level of rigor. In practice, you end up coming across like a dick when you appoint yourself as gatekeeper of factual debate, forbid any emotions from anyone participating in the discussion, and demand research receipts for everything. Among other things, this is what got people irritated to hell and back with Danglars, now banned. He burned all the good will in any discussion because people were instantly wrong to have any strong feelings on a subject, and being wrong, they needed to be condescended to and patronized accordingly. Here we have an actual trans woman relaying her experiences in the US, which were so bad she had to leave the country, and describing how she feels regarding LGBTQ+ developments in the US. If you're interested in understanding people with differing viewpoints to yourself, this is the part where you shut up and listen, and give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe they know the first thing they're talking about. Blackjack instead jumped on it as an opportunity to question the validity of her feelings, and argue that she can't possibly be justified in feeling the way she feels because it isn't backed up by data that he likes. Way to make her point there, my dude. Calling the US a police state and saying the conservative base is cheering on Nazis assaulting trans people is not “relaying a personal experience.” If you want to relay a personal experience and be free of criticism it can be done in Blogs. If you want to say scurrilous things about a group of people or a country in the Politics thread people have a right to question it. It’s one or the other. To be fair plasmid isn’t even the one using their identify to deflect criticism of their claims, that’s what other people are doing for them. This is everything that’s wrong with political discourse in this country. People in this thread thinking it’s fine and dandy to attack conservatives as Nazi-loving transphobes and then use identity politics to shut down any disagreement. No one here is making the argument that, because someone is a transgender person, they should not face criticism. Absolutely no one. This claim of BJ is completely false and unsubstantiated, and it can only be a result of BJ engaging in bad faith interpretation of people's comments. plasmidghost has presented actual evidence for their claims, which BJ is completely ignoring. He has never addressed any of it and he keeps circling the evidence in favor of his accusation against plasmid. When the evidence is presented, BJ does - contrary to what would be expected from actual good faith argumentation - not address it honestly and incorporate it into the argument at large, but instead paints himself as the victim of identity politics gone awry. Ironic, considering that plasmid has spoken out against identity politics in the past - again something that BJ deliberately ignores in favor of his own argumentation. This is wholly being done in bad faith. I can't possibly consider this a genuine form of argumentation. BJ is not a victim in this board, yet portrays himself as such over and over again. Which I find especially bizarre this time considering the person he's criticizing is a real victim of real perpetration. “Ironic, considering that plasmid has spoken out against identity politics in the past - again something that BJ deliberately ignores in favor of his own argumentation.” First of all, that’s a complete falsehood. I specifically said in my last post that PG is not the one using their identity to deflect criticism and that it’s other people doing it on their behalf. In fact what I actually said was it’s incredibly patronizing to PG to defend them with this “omg how dare you” attitude as if PG is too fragile to have their claims challenged on a politics forum. Second, I never said trans people don’t face any persecution. I said it’s simply not the case that they are being beaten in the street by Nazis that are celebrated by the conservative base. That it’s hyperbole and inaccurate to pretend like it’s only a matter of time before they are sent to concentration camps. Neo-Nazis protesting a drag Queen story hour does not substantiate those claims. Drag queens are not even the same thing as transgendered people by the way. Obviously it can be very easy to muddy the water here to try to foist the position of “BJ thinks trans people don’t face any discrimination” on me. It’s obviously not something I’m arguing. Third, maybe you’ve completely missed the trend here so let me tie this in for you. A poll showed that over half of very liberal people believed the police kill over 1,000 unarmed black people per year. The real number is about 10. Another poll showed that 41% of Democrats estimated your chance of being hospitalized if you caught COVID was 50% or greater. The actual chance was 1%. So to me it’s obvious that Democrats/Liberals overestimate the perceived threats of things and not just by a little bit but by a factor of 50 or 100. You can’t solve problems if you can’t even accurately grasp the magnitude of the problem. San Francisco, probably the most liberal city, considered these problems more grave than other cities and adopted policies that reflected that. Now they have an understaffed police department, countless businesses have closed their doors and the entirely city is spiraling into a shit sandwich in no time quick. I’m always met with the same hostility when I point out the irrationality of how liberals overestimate any of these things. “How dare you belittle PG’s life experience, he fled the country to escape persecution!” “How dare you downplay COVID, my grandmother died of COVID!” “How dare you imply black people don’t face discrimination from police, Black Lives Matter!” Emotional arguments that people think ought to trump objective reality. Good faith argumentation, no doubt. Speaking for myself, my intention when I do respond to you is never that it makes me feel good. I hate reading and responding to your comments, that's why I'm usually shortening my responses to you as much as possible while only getting my main message across. Your argumentation regarding LGBTQ issues is just bad, I haven't seen a single comment from you on that matter that I can mostly agree with. For some reason you think this is our problem. The people disagreeing with you are somehow the problem. I have a very hard time understanding your thought process that leads you to a conclusion like the one of people wanting to protect poor transgender people's feelings. No, your argumentation is bad. It's really, really bad. That's why we're arguing with you. But it's pissing me off and it's stealing my time and energy, so with each occasion that this happens I'm less and less inclined to put quality effort into it. This is also why plasmidghost is leaving. You're completely insufferable in this regard. I got it from you saying I’m “contributing to the pain of LGBTQ people” because I disagree with the notions that conservatives are celebrating Nazis that assault trans people and that there’s not a trans genocide going on. Isn’t that what that means? I’m not causing physical pain, right? That would be impossible through the internet. So I must be causing them emotional pain. Another word for emotions is feelings. If this is another bad faith interpretation of your words then I’m sorry, maybe I just have a poor grasp of English. Of course it's emotional pain you're causing and not physical. But that part of my argument is not priority when I respond to you, it's an addition. You focus on that part and ignore the factual parts because that's more convenient to you. The claims you make about transgender people got blown out of the water, and so far you've failed to acknowledge that - instead painting the discussion as if it were about your general tone or attitude. This is one of the main reasons that causes exasperation in people when they discuss things with you: your strong tendency to shift the argument away from the core point to side issues, to entirely irrelevant issues, and even to straw men. So you do see where I got that from, your complaint is that part of your argument is not the priority when you respond to me. Has it occurred to you that if people accuse me of harming trans people or spreading vitriol that it is not the “side issue” for me?
Ok so now it's apparently about who's hurt more, either you, or a member of a demographic that's evidently being marginalized. No, I'm going to drop this discussion with you, our conversation is over.
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On July 03 2023 03:26 Elroi wrote:Show nested quote +On July 02 2023 22:15 Magic Powers wrote:On July 02 2023 20:55 Elroi wrote:On July 01 2023 15:08 BlackJack wrote:On July 01 2023 10:29 plasmidghost wrote:On July 01 2023 01:42 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 01 2023 01:11 Kyadytim wrote:For me, the most upsetting part of the Creative LLC case is that the request that triggered the lawsuit seems to be fake. The person who allegedly sent it claims to not have sent it, and also has been happily married in a heterosexual relationship for 15 years. It was also sent the day after the case was filed. This case existed entirely so that conservative litigation teams could give the Supreme Court an opportunity to rule in favor of legal discrimination. www.theguardian.com That might be upsetting in terms of how you view the court, but it could also be encouraging in terms of what impact it'll have. If they had to make up a case it prolly won't be difficult to find a web designer, even for gay couples. I'm guessing today, this is a case where being publicly known for refusing to provide services for gay weddings will cost you more than you gain. Not saying it's not problematic but I'm pretty confident gay acceptance isn't contingent on legislation. I can also accept the argument that a website is more related to free speech than other services are (even if this is disingenuous from the people making that claim), and thus I dunno if this creates a precedent for other services. Maybe it does but I dunno. This post is super emblematic of why I don't post on this site anymore. You and many others have no fucking clue how bad this ruling is for queer people and how bad things are for us or y'all simply don't care and I've come to realize that there is no amount of evidence or experience I can show that will make y'all or other people change their minds. People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. The Civil Rights Act is dead and the Democrats and Biden will not do anything to fix the SC, they'll just send out links to ActBlue. The US is a decaying police state with no revolutionary potential and will not get better, and I've given up hope in general for most everywhere else, so fuck it, I'll just post this and leave for good: [img]https://images2.imgbox.com/54/51/uegyih58_o.jpg[/im] I think the last time you posted here you were saying that trans kids were being removed from homes with loving parents to be put into foster homes. When I asked you for a single example you couldn’t provide one and told me that’s what people on Twitter who you trusted were telling you. A few months ago it was front page news everywherewhen a woman at the cheesecake factory that probably had one too many Skinnylicious margaritas said some nasty things to an LGBT person. The idea that there’s some epidemic of nazis beating up queer people while the conservatives cheer them on sounds a little far fetched. Why is it not all over the news? If saying nasty things is front page news worthy than these assaults should be even more newsworthy and if they are as prevalent as you make it seem we should hear about it. Are they just not getting captured on some of the 300 million smartphones? You’ve been posting for years now constantly invoking genocide and nazism and hitler. It’s absurd. The LGBTQ population is exploding. 20% of gen Z identifies as LGBTQ. That’s 1 in 5. That’s double the rate of millennials and millennials are double the rate of Gen X and Gen X is double the rate of baby boomers. Either your posts have no basis in reality or this is the worst attempt at genocide in history. This kind of language seems to have become quite common. I saw a manifestation against restrictions on sex altering surgery where many of the protesters called it "genocide" and here is a male transgender cyclist calling restrictions on her participation in tournaments "genocide". I'm not denying that there are many legitimate problems to discuss, but throwing around words like that seems to have become a trend. Regarding MTF athletes, for every person who calls their exclusion "genocide" you have a number of (not right-wing) people arguing over the nuances of inclusion vs fairness vs science. Yes, they're having a debate. For people who are politically neutral or left-leaning, they're unsure of what to do and they're having a conversation. For people who are politically right-wing, there is no debate. All of them are completely certain of what to do: strict exclusion of all MTF athletes. The whole of the right-wing is ideologically driven, but only the fringe left is ideologically driven, while the overwhelming majority of remaining people between these two groups is thinking about the dilemma fairly rationally. The distinction is clear: left-wingers are not generally being radical about MTF athlete inclusion. They're debating the issue. They're not just winging it and blindly following the personal interests of a small fraction of the population. We certainly can't say the same thing about many right-wingers. They're just blocking the path and they're never going to budge. It's like arguing with a wall. And this is regarding a tiny issue in the vastness of the transgender landscape. MTF athletes are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the population. "Would transgender women 'take over' women's sport? Harper: Trans women are never going to take over women's sport. First of all, trans people make up roughly 1% of the population. The best example of a population study to look at comes from America. If you look at NCAA sports, there are more than 200,000 women competing every year in NCAA sports. Trans women make up 0.5-1% of the population so we should be seeing 1,000-2,000 trans women every year. The NCAA 11 years ago allowed trans women to compete, based on hormone therapy. We should be seeing 1,000-2,000. We see a handful every year." Somehow an issue that affects very few people in the world is front and center for conservatives regarding their issues with transgender people. How? Why? Is this really such a big deal that it has to result in anti-LGBTQ legislation? The answer is obviously no. The sports associations can figure this out for themselves, they don't need laws interfering with the process. Mistakes will be made on the way to a better solution, but these are not going to "ruin women's sports" in any meaningful capacity. So yet again conservatives (pretend to) care more about a much smaller fraction of the population than about a much larger fraction. This is called a "red herring fallacy". https://www.bbc.com/sport/61346517 I don't really see how your response has anything to do with my post. BJ pointed to comments like this, from this thread: Show nested quote +People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. and talk about "genocide" on trans people in the US. And said that it is wildly exaggerated and that you should be able to back such claims up with evidence. I only gave other examples of the same kind of exaggerations (such as calling a ban on trans women in women's sport genocide).
No one in this thread said that transgender people are experiencing genocide, BJ made that up.
Ironic, isn't it? "Backing claims up with evidence" and all that, right?
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On July 03 2023 03:17 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2023 18:27 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2023 09:38 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2023 08:55 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2023 07:44 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2023 02:40 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2023 00:09 Mohdoo wrote:
As I always say: There is no legal mechanism for the supreme court to enforce their rulings. It is purely theater and tradition
Biden has the option to just kinda look at the supreme court, flip them off, and do what he wants with student loans or whatever else. The US political system would probably implode rather quickly. Granted Biden could stand to do something drastic since he's currently losing to a fashy insurrectionist. One problem Biden's facing is that the net loss of rights under his administration can't be changed by simply reelecting him. In fact, there's no indication electing him (or Democrats at the national level) will do anything to stop the ongoing decay of people's rights. As it sits I get the feeling Democrats/their supporters are going to basically end up saying "well the rules say that's how it works, so fascism wins. We'll get them next election!" like they have with SCOTUS. If anything, what we have learned is that whoever happens to be sitting in the president's chair at the time of a supreme court justice dying is the most important parameter in american politics. Voting dem, regardless of who, has only become further ingrained. Let's say some fiery socialist dem won in 2020 instead. We just learned their student loan forgiveness would have been shot down. All that matters right now is the supreme court. Abortion, student loans, affirmative action, all of the hot button items are just settled by the court. So all you can really do is camp out the chair for the next time one needs to be replaced. Realistically speaking, you're looking at more than a decade before that has a possibility of paying off and hoping Sotomayor retires at a favorable time, unlike RBG. Losing the presidency just once in the next 3-6 cycles (or failing to fill a vacancy again) could easily extend the time horizon for a SCOTUS that isn't stripping people of bodily autonomy, voting rights, etc. into several decades away. All that assumes the fashy insurrectionist that's polling ahead of Biden and/or his proteges/supporters don't destroy US democracy in the intervening decade(s). "You'll lose even more rights even faster if you don't elect us!" isn't exactly an inspirational message to carry you through several must win elections in a row. What do you see as the way of breaking the impact the supreme court has? What can a progressive candidate do that isn't vulnerable to the supreme court deciding they disagree? As gobbledy points out there's adding Justices. Even if Republicans just do it back when they win, at least then it's a back and forth instead of one loss costing you a decade+ on top of the decade+ it seems people will already have to wait to get their rights back (and maybe stop losing them). As is indicated by plasmids amazing post, it's already immeasurably bad here. If one is relatively comfortable, and doesn't want to truly empathize with people outside a very small circle, it seems passable enough. But if you just scratch the surface a little bit, you uncover a gaping, festering, horrific wound stretching across great swaths of marginalized and oppressed communities. If you focus in for a moment on individuals instead of the statistics, it's absolutely gutting and enough to bring just about anyone tears. That's without even pausing for a moment to consider we do worse abroad. People are still being maimed, killed, and born with various (sometimes terminal) disabilities from the toxic and undetonated ordinance that's just littered around the warzones where we slaughtered innocent families en masse and poisoned the land of those they didn't burn while looting anything of value. The illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians continues under the auspices of US diplomacy, more coups than you have phalanges, and a level of cynical hegemonic domination over so much of world affairs that the current dependence on the dollar that underpins so much of the US economy is something that even I don't think Kwark is exaggerating about when describing how inexorable it is from the existing world economic system. Basically, Pre WWII Germany picked up where the post civil war US left off and post WWII US picked up where Nazi Germany left off. But the US focused on the world domination part first and is now flirting (I can't stress enough how bad it is Trump is even able to compete let alone is leading in polls) with going full mask-off fascism. That's all ominous enough on it's own, but when you realize that Democrats plan is to just never lose again or win back control from what even some of the more moderate among them readily identify as fascists through elections in/over the next 20 years (and maybe you get some rights back then, or maybe just lose more of them slower), it's hard for things not to feel hopeless. It's not easy, but I'm still holding out for a mass awakening of people's revolutionary spirit in the US. Granted this forum hasn't exactly inspired a lot of hope in my capacity to help realize that. I agree with all of this and I think Frantz Fanon’s perspectives on the issue are a good fit for what ought to be done. And until enough people are on board, there is value in doing what we can. I think the recent Supreme Court rulings have shown legislation can only be done through the court right now due to political gridlock, so the only real option is executive orders and disregard for the Supreme Court. Would greatly favor more direct approaches, but it seems we have a bit to go before Fanon’s perspectives can be applied to the situation.
I can dig it 
I'd just say on the "value in doing what we can" I'm firmly in the nonreformist reforms camp. It's important to recognize the differences between those and standard liberal reforms that further entrench the status quo.
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On July 03 2023 03:48 Magic Powers wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2023 03:26 Elroi wrote:On July 02 2023 22:15 Magic Powers wrote:On July 02 2023 20:55 Elroi wrote:On July 01 2023 15:08 BlackJack wrote:On July 01 2023 10:29 plasmidghost wrote:On July 01 2023 01:42 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 01 2023 01:11 Kyadytim wrote:For me, the most upsetting part of the Creative LLC case is that the request that triggered the lawsuit seems to be fake. The person who allegedly sent it claims to not have sent it, and also has been happily married in a heterosexual relationship for 15 years. It was also sent the day after the case was filed. This case existed entirely so that conservative litigation teams could give the Supreme Court an opportunity to rule in favor of legal discrimination. www.theguardian.com That might be upsetting in terms of how you view the court, but it could also be encouraging in terms of what impact it'll have. If they had to make up a case it prolly won't be difficult to find a web designer, even for gay couples. I'm guessing today, this is a case where being publicly known for refusing to provide services for gay weddings will cost you more than you gain. Not saying it's not problematic but I'm pretty confident gay acceptance isn't contingent on legislation. I can also accept the argument that a website is more related to free speech than other services are (even if this is disingenuous from the people making that claim), and thus I dunno if this creates a precedent for other services. Maybe it does but I dunno. This post is super emblematic of why I don't post on this site anymore. You and many others have no fucking clue how bad this ruling is for queer people and how bad things are for us or y'all simply don't care and I've come to realize that there is no amount of evidence or experience I can show that will make y'all or other people change their minds. People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. The Civil Rights Act is dead and the Democrats and Biden will not do anything to fix the SC, they'll just send out links to ActBlue. The US is a decaying police state with no revolutionary potential and will not get better, and I've given up hope in general for most everywhere else, so fuck it, I'll just post this and leave for good: [img]https://images2.imgbox.com/54/51/uegyih58_o.jpg[/im] I think the last time you posted here you were saying that trans kids were being removed from homes with loving parents to be put into foster homes. When I asked you for a single example you couldn’t provide one and told me that’s what people on Twitter who you trusted were telling you. A few months ago it was front page news everywherewhen a woman at the cheesecake factory that probably had one too many Skinnylicious margaritas said some nasty things to an LGBT person. The idea that there’s some epidemic of nazis beating up queer people while the conservatives cheer them on sounds a little far fetched. Why is it not all over the news? If saying nasty things is front page news worthy than these assaults should be even more newsworthy and if they are as prevalent as you make it seem we should hear about it. Are they just not getting captured on some of the 300 million smartphones? You’ve been posting for years now constantly invoking genocide and nazism and hitler. It’s absurd. The LGBTQ population is exploding. 20% of gen Z identifies as LGBTQ. That’s 1 in 5. That’s double the rate of millennials and millennials are double the rate of Gen X and Gen X is double the rate of baby boomers. Either your posts have no basis in reality or this is the worst attempt at genocide in history. This kind of language seems to have become quite common. I saw a manifestation against restrictions on sex altering surgery where many of the protesters called it "genocide" and here is a male transgender cyclist calling restrictions on her participation in tournaments "genocide". I'm not denying that there are many legitimate problems to discuss, but throwing around words like that seems to have become a trend. Regarding MTF athletes, for every person who calls their exclusion "genocide" you have a number of (not right-wing) people arguing over the nuances of inclusion vs fairness vs science. Yes, they're having a debate. For people who are politically neutral or left-leaning, they're unsure of what to do and they're having a conversation. For people who are politically right-wing, there is no debate. All of them are completely certain of what to do: strict exclusion of all MTF athletes. The whole of the right-wing is ideologically driven, but only the fringe left is ideologically driven, while the overwhelming majority of remaining people between these two groups is thinking about the dilemma fairly rationally. The distinction is clear: left-wingers are not generally being radical about MTF athlete inclusion. They're debating the issue. They're not just winging it and blindly following the personal interests of a small fraction of the population. We certainly can't say the same thing about many right-wingers. They're just blocking the path and they're never going to budge. It's like arguing with a wall. And this is regarding a tiny issue in the vastness of the transgender landscape. MTF athletes are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the population. "Would transgender women 'take over' women's sport? Harper: Trans women are never going to take over women's sport. First of all, trans people make up roughly 1% of the population. The best example of a population study to look at comes from America. If you look at NCAA sports, there are more than 200,000 women competing every year in NCAA sports. Trans women make up 0.5-1% of the population so we should be seeing 1,000-2,000 trans women every year. The NCAA 11 years ago allowed trans women to compete, based on hormone therapy. We should be seeing 1,000-2,000. We see a handful every year." Somehow an issue that affects very few people in the world is front and center for conservatives regarding their issues with transgender people. How? Why? Is this really such a big deal that it has to result in anti-LGBTQ legislation? The answer is obviously no. The sports associations can figure this out for themselves, they don't need laws interfering with the process. Mistakes will be made on the way to a better solution, but these are not going to "ruin women's sports" in any meaningful capacity. So yet again conservatives (pretend to) care more about a much smaller fraction of the population than about a much larger fraction. This is called a "red herring fallacy". https://www.bbc.com/sport/61346517 I don't really see how your response has anything to do with my post. BJ pointed to comments like this, from this thread: People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. and talk about "genocide" on trans people in the US. And said that it is wildly exaggerated and that you should be able to back such claims up with evidence. I only gave other examples of the same kind of exaggerations (such as calling a ban on trans women in women's sport genocide). No one in this thread said that transgender people are experiencing genocide, BJ made that up. Ironic, isn't it? "Backing claims up with evidence" and all that, right?
On July 01 2022 15:33 plasmidghost wrote:+ Show Spoiler +In one month, I will move from Texas to Belgium, and I will most likely never return to the United States.
On 12 December 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States terminated a recount of Florida's votes for president. In a 5-4 decision on party lines, the court gave the presidency to George W. Bush, and less than a year later, we were at war and the post-WWII party that had defined American capitalism and excess came to an abrupt and permanent end. On 16 June 2015, Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for president, and the forces of decades of conservative lobbying, Christian fundamentalism, and fascist recruiting killed off any mirage of America being a country based on freedom, justice, and equality. On 24 June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and many Americans suddenly realized that the war had come home.
When you cross a black hole's event horizon, time ceases to exist. Your body gets torn limb from limb, cell from cell, atom from atom, until several infinites later, your body ha been reunited with the cosmic dust it was formed out of. While some physical manifestation of you still exists, your past, present, and futures collapse onto one another into one perpetual scream. You see infinitely many lifetimes born from every decision you could've made or not made and are forced to reckon with seeing the life of your dreams fade away and be replaced with a nightmare, ad infinitum, tormenting you until you've gone insane. But just as suddenly as your hell began, it ends, and all that's left of you is your soul, the pure essence of you as a human being, and then you enter it.
When I entered a black hole, I was greeted with the void. No sound, no light, nothing. I was, for the first time in my life, truly alone, despite my many feelings of loneliness before. Or so I thought. The voice of Death spoke my name and it echoed around me and inside me. I turned fearful, then sighed in resignation, accepting that I was dead. Or so I thought, once again. Death started to take a physical form in front of me and told me that I was in fact, not dead. When I heard Their voice, it was not one of malice, or evil, or temptation. It was gentle, soft, and tranquil. I told Death how terrified I was of Them, and They told me that I had a fundamental misunderstanding of Them. They are not some malevolent spectre, haunting and stalking people, trying to lure them into recklessness and death. They just simply are. No more, no less, and then I understood Them. Death told me to remember what I had seen during my infinite lifetimes and I promised Them that I would make the most out of the rest of my life, until I was finally reunited with Them.
But I should not be alive right now, despite my new lease on life. On Valentine's Day 2022, I had an unintentional drug overdose in a nondescript hotel room in Orange County, California, resulting in me developing severe serotonin syndrome. I rapidly lost consciousness, had a seizure that jolted me awake, then nearly choked on my own vomit a few seconds later. Whether by G-d's mercy, or kismet, or the pure chaos of the universe, that seizure woke me up just before I choked to death, and I survived while so many others haven't. A true undeserved miracle.
The most consequential day of my political radicalization was on 17 July 2014, when Eric Garner was murdered by NYPD. I watched the video of him saying "I Can't Breathe" over and over while the life was choked out of him for the "crime" of selling loose cigarettes, and his dying words have never left my mind since then. Over the next month, I confronted the nature of my upbringing in small-town Texas where it was deeply ingrained in me to always respect police and that they were just doing what they had to do, and that if they murdered someone, regardless of the circumstances, it was justified. I started reading a bunch of writings and speeches that Black activists on Twitter were recommending, my first being the autobiography of Malcolm X, arguably still one of the biggest influences on me politically. From there was a deep dive into the life of one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, Fred Hampton, who I believe would've completely changed the face of America if he wasn't assassinated by the FBI. The works of Angela Davis and Assata Shakur helped to open my eyes to Black feminist perspectives that I greatly support and advocate for to this day.
For the several years that followed, I rarely discussed my political beliefs in any serious capacity online because I never could get people to see the warning signs that came from the response to the 2008 recession and realize that we were heading into a late-capitalist hell. I watched as far-right forces coalesced in the GOP and the Democrats utterly failed the country in so many ways, but no one wanted to see what was going to happen. As I steadily became more militant in my beliefs, many millennials and Gen Zers around my age were experiencing firsthand the absolute nightmare American society had become with student loans, wage stagnation, healthcare, and so much more, but instead of fighting, they gave into nihilism, despair, misanthropy, and apathy, all combining into doomerism. Our generation was going to go silently, never achieving a better world. The Black Lives Matter movement probably was one of my only glimmers of hope during the 2010s, but the GOP and Dems swiftly came down to stop any meaningful change to policing occurring. It truly drove the point home that the liberals will always side with the far-right over the progressives because ultimately, the liberals with all the power and money benefit from a far-right government because they get to push for fundraising while knowing that their massive wealth compared to the average American will never be touched.
When the anti-transgender legislation and societal forces started spreading in 2019, none of us knew what to do. As things got worse and worse over the next three years, we were completely alone. The Dems never did anything noteworthy to help us while the GOP dehumanized us and stripped us of rights across the country. The only queer organizations and advocacy groups that cared about us were trans-focused ones. It wasn't until Florida's Don't Say Gay bill was being pushed that the queer orgs actually started fighting back. To them, we were expendable. They cared more about cis gay men not being able to donate blood than trans people not being allowed to exist. We kept sounding the alarm bells about the broader implications of what attacking us could mean, and no one listened. For decades, trans people had existed in a dark forest, intentionally not being seen or heard, because the moment we would be spotted, we would be labelled an existential threat and target for elimination by overwhelming forces that we had no chance of defeating.
When Roe v Wade was overturned, it completely changed the mood of nearly everyone I know, myself included. At this point, all of my friends and close associates knew I was extremely far-left and I had countless furious people reaching out to me to ask things like how to make Molotov cocktails, how to force change when no politicians want it to happen, and the nature and morals of political violence. My go-to quote for them was by the legendary Kwame Ture: "In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none." No group of oppressed people in the United States were ever handed their rights without violence, and it seemed many people finally realized that simple truth.
If you have a million people ready to die for your cause, you are going to fail. You can send unit after unit of people to fight and die, but it will not make a difference to the neo-Nazis and fascists in power. If you want to win, you have to be willing to kill quickly and kill repeatedly. To them, we are not human. To them, we are merely vermin to be squashed, and I am going to treat them in kind. They have long lost the capability to be shown the error of their ways, and I am not going to go the way my ancestors did, killed by the Nazi scum. If I can secure a better future for trans people in America and the world, even if it meant sacrificing my freedom or my life, I will do it. After all, I shouldn't even be alive. I am not going to let trans joy be eradicated by these monsters. If they say we're not human, then I'm going to show them how not human I can get.
That was my thought process on the weekend of 24 June 2022. The week since then has been sobering. I came to realize while talking with cis people that nearly all don't have the conviction to die or kill, and that is not something I would ever ask of someone. The trans community can band together and arm ourselves, but very few people will fight with us. If I decide to actually get violent with the fascists, it's going to cause the rapid destruction of trans people across America. As it stands, I don't see a way forward for me as a trans person in America, and I don't want to die for nothing.
I don't know what the future has in store for transgender people in the United States, but it looks horrifying. I fully expect a genocide to occur against us here and that it's already started. + Show Spoiler +I live every moment of my life thinking that I'm going to lose the people here I love to horrific violence and society at large will encourage it or simply not care. And I get to flee. I get to leave the United States, move to Belgium, and have a job there. I do not deserve this. There is no special quality I have that makes me more worthy of being safe than any other trans person. It's pure luck. I am going to leave in a cowardly way, and I will be a worse person for it. I have effectively abandoned my community to die at the hands of overwhelming forces we cannot hope to win against while I save my own skin. I have benefitted from life without doing anything to earn it.
At the end of the day, I just hope we survive, and I hope all trans people can endure. I decided to join a political party for the first time in my life: PTB-PVDA, the Workers' Party of Belgium, which is a Marxist party that I think I can do a lot of good campaigning and advocating for. Maybe by working with them, I can ensure a better future in some way, but right now, things are bleak. I'm going to try to make the most of the extension of life I was given, but it is hollow, and the guilt I have will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Ironic, isn’t it?
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On July 03 2023 04:01 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2023 03:48 Magic Powers wrote:On July 03 2023 03:26 Elroi wrote:On July 02 2023 22:15 Magic Powers wrote:On July 02 2023 20:55 Elroi wrote:On July 01 2023 15:08 BlackJack wrote:On July 01 2023 10:29 plasmidghost wrote:On July 01 2023 01:42 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 01 2023 01:11 Kyadytim wrote:For me, the most upsetting part of the Creative LLC case is that the request that triggered the lawsuit seems to be fake. The person who allegedly sent it claims to not have sent it, and also has been happily married in a heterosexual relationship for 15 years. It was also sent the day after the case was filed. This case existed entirely so that conservative litigation teams could give the Supreme Court an opportunity to rule in favor of legal discrimination. www.theguardian.com That might be upsetting in terms of how you view the court, but it could also be encouraging in terms of what impact it'll have. If they had to make up a case it prolly won't be difficult to find a web designer, even for gay couples. I'm guessing today, this is a case where being publicly known for refusing to provide services for gay weddings will cost you more than you gain. Not saying it's not problematic but I'm pretty confident gay acceptance isn't contingent on legislation. I can also accept the argument that a website is more related to free speech than other services are (even if this is disingenuous from the people making that claim), and thus I dunno if this creates a precedent for other services. Maybe it does but I dunno. This post is super emblematic of why I don't post on this site anymore. You and many others have no fucking clue how bad this ruling is for queer people and how bad things are for us or y'all simply don't care and I've come to realize that there is no amount of evidence or experience I can show that will make y'all or other people change their minds. People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. The Civil Rights Act is dead and the Democrats and Biden will not do anything to fix the SC, they'll just send out links to ActBlue. The US is a decaying police state with no revolutionary potential and will not get better, and I've given up hope in general for most everywhere else, so fuck it, I'll just post this and leave for good: [img]https://images2.imgbox.com/54/51/uegyih58_o.jpg[/im] I think the last time you posted here you were saying that trans kids were being removed from homes with loving parents to be put into foster homes. When I asked you for a single example you couldn’t provide one and told me that’s what people on Twitter who you trusted were telling you. A few months ago it was front page news everywherewhen a woman at the cheesecake factory that probably had one too many Skinnylicious margaritas said some nasty things to an LGBT person. The idea that there’s some epidemic of nazis beating up queer people while the conservatives cheer them on sounds a little far fetched. Why is it not all over the news? If saying nasty things is front page news worthy than these assaults should be even more newsworthy and if they are as prevalent as you make it seem we should hear about it. Are they just not getting captured on some of the 300 million smartphones? You’ve been posting for years now constantly invoking genocide and nazism and hitler. It’s absurd. The LGBTQ population is exploding. 20% of gen Z identifies as LGBTQ. That’s 1 in 5. That’s double the rate of millennials and millennials are double the rate of Gen X and Gen X is double the rate of baby boomers. Either your posts have no basis in reality or this is the worst attempt at genocide in history. This kind of language seems to have become quite common. I saw a manifestation against restrictions on sex altering surgery where many of the protesters called it "genocide" and here is a male transgender cyclist calling restrictions on her participation in tournaments "genocide". I'm not denying that there are many legitimate problems to discuss, but throwing around words like that seems to have become a trend. Regarding MTF athletes, for every person who calls their exclusion "genocide" you have a number of (not right-wing) people arguing over the nuances of inclusion vs fairness vs science. Yes, they're having a debate. For people who are politically neutral or left-leaning, they're unsure of what to do and they're having a conversation. For people who are politically right-wing, there is no debate. All of them are completely certain of what to do: strict exclusion of all MTF athletes. The whole of the right-wing is ideologically driven, but only the fringe left is ideologically driven, while the overwhelming majority of remaining people between these two groups is thinking about the dilemma fairly rationally. The distinction is clear: left-wingers are not generally being radical about MTF athlete inclusion. They're debating the issue. They're not just winging it and blindly following the personal interests of a small fraction of the population. We certainly can't say the same thing about many right-wingers. They're just blocking the path and they're never going to budge. It's like arguing with a wall. And this is regarding a tiny issue in the vastness of the transgender landscape. MTF athletes are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the population. "Would transgender women 'take over' women's sport? Harper: Trans women are never going to take over women's sport. First of all, trans people make up roughly 1% of the population. The best example of a population study to look at comes from America. If you look at NCAA sports, there are more than 200,000 women competing every year in NCAA sports. Trans women make up 0.5-1% of the population so we should be seeing 1,000-2,000 trans women every year. The NCAA 11 years ago allowed trans women to compete, based on hormone therapy. We should be seeing 1,000-2,000. We see a handful every year." Somehow an issue that affects very few people in the world is front and center for conservatives regarding their issues with transgender people. How? Why? Is this really such a big deal that it has to result in anti-LGBTQ legislation? The answer is obviously no. The sports associations can figure this out for themselves, they don't need laws interfering with the process. Mistakes will be made on the way to a better solution, but these are not going to "ruin women's sports" in any meaningful capacity. So yet again conservatives (pretend to) care more about a much smaller fraction of the population than about a much larger fraction. This is called a "red herring fallacy". https://www.bbc.com/sport/61346517 I don't really see how your response has anything to do with my post. BJ pointed to comments like this, from this thread: People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. and talk about "genocide" on trans people in the US. And said that it is wildly exaggerated and that you should be able to back such claims up with evidence. I only gave other examples of the same kind of exaggerations (such as calling a ban on trans women in women's sport genocide). No one in this thread said that transgender people are experiencing genocide, BJ made that up. Ironic, isn't it? "Backing claims up with evidence" and all that, right? Show nested quote +On July 01 2022 15:33 plasmidghost wrote:+ Show Spoiler +In one month, I will move from Texas to Belgium, and I will most likely never return to the United States.
On 12 December 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States terminated a recount of Florida's votes for president. In a 5-4 decision on party lines, the court gave the presidency to George W. Bush, and less than a year later, we were at war and the post-WWII party that had defined American capitalism and excess came to an abrupt and permanent end. On 16 June 2015, Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for president, and the forces of decades of conservative lobbying, Christian fundamentalism, and fascist recruiting killed off any mirage of America being a country based on freedom, justice, and equality. On 24 June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and many Americans suddenly realized that the war had come home.
When you cross a black hole's event horizon, time ceases to exist. Your body gets torn limb from limb, cell from cell, atom from atom, until several infinites later, your body ha been reunited with the cosmic dust it was formed out of. While some physical manifestation of you still exists, your past, present, and futures collapse onto one another into one perpetual scream. You see infinitely many lifetimes born from every decision you could've made or not made and are forced to reckon with seeing the life of your dreams fade away and be replaced with a nightmare, ad infinitum, tormenting you until you've gone insane. But just as suddenly as your hell began, it ends, and all that's left of you is your soul, the pure essence of you as a human being, and then you enter it.
When I entered a black hole, I was greeted with the void. No sound, no light, nothing. I was, for the first time in my life, truly alone, despite my many feelings of loneliness before. Or so I thought. The voice of Death spoke my name and it echoed around me and inside me. I turned fearful, then sighed in resignation, accepting that I was dead. Or so I thought, once again. Death started to take a physical form in front of me and told me that I was in fact, not dead. When I heard Their voice, it was not one of malice, or evil, or temptation. It was gentle, soft, and tranquil. I told Death how terrified I was of Them, and They told me that I had a fundamental misunderstanding of Them. They are not some malevolent spectre, haunting and stalking people, trying to lure them into recklessness and death. They just simply are. No more, no less, and then I understood Them. Death told me to remember what I had seen during my infinite lifetimes and I promised Them that I would make the most out of the rest of my life, until I was finally reunited with Them.
But I should not be alive right now, despite my new lease on life. On Valentine's Day 2022, I had an unintentional drug overdose in a nondescript hotel room in Orange County, California, resulting in me developing severe serotonin syndrome. I rapidly lost consciousness, had a seizure that jolted me awake, then nearly choked on my own vomit a few seconds later. Whether by G-d's mercy, or kismet, or the pure chaos of the universe, that seizure woke me up just before I choked to death, and I survived while so many others haven't. A true undeserved miracle.
The most consequential day of my political radicalization was on 17 July 2014, when Eric Garner was murdered by NYPD. I watched the video of him saying "I Can't Breathe" over and over while the life was choked out of him for the "crime" of selling loose cigarettes, and his dying words have never left my mind since then. Over the next month, I confronted the nature of my upbringing in small-town Texas where it was deeply ingrained in me to always respect police and that they were just doing what they had to do, and that if they murdered someone, regardless of the circumstances, it was justified. I started reading a bunch of writings and speeches that Black activists on Twitter were recommending, my first being the autobiography of Malcolm X, arguably still one of the biggest influences on me politically. From there was a deep dive into the life of one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, Fred Hampton, who I believe would've completely changed the face of America if he wasn't assassinated by the FBI. The works of Angela Davis and Assata Shakur helped to open my eyes to Black feminist perspectives that I greatly support and advocate for to this day.
For the several years that followed, I rarely discussed my political beliefs in any serious capacity online because I never could get people to see the warning signs that came from the response to the 2008 recession and realize that we were heading into a late-capitalist hell. I watched as far-right forces coalesced in the GOP and the Democrats utterly failed the country in so many ways, but no one wanted to see what was going to happen. As I steadily became more militant in my beliefs, many millennials and Gen Zers around my age were experiencing firsthand the absolute nightmare American society had become with student loans, wage stagnation, healthcare, and so much more, but instead of fighting, they gave into nihilism, despair, misanthropy, and apathy, all combining into doomerism. Our generation was going to go silently, never achieving a better world. The Black Lives Matter movement probably was one of my only glimmers of hope during the 2010s, but the GOP and Dems swiftly came down to stop any meaningful change to policing occurring. It truly drove the point home that the liberals will always side with the far-right over the progressives because ultimately, the liberals with all the power and money benefit from a far-right government because they get to push for fundraising while knowing that their massive wealth compared to the average American will never be touched.
When the anti-transgender legislation and societal forces started spreading in 2019, none of us knew what to do. As things got worse and worse over the next three years, we were completely alone. The Dems never did anything noteworthy to help us while the GOP dehumanized us and stripped us of rights across the country. The only queer organizations and advocacy groups that cared about us were trans-focused ones. It wasn't until Florida's Don't Say Gay bill was being pushed that the queer orgs actually started fighting back. To them, we were expendable. They cared more about cis gay men not being able to donate blood than trans people not being allowed to exist. We kept sounding the alarm bells about the broader implications of what attacking us could mean, and no one listened. For decades, trans people had existed in a dark forest, intentionally not being seen or heard, because the moment we would be spotted, we would be labelled an existential threat and target for elimination by overwhelming forces that we had no chance of defeating.
When Roe v Wade was overturned, it completely changed the mood of nearly everyone I know, myself included. At this point, all of my friends and close associates knew I was extremely far-left and I had countless furious people reaching out to me to ask things like how to make Molotov cocktails, how to force change when no politicians want it to happen, and the nature and morals of political violence. My go-to quote for them was by the legendary Kwame Ture: "In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none." No group of oppressed people in the United States were ever handed their rights without violence, and it seemed many people finally realized that simple truth.
If you have a million people ready to die for your cause, you are going to fail. You can send unit after unit of people to fight and die, but it will not make a difference to the neo-Nazis and fascists in power. If you want to win, you have to be willing to kill quickly and kill repeatedly. To them, we are not human. To them, we are merely vermin to be squashed, and I am going to treat them in kind. They have long lost the capability to be shown the error of their ways, and I am not going to go the way my ancestors did, killed by the Nazi scum. If I can secure a better future for trans people in America and the world, even if it meant sacrificing my freedom or my life, I will do it. After all, I shouldn't even be alive. I am not going to let trans joy be eradicated by these monsters. If they say we're not human, then I'm going to show them how not human I can get.
That was my thought process on the weekend of 24 June 2022. The week since then has been sobering. I came to realize while talking with cis people that nearly all don't have the conviction to die or kill, and that is not something I would ever ask of someone. The trans community can band together and arm ourselves, but very few people will fight with us. If I decide to actually get violent with the fascists, it's going to cause the rapid destruction of trans people across America. As it stands, I don't see a way forward for me as a trans person in America, and I don't want to die for nothing.
I don't know what the future has in store for transgender people in the United States, but it looks horrifying. I fully expect a genocide to occur against us here and that it's already started. + Show Spoiler +I live every moment of my life thinking that I'm going to lose the people here I love to horrific violence and society at large will encourage it or simply not care. And I get to flee. I get to leave the United States, move to Belgium, and have a job there. I do not deserve this. There is no special quality I have that makes me more worthy of being safe than any other trans person. It's pure luck. I am going to leave in a cowardly way, and I will be a worse person for it. I have effectively abandoned my community to die at the hands of overwhelming forces we cannot hope to win against while I save my own skin. I have benefitted from life without doing anything to earn it.
At the end of the day, I just hope we survive, and I hope all trans people can endure. I decided to join a political party for the first time in my life: PTB-PVDA, the Workers' Party of Belgium, which is a Marxist party that I think I can do a lot of good campaigning and advocating for. Maybe by working with them, I can ensure a better future in some way, but right now, things are bleak. I'm going to try to make the most of the extension of life I was given, but it is hollow, and the guilt I have will stay with me for the rest of my life. Ironic, isn’t it?
Nothing ironic about that, because it's quite obvious that Plasmid was talking about what the future might look like and where things are heading in her opinion, not that there are trans people being queued up for gas chambers right here and now. Also, who cares? It's one post from one person a year ago, but I guess that invalidates literally anything anyone could say on the topic now because LiBeRaL CrYbAbIeS aLwAyS ExAgGeRaTe EvErYtHiNg MeAnWhIlE SaN FrAnCiScO iS LiTeRaLLy BuRnInG RiGhT NoW.
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Norway28591 Posts
Tbh the discussion around what did the person who is no longer part of the thread say in the past isn't really interesting enough to warrant a whole lot of back and forth replies on.
I'm not sure there's even that big disagreements on 'the facts' here. Does anybody here think transgendered people are actually subject to a genocide, or was that just a bit flowery language?
In the same vein, I'm guessing nobody here thinks transgendered people are a group that encounters little opposition of substance. They're clearly an oppressed group, and I think it's also fair that particularly hateful groups have become emboldened in targeting them, and that they're also subject to more vitriol than before because they've become a more visible group as more people have started identifying as trans. This is obviously unacceptable and we should fight this trend.
But invoking nazi germany is something people should know to be careful with, and I think if people do, they should be especially mindful to specify whether they mean 1930s nazi germany or 1940s nazi germany. Even though one led to the other, there's also nothing inevitable about some people having misguided beliefs about jewish worldly influence eventually turning into the holocaust.
I honestly don't fully know how views on trans people have evolved over the past few years. My impression is that people are generally more supportive of stuff like using the preferred pronouns than they used to be (and that people who refuse to do so are increasingly, by greater society, considered trolls/assholes), but that there might be some evolution in the other direction on other questions. I don't have time to summarize, or even fully read this study right now, but it seemed like interesting food for thought, so maybe we can try to steer the discussion over to segments of this that people find particularly interesting:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/
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On July 03 2023 03:57 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2023 03:17 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2023 18:27 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2023 09:38 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2023 08:55 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2023 07:44 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2023 02:40 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2023 00:09 Mohdoo wrote:
As I always say: There is no legal mechanism for the supreme court to enforce their rulings. It is purely theater and tradition
Biden has the option to just kinda look at the supreme court, flip them off, and do what he wants with student loans or whatever else. The US political system would probably implode rather quickly. Granted Biden could stand to do something drastic since he's currently losing to a fashy insurrectionist. One problem Biden's facing is that the net loss of rights under his administration can't be changed by simply reelecting him. In fact, there's no indication electing him (or Democrats at the national level) will do anything to stop the ongoing decay of people's rights. As it sits I get the feeling Democrats/their supporters are going to basically end up saying "well the rules say that's how it works, so fascism wins. We'll get them next election!" like they have with SCOTUS. If anything, what we have learned is that whoever happens to be sitting in the president's chair at the time of a supreme court justice dying is the most important parameter in american politics. Voting dem, regardless of who, has only become further ingrained. Let's say some fiery socialist dem won in 2020 instead. We just learned their student loan forgiveness would have been shot down. All that matters right now is the supreme court. Abortion, student loans, affirmative action, all of the hot button items are just settled by the court. So all you can really do is camp out the chair for the next time one needs to be replaced. Realistically speaking, you're looking at more than a decade before that has a possibility of paying off and hoping Sotomayor retires at a favorable time, unlike RBG. Losing the presidency just once in the next 3-6 cycles (or failing to fill a vacancy again) could easily extend the time horizon for a SCOTUS that isn't stripping people of bodily autonomy, voting rights, etc. into several decades away. All that assumes the fashy insurrectionist that's polling ahead of Biden and/or his proteges/supporters don't destroy US democracy in the intervening decade(s). "You'll lose even more rights even faster if you don't elect us!" isn't exactly an inspirational message to carry you through several must win elections in a row. What do you see as the way of breaking the impact the supreme court has? What can a progressive candidate do that isn't vulnerable to the supreme court deciding they disagree? As gobbledy points out there's adding Justices. Even if Republicans just do it back when they win, at least then it's a back and forth instead of one loss costing you a decade+ on top of the decade+ it seems people will already have to wait to get their rights back (and maybe stop losing them). As is indicated by plasmids amazing post, it's already immeasurably bad here. If one is relatively comfortable, and doesn't want to truly empathize with people outside a very small circle, it seems passable enough. But if you just scratch the surface a little bit, you uncover a gaping, festering, horrific wound stretching across great swaths of marginalized and oppressed communities. If you focus in for a moment on individuals instead of the statistics, it's absolutely gutting and enough to bring just about anyone tears. That's without even pausing for a moment to consider we do worse abroad. People are still being maimed, killed, and born with various (sometimes terminal) disabilities from the toxic and undetonated ordinance that's just littered around the warzones where we slaughtered innocent families en masse and poisoned the land of those they didn't burn while looting anything of value. The illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians continues under the auspices of US diplomacy, more coups than you have phalanges, and a level of cynical hegemonic domination over so much of world affairs that the current dependence on the dollar that underpins so much of the US economy is something that even I don't think Kwark is exaggerating about when describing how inexorable it is from the existing world economic system. Basically, Pre WWII Germany picked up where the post civil war US left off and post WWII US picked up where Nazi Germany left off. But the US focused on the world domination part first and is now flirting (I can't stress enough how bad it is Trump is even able to compete let alone is leading in polls) with going full mask-off fascism. That's all ominous enough on it's own, but when you realize that Democrats plan is to just never lose again or win back control from what even some of the more moderate among them readily identify as fascists through elections in/over the next 20 years (and maybe you get some rights back then, or maybe just lose more of them slower), it's hard for things not to feel hopeless. It's not easy, but I'm still holding out for a mass awakening of people's revolutionary spirit in the US. Granted this forum hasn't exactly inspired a lot of hope in my capacity to help realize that. I agree with all of this and I think Frantz Fanon’s perspectives on the issue are a good fit for what ought to be done. And until enough people are on board, there is value in doing what we can. I think the recent Supreme Court rulings have shown legislation can only be done through the court right now due to political gridlock, so the only real option is executive orders and disregard for the Supreme Court. Would greatly favor more direct approaches, but it seems we have a bit to go before Fanon’s perspectives can be applied to the situation. I can dig it I'd just say on the "value in doing what we can" I'm firmly in the nonreformist reforms camp. It's important to recognize the differences between those and standard liberal reforms that further entrench the status quo.
So then what do we do now? How do we still do what we can without entrenching the status quo?
I agree with the gist of not allowing the status quote to continue to dig it’s teeth into culture, but there needs to be a mechanism of doing that while also mitigating bad situations in the meantime.
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On July 03 2023 04:01 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2023 03:48 Magic Powers wrote:On July 03 2023 03:26 Elroi wrote:On July 02 2023 22:15 Magic Powers wrote:On July 02 2023 20:55 Elroi wrote:On July 01 2023 15:08 BlackJack wrote:On July 01 2023 10:29 plasmidghost wrote:On July 01 2023 01:42 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 01 2023 01:11 Kyadytim wrote:For me, the most upsetting part of the Creative LLC case is that the request that triggered the lawsuit seems to be fake. The person who allegedly sent it claims to not have sent it, and also has been happily married in a heterosexual relationship for 15 years. It was also sent the day after the case was filed. This case existed entirely so that conservative litigation teams could give the Supreme Court an opportunity to rule in favor of legal discrimination. www.theguardian.com That might be upsetting in terms of how you view the court, but it could also be encouraging in terms of what impact it'll have. If they had to make up a case it prolly won't be difficult to find a web designer, even for gay couples. I'm guessing today, this is a case where being publicly known for refusing to provide services for gay weddings will cost you more than you gain. Not saying it's not problematic but I'm pretty confident gay acceptance isn't contingent on legislation. I can also accept the argument that a website is more related to free speech than other services are (even if this is disingenuous from the people making that claim), and thus I dunno if this creates a precedent for other services. Maybe it does but I dunno. This post is super emblematic of why I don't post on this site anymore. You and many others have no fucking clue how bad this ruling is for queer people and how bad things are for us or y'all simply don't care and I've come to realize that there is no amount of evidence or experience I can show that will make y'all or other people change their minds. People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. The Civil Rights Act is dead and the Democrats and Biden will not do anything to fix the SC, they'll just send out links to ActBlue. The US is a decaying police state with no revolutionary potential and will not get better, and I've given up hope in general for most everywhere else, so fuck it, I'll just post this and leave for good: [img]https://images2.imgbox.com/54/51/uegyih58_o.jpg[/im] I think the last time you posted here you were saying that trans kids were being removed from homes with loving parents to be put into foster homes. When I asked you for a single example you couldn’t provide one and told me that’s what people on Twitter who you trusted were telling you. A few months ago it was front page news everywherewhen a woman at the cheesecake factory that probably had one too many Skinnylicious margaritas said some nasty things to an LGBT person. The idea that there’s some epidemic of nazis beating up queer people while the conservatives cheer them on sounds a little far fetched. Why is it not all over the news? If saying nasty things is front page news worthy than these assaults should be even more newsworthy and if they are as prevalent as you make it seem we should hear about it. Are they just not getting captured on some of the 300 million smartphones? You’ve been posting for years now constantly invoking genocide and nazism and hitler. It’s absurd. The LGBTQ population is exploding. 20% of gen Z identifies as LGBTQ. That’s 1 in 5. That’s double the rate of millennials and millennials are double the rate of Gen X and Gen X is double the rate of baby boomers. Either your posts have no basis in reality or this is the worst attempt at genocide in history. This kind of language seems to have become quite common. I saw a manifestation against restrictions on sex altering surgery where many of the protesters called it "genocide" and here is a male transgender cyclist calling restrictions on her participation in tournaments "genocide". I'm not denying that there are many legitimate problems to discuss, but throwing around words like that seems to have become a trend. Regarding MTF athletes, for every person who calls their exclusion "genocide" you have a number of (not right-wing) people arguing over the nuances of inclusion vs fairness vs science. Yes, they're having a debate. For people who are politically neutral or left-leaning, they're unsure of what to do and they're having a conversation. For people who are politically right-wing, there is no debate. All of them are completely certain of what to do: strict exclusion of all MTF athletes. The whole of the right-wing is ideologically driven, but only the fringe left is ideologically driven, while the overwhelming majority of remaining people between these two groups is thinking about the dilemma fairly rationally. The distinction is clear: left-wingers are not generally being radical about MTF athlete inclusion. They're debating the issue. They're not just winging it and blindly following the personal interests of a small fraction of the population. We certainly can't say the same thing about many right-wingers. They're just blocking the path and they're never going to budge. It's like arguing with a wall. And this is regarding a tiny issue in the vastness of the transgender landscape. MTF athletes are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the population. "Would transgender women 'take over' women's sport? Harper: Trans women are never going to take over women's sport. First of all, trans people make up roughly 1% of the population. The best example of a population study to look at comes from America. If you look at NCAA sports, there are more than 200,000 women competing every year in NCAA sports. Trans women make up 0.5-1% of the population so we should be seeing 1,000-2,000 trans women every year. The NCAA 11 years ago allowed trans women to compete, based on hormone therapy. We should be seeing 1,000-2,000. We see a handful every year." Somehow an issue that affects very few people in the world is front and center for conservatives regarding their issues with transgender people. How? Why? Is this really such a big deal that it has to result in anti-LGBTQ legislation? The answer is obviously no. The sports associations can figure this out for themselves, they don't need laws interfering with the process. Mistakes will be made on the way to a better solution, but these are not going to "ruin women's sports" in any meaningful capacity. So yet again conservatives (pretend to) care more about a much smaller fraction of the population than about a much larger fraction. This is called a "red herring fallacy". https://www.bbc.com/sport/61346517 I don't really see how your response has anything to do with my post. BJ pointed to comments like this, from this thread: People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. and talk about "genocide" on trans people in the US. And said that it is wildly exaggerated and that you should be able to back such claims up with evidence. I only gave other examples of the same kind of exaggerations (such as calling a ban on trans women in women's sport genocide). No one in this thread said that transgender people are experiencing genocide, BJ made that up. Ironic, isn't it? "Backing claims up with evidence" and all that, right? Show nested quote +On July 01 2022 15:33 plasmidghost wrote:+ Show Spoiler +In one month, I will move from Texas to Belgium, and I will most likely never return to the United States.
On 12 December 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States terminated a recount of Florida's votes for president. In a 5-4 decision on party lines, the court gave the presidency to George W. Bush, and less than a year later, we were at war and the post-WWII party that had defined American capitalism and excess came to an abrupt and permanent end. On 16 June 2015, Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for president, and the forces of decades of conservative lobbying, Christian fundamentalism, and fascist recruiting killed off any mirage of America being a country based on freedom, justice, and equality. On 24 June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and many Americans suddenly realized that the war had come home.
When you cross a black hole's event horizon, time ceases to exist. Your body gets torn limb from limb, cell from cell, atom from atom, until several infinites later, your body ha been reunited with the cosmic dust it was formed out of. While some physical manifestation of you still exists, your past, present, and futures collapse onto one another into one perpetual scream. You see infinitely many lifetimes born from every decision you could've made or not made and are forced to reckon with seeing the life of your dreams fade away and be replaced with a nightmare, ad infinitum, tormenting you until you've gone insane. But just as suddenly as your hell began, it ends, and all that's left of you is your soul, the pure essence of you as a human being, and then you enter it.
When I entered a black hole, I was greeted with the void. No sound, no light, nothing. I was, for the first time in my life, truly alone, despite my many feelings of loneliness before. Or so I thought. The voice of Death spoke my name and it echoed around me and inside me. I turned fearful, then sighed in resignation, accepting that I was dead. Or so I thought, once again. Death started to take a physical form in front of me and told me that I was in fact, not dead. When I heard Their voice, it was not one of malice, or evil, or temptation. It was gentle, soft, and tranquil. I told Death how terrified I was of Them, and They told me that I had a fundamental misunderstanding of Them. They are not some malevolent spectre, haunting and stalking people, trying to lure them into recklessness and death. They just simply are. No more, no less, and then I understood Them. Death told me to remember what I had seen during my infinite lifetimes and I promised Them that I would make the most out of the rest of my life, until I was finally reunited with Them.
But I should not be alive right now, despite my new lease on life. On Valentine's Day 2022, I had an unintentional drug overdose in a nondescript hotel room in Orange County, California, resulting in me developing severe serotonin syndrome. I rapidly lost consciousness, had a seizure that jolted me awake, then nearly choked on my own vomit a few seconds later. Whether by G-d's mercy, or kismet, or the pure chaos of the universe, that seizure woke me up just before I choked to death, and I survived while so many others haven't. A true undeserved miracle.
The most consequential day of my political radicalization was on 17 July 2014, when Eric Garner was murdered by NYPD. I watched the video of him saying "I Can't Breathe" over and over while the life was choked out of him for the "crime" of selling loose cigarettes, and his dying words have never left my mind since then. Over the next month, I confronted the nature of my upbringing in small-town Texas where it was deeply ingrained in me to always respect police and that they were just doing what they had to do, and that if they murdered someone, regardless of the circumstances, it was justified. I started reading a bunch of writings and speeches that Black activists on Twitter were recommending, my first being the autobiography of Malcolm X, arguably still one of the biggest influences on me politically. From there was a deep dive into the life of one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, Fred Hampton, who I believe would've completely changed the face of America if he wasn't assassinated by the FBI. The works of Angela Davis and Assata Shakur helped to open my eyes to Black feminist perspectives that I greatly support and advocate for to this day.
For the several years that followed, I rarely discussed my political beliefs in any serious capacity online because I never could get people to see the warning signs that came from the response to the 2008 recession and realize that we were heading into a late-capitalist hell. I watched as far-right forces coalesced in the GOP and the Democrats utterly failed the country in so many ways, but no one wanted to see what was going to happen. As I steadily became more militant in my beliefs, many millennials and Gen Zers around my age were experiencing firsthand the absolute nightmare American society had become with student loans, wage stagnation, healthcare, and so much more, but instead of fighting, they gave into nihilism, despair, misanthropy, and apathy, all combining into doomerism. Our generation was going to go silently, never achieving a better world. The Black Lives Matter movement probably was one of my only glimmers of hope during the 2010s, but the GOP and Dems swiftly came down to stop any meaningful change to policing occurring. It truly drove the point home that the liberals will always side with the far-right over the progressives because ultimately, the liberals with all the power and money benefit from a far-right government because they get to push for fundraising while knowing that their massive wealth compared to the average American will never be touched.
When the anti-transgender legislation and societal forces started spreading in 2019, none of us knew what to do. As things got worse and worse over the next three years, we were completely alone. The Dems never did anything noteworthy to help us while the GOP dehumanized us and stripped us of rights across the country. The only queer organizations and advocacy groups that cared about us were trans-focused ones. It wasn't until Florida's Don't Say Gay bill was being pushed that the queer orgs actually started fighting back. To them, we were expendable. They cared more about cis gay men not being able to donate blood than trans people not being allowed to exist. We kept sounding the alarm bells about the broader implications of what attacking us could mean, and no one listened. For decades, trans people had existed in a dark forest, intentionally not being seen or heard, because the moment we would be spotted, we would be labelled an existential threat and target for elimination by overwhelming forces that we had no chance of defeating.
When Roe v Wade was overturned, it completely changed the mood of nearly everyone I know, myself included. At this point, all of my friends and close associates knew I was extremely far-left and I had countless furious people reaching out to me to ask things like how to make Molotov cocktails, how to force change when no politicians want it to happen, and the nature and morals of political violence. My go-to quote for them was by the legendary Kwame Ture: "In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none." No group of oppressed people in the United States were ever handed their rights without violence, and it seemed many people finally realized that simple truth.
If you have a million people ready to die for your cause, you are going to fail. You can send unit after unit of people to fight and die, but it will not make a difference to the neo-Nazis and fascists in power. If you want to win, you have to be willing to kill quickly and kill repeatedly. To them, we are not human. To them, we are merely vermin to be squashed, and I am going to treat them in kind. They have long lost the capability to be shown the error of their ways, and I am not going to go the way my ancestors did, killed by the Nazi scum. If I can secure a better future for trans people in America and the world, even if it meant sacrificing my freedom or my life, I will do it. After all, I shouldn't even be alive. I am not going to let trans joy be eradicated by these monsters. If they say we're not human, then I'm going to show them how not human I can get.
That was my thought process on the weekend of 24 June 2022. The week since then has been sobering. I came to realize while talking with cis people that nearly all don't have the conviction to die or kill, and that is not something I would ever ask of someone. The trans community can band together and arm ourselves, but very few people will fight with us. If I decide to actually get violent with the fascists, it's going to cause the rapid destruction of trans people across America. As it stands, I don't see a way forward for me as a trans person in America, and I don't want to die for nothing.
I don't know what the future has in store for transgender people in the United States, but it looks horrifying. I fully expect a genocide to occur against us here and that it's already started. + Show Spoiler +I live every moment of my life thinking that I'm going to lose the people here I love to horrific violence and society at large will encourage it or simply not care. And I get to flee. I get to leave the United States, move to Belgium, and have a job there. I do not deserve this. There is no special quality I have that makes me more worthy of being safe than any other trans person. It's pure luck. I am going to leave in a cowardly way, and I will be a worse person for it. I have effectively abandoned my community to die at the hands of overwhelming forces we cannot hope to win against while I save my own skin. I have benefitted from life without doing anything to earn it.
At the end of the day, I just hope we survive, and I hope all trans people can endure. I decided to join a political party for the first time in my life: PTB-PVDA, the Workers' Party of Belgium, which is a Marxist party that I think I can do a lot of good campaigning and advocating for. Maybe by working with them, I can ensure a better future in some way, but right now, things are bleak. I'm going to try to make the most of the extension of life I was given, but it is hollow, and the guilt I have will stay with me for the rest of my life. Ironic, isn’t it?
Nothing ironic about it except that it took you far too long to present the evidence for your claim.
Firstly it's a prediction of genocide. Yes, plasmid adds "[...] that it's already started", but that's in reference to "I fully expect [...]". This is not descriptive, but predictive. According to my understanding of grammar, this cannot be considered a declaration that genocide is currently taking place.
Also, need clarification of "here". The previous sentence makes it sound like all of United States, but plasmid could have meant Texas specifically.
Furthermore, the comment was in response to Roe v Wade, albeit a week late. plasmid also drew a connection all the way back to G.W. Bush's presidency and things in between.
When RvW got overturned there was an uproar in the US. I think it makes a lot of sense to suspect that, if even women have their rights retroactively denied, the situation for transgender people is also fairly likely to get worse.
My conclusion is that this is not in support of your claim until we get confirmation from plasmid. You'd have to ask them for confirmation before you can state with any degree of confidence that your interpretation of their words is the correct one.
PS: please next time consider linking to the comment you're quoting from.
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On July 03 2023 04:30 Liquid`Drone wrote:Tbh the discussion around what did the person who is no longer part of the thread say in the past isn't really interesting enough to warrant a whole lot of back and forth replies on. I'm not sure there's even that big disagreements on 'the facts' here. Does anybody here think transgendered people are actually subject to a genocide, or was that just a bit flowery language? In the same vein, I'm guessing nobody here thinks transgendered people are a group that encounters little opposition of substance. They're clearly an oppressed group, and I think it's also fair that particularly hateful groups have become emboldened in targeting them, and that they're also subject to more vitriol than before because they've become a more visible group as more people have started identifying as trans. This is obviously unacceptable and we should fight this trend. But invoking nazi germany is something people should know to be careful with, and I think if people do, they should be especially mindful to specify whether they mean 1930s nazi germany or 1940s nazi germany. Even though one led to the other, there's also nothing inevitable about some people having misguided beliefs about jewish worldly influence eventually turning into the holocaust. I honestly don't fully know how views on trans people have evolved over the past few years. My impression is that people are generally more supportive of stuff like using the preferred pronouns than they used to be (and that people who refuse to do so are increasingly, by greater society, considered trolls/assholes), but that there might be some evolution in the other direction on other questions. I don't have time to summarize, or even fully read this study right now, but it seemed like interesting food for thought, so maybe we can try to steer the discussion over to segments of this that people find particularly interesting: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/
Going purely by the dictionary definitions of genocide, the transgender community at large is certainly not experiencing genocide in the US right now. Of course this doesn't mean that certain places aren't highly detrimental to their well-being. There are places in the US from which transgender people are escaping (quite evidently), which makes it fairly obvious that a claim of genocide would have at least some basis in reality. Not to mention the legal apparatus working against them, too. It would not be considered genocide, but it could also not be shrugged off.
The various definitions of "genocide" are broader than people may be aware of.
For example one of the recent additions is the following:
"Genocide is the concerted, coordinated effort to destroy any human group or collectivity as it is defined by the perpetrator.
Genocide differs from other mass crimes against humanity and atrocities by its ambition. Genocide aims to not only eliminate individual members of the targeted group but to destroy the group's ability to maintain its social and cultural cohesion and, thus, its existence as a group.
Because perpetrators very rarely provide explicit statements of genocidal intent, this intent can be uncovered by examining policies, actions, and outcomes, as well as the guiding ideology."
Without a doubt there are groups in America that are either actively trying or otherwise aiming to destroy the transgender community. This can be done through various means: laws, local expulsion/displacement, violent attacks, aggressive rhetoric, social repression, to name some of the most common ways.
To some degree, these are all real phenomenons in the US, albeit not widespread as of this moment. Certain neighborhoods, districts or small towns can become too hostile for transgender people to stick around without major concerns. And that I would certainly consider a small sibling of genocide, with significant potential to get worse.
Note that this is exactly how things went for the Jews. For many years they were allowed to live side by side with their fellow citizens, and then almost out of nowhere the dangerous rhetoric started to get worse, the attacks increased, and eventually genocidal dictators were installed that saw the Jews as evil vermin, and a plan to actively and swiftly eradicate them was enacted.
The people of Germany and other countries weren't prepared for this, they did not interfere. The Jews got rounded up strictly because politics dictated it. There was no meaningful resistance. The status quo shifted from (relatively) peaceful side-by-side to genocide very soon after an oppressive dictator was installed, and that's all it took.
The most recent president in US history was a proto-fascist.
This is why it's so important to learn from history and to draw the right parallels before it's too late.
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On July 03 2023 04:01 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2023 03:48 Magic Powers wrote:On July 03 2023 03:26 Elroi wrote:On July 02 2023 22:15 Magic Powers wrote:On July 02 2023 20:55 Elroi wrote:On July 01 2023 15:08 BlackJack wrote:On July 01 2023 10:29 plasmidghost wrote:On July 01 2023 01:42 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 01 2023 01:11 Kyadytim wrote:For me, the most upsetting part of the Creative LLC case is that the request that triggered the lawsuit seems to be fake. The person who allegedly sent it claims to not have sent it, and also has been happily married in a heterosexual relationship for 15 years. It was also sent the day after the case was filed. This case existed entirely so that conservative litigation teams could give the Supreme Court an opportunity to rule in favor of legal discrimination. www.theguardian.com That might be upsetting in terms of how you view the court, but it could also be encouraging in terms of what impact it'll have. If they had to make up a case it prolly won't be difficult to find a web designer, even for gay couples. I'm guessing today, this is a case where being publicly known for refusing to provide services for gay weddings will cost you more than you gain. Not saying it's not problematic but I'm pretty confident gay acceptance isn't contingent on legislation. I can also accept the argument that a website is more related to free speech than other services are (even if this is disingenuous from the people making that claim), and thus I dunno if this creates a precedent for other services. Maybe it does but I dunno. This post is super emblematic of why I don't post on this site anymore. You and many others have no fucking clue how bad this ruling is for queer people and how bad things are for us or y'all simply don't care and I've come to realize that there is no amount of evidence or experience I can show that will make y'all or other people change their minds. People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. The Civil Rights Act is dead and the Democrats and Biden will not do anything to fix the SC, they'll just send out links to ActBlue. The US is a decaying police state with no revolutionary potential and will not get better, and I've given up hope in general for most everywhere else, so fuck it, I'll just post this and leave for good: [img]https://images2.imgbox.com/54/51/uegyih58_o.jpg[/im] I think the last time you posted here you were saying that trans kids were being removed from homes with loving parents to be put into foster homes. When I asked you for a single example you couldn’t provide one and told me that’s what people on Twitter who you trusted were telling you. A few months ago it was front page news everywherewhen a woman at the cheesecake factory that probably had one too many Skinnylicious margaritas said some nasty things to an LGBT person. The idea that there’s some epidemic of nazis beating up queer people while the conservatives cheer them on sounds a little far fetched. Why is it not all over the news? If saying nasty things is front page news worthy than these assaults should be even more newsworthy and if they are as prevalent as you make it seem we should hear about it. Are they just not getting captured on some of the 300 million smartphones? You’ve been posting for years now constantly invoking genocide and nazism and hitler. It’s absurd. The LGBTQ population is exploding. 20% of gen Z identifies as LGBTQ. That’s 1 in 5. That’s double the rate of millennials and millennials are double the rate of Gen X and Gen X is double the rate of baby boomers. Either your posts have no basis in reality or this is the worst attempt at genocide in history. This kind of language seems to have become quite common. I saw a manifestation against restrictions on sex altering surgery where many of the protesters called it "genocide" and here is a male transgender cyclist calling restrictions on her participation in tournaments "genocide". I'm not denying that there are many legitimate problems to discuss, but throwing around words like that seems to have become a trend. Regarding MTF athletes, for every person who calls their exclusion "genocide" you have a number of (not right-wing) people arguing over the nuances of inclusion vs fairness vs science. Yes, they're having a debate. For people who are politically neutral or left-leaning, they're unsure of what to do and they're having a conversation. For people who are politically right-wing, there is no debate. All of them are completely certain of what to do: strict exclusion of all MTF athletes. The whole of the right-wing is ideologically driven, but only the fringe left is ideologically driven, while the overwhelming majority of remaining people between these two groups is thinking about the dilemma fairly rationally. The distinction is clear: left-wingers are not generally being radical about MTF athlete inclusion. They're debating the issue. They're not just winging it and blindly following the personal interests of a small fraction of the population. We certainly can't say the same thing about many right-wingers. They're just blocking the path and they're never going to budge. It's like arguing with a wall. And this is regarding a tiny issue in the vastness of the transgender landscape. MTF athletes are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the population. "Would transgender women 'take over' women's sport? Harper: Trans women are never going to take over women's sport. First of all, trans people make up roughly 1% of the population. The best example of a population study to look at comes from America. If you look at NCAA sports, there are more than 200,000 women competing every year in NCAA sports. Trans women make up 0.5-1% of the population so we should be seeing 1,000-2,000 trans women every year. The NCAA 11 years ago allowed trans women to compete, based on hormone therapy. We should be seeing 1,000-2,000. We see a handful every year." Somehow an issue that affects very few people in the world is front and center for conservatives regarding their issues with transgender people. How? Why? Is this really such a big deal that it has to result in anti-LGBTQ legislation? The answer is obviously no. The sports associations can figure this out for themselves, they don't need laws interfering with the process. Mistakes will be made on the way to a better solution, but these are not going to "ruin women's sports" in any meaningful capacity. So yet again conservatives (pretend to) care more about a much smaller fraction of the population than about a much larger fraction. This is called a "red herring fallacy". https://www.bbc.com/sport/61346517 I don't really see how your response has anything to do with my post. BJ pointed to comments like this, from this thread: People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. and talk about "genocide" on trans people in the US. And said that it is wildly exaggerated and that you should be able to back such claims up with evidence. I only gave other examples of the same kind of exaggerations (such as calling a ban on trans women in women's sport genocide). No one in this thread said that transgender people are experiencing genocide, BJ made that up. Ironic, isn't it? "Backing claims up with evidence" and all that, right? Show nested quote +On July 01 2022 15:33 plasmidghost wrote:+ Show Spoiler +In one month, I will move from Texas to Belgium, and I will most likely never return to the United States.
On 12 December 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States terminated a recount of Florida's votes for president. In a 5-4 decision on party lines, the court gave the presidency to George W. Bush, and less than a year later, we were at war and the post-WWII party that had defined American capitalism and excess came to an abrupt and permanent end. On 16 June 2015, Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for president, and the forces of decades of conservative lobbying, Christian fundamentalism, and fascist recruiting killed off any mirage of America being a country based on freedom, justice, and equality. On 24 June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and many Americans suddenly realized that the war had come home.
When you cross a black hole's event horizon, time ceases to exist. Your body gets torn limb from limb, cell from cell, atom from atom, until several infinites later, your body ha been reunited with the cosmic dust it was formed out of. While some physical manifestation of you still exists, your past, present, and futures collapse onto one another into one perpetual scream. You see infinitely many lifetimes born from every decision you could've made or not made and are forced to reckon with seeing the life of your dreams fade away and be replaced with a nightmare, ad infinitum, tormenting you until you've gone insane. But just as suddenly as your hell began, it ends, and all that's left of you is your soul, the pure essence of you as a human being, and then you enter it.
When I entered a black hole, I was greeted with the void. No sound, no light, nothing. I was, for the first time in my life, truly alone, despite my many feelings of loneliness before. Or so I thought. The voice of Death spoke my name and it echoed around me and inside me. I turned fearful, then sighed in resignation, accepting that I was dead. Or so I thought, once again. Death started to take a physical form in front of me and told me that I was in fact, not dead. When I heard Their voice, it was not one of malice, or evil, or temptation. It was gentle, soft, and tranquil. I told Death how terrified I was of Them, and They told me that I had a fundamental misunderstanding of Them. They are not some malevolent spectre, haunting and stalking people, trying to lure them into recklessness and death. They just simply are. No more, no less, and then I understood Them. Death told me to remember what I had seen during my infinite lifetimes and I promised Them that I would make the most out of the rest of my life, until I was finally reunited with Them.
But I should not be alive right now, despite my new lease on life. On Valentine's Day 2022, I had an unintentional drug overdose in a nondescript hotel room in Orange County, California, resulting in me developing severe serotonin syndrome. I rapidly lost consciousness, had a seizure that jolted me awake, then nearly choked on my own vomit a few seconds later. Whether by G-d's mercy, or kismet, or the pure chaos of the universe, that seizure woke me up just before I choked to death, and I survived while so many others haven't. A true undeserved miracle.
The most consequential day of my political radicalization was on 17 July 2014, when Eric Garner was murdered by NYPD. I watched the video of him saying "I Can't Breathe" over and over while the life was choked out of him for the "crime" of selling loose cigarettes, and his dying words have never left my mind since then. Over the next month, I confronted the nature of my upbringing in small-town Texas where it was deeply ingrained in me to always respect police and that they were just doing what they had to do, and that if they murdered someone, regardless of the circumstances, it was justified. I started reading a bunch of writings and speeches that Black activists on Twitter were recommending, my first being the autobiography of Malcolm X, arguably still one of the biggest influences on me politically. From there was a deep dive into the life of one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, Fred Hampton, who I believe would've completely changed the face of America if he wasn't assassinated by the FBI. The works of Angela Davis and Assata Shakur helped to open my eyes to Black feminist perspectives that I greatly support and advocate for to this day.
For the several years that followed, I rarely discussed my political beliefs in any serious capacity online because I never could get people to see the warning signs that came from the response to the 2008 recession and realize that we were heading into a late-capitalist hell. I watched as far-right forces coalesced in the GOP and the Democrats utterly failed the country in so many ways, but no one wanted to see what was going to happen. As I steadily became more militant in my beliefs, many millennials and Gen Zers around my age were experiencing firsthand the absolute nightmare American society had become with student loans, wage stagnation, healthcare, and so much more, but instead of fighting, they gave into nihilism, despair, misanthropy, and apathy, all combining into doomerism. Our generation was going to go silently, never achieving a better world. The Black Lives Matter movement probably was one of my only glimmers of hope during the 2010s, but the GOP and Dems swiftly came down to stop any meaningful change to policing occurring. It truly drove the point home that the liberals will always side with the far-right over the progressives because ultimately, the liberals with all the power and money benefit from a far-right government because they get to push for fundraising while knowing that their massive wealth compared to the average American will never be touched.
When the anti-transgender legislation and societal forces started spreading in 2019, none of us knew what to do. As things got worse and worse over the next three years, we were completely alone. The Dems never did anything noteworthy to help us while the GOP dehumanized us and stripped us of rights across the country. The only queer organizations and advocacy groups that cared about us were trans-focused ones. It wasn't until Florida's Don't Say Gay bill was being pushed that the queer orgs actually started fighting back. To them, we were expendable. They cared more about cis gay men not being able to donate blood than trans people not being allowed to exist. We kept sounding the alarm bells about the broader implications of what attacking us could mean, and no one listened. For decades, trans people had existed in a dark forest, intentionally not being seen or heard, because the moment we would be spotted, we would be labelled an existential threat and target for elimination by overwhelming forces that we had no chance of defeating.
When Roe v Wade was overturned, it completely changed the mood of nearly everyone I know, myself included. At this point, all of my friends and close associates knew I was extremely far-left and I had countless furious people reaching out to me to ask things like how to make Molotov cocktails, how to force change when no politicians want it to happen, and the nature and morals of political violence. My go-to quote for them was by the legendary Kwame Ture: "In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none." No group of oppressed people in the United States were ever handed their rights without violence, and it seemed many people finally realized that simple truth.
If you have a million people ready to die for your cause, you are going to fail. You can send unit after unit of people to fight and die, but it will not make a difference to the neo-Nazis and fascists in power. If you want to win, you have to be willing to kill quickly and kill repeatedly. To them, we are not human. To them, we are merely vermin to be squashed, and I am going to treat them in kind. They have long lost the capability to be shown the error of their ways, and I am not going to go the way my ancestors did, killed by the Nazi scum. If I can secure a better future for trans people in America and the world, even if it meant sacrificing my freedom or my life, I will do it. After all, I shouldn't even be alive. I am not going to let trans joy be eradicated by these monsters. If they say we're not human, then I'm going to show them how not human I can get.
That was my thought process on the weekend of 24 June 2022. The week since then has been sobering. I came to realize while talking with cis people that nearly all don't have the conviction to die or kill, and that is not something I would ever ask of someone. The trans community can band together and arm ourselves, but very few people will fight with us. If I decide to actually get violent with the fascists, it's going to cause the rapid destruction of trans people across America. As it stands, I don't see a way forward for me as a trans person in America, and I don't want to die for nothing.
I don't know what the future has in store for transgender people in the United States, but it looks horrifying. I fully expect a genocide to occur against us here and that it's already started. + Show Spoiler +I live every moment of my life thinking that I'm going to lose the people here I love to horrific violence and society at large will encourage it or simply not care. And I get to flee. I get to leave the United States, move to Belgium, and have a job there. I do not deserve this. There is no special quality I have that makes me more worthy of being safe than any other trans person. It's pure luck. I am going to leave in a cowardly way, and I will be a worse person for it. I have effectively abandoned my community to die at the hands of overwhelming forces we cannot hope to win against while I save my own skin. I have benefitted from life without doing anything to earn it.
At the end of the day, I just hope we survive, and I hope all trans people can endure. I decided to join a political party for the first time in my life: PTB-PVDA, the Workers' Party of Belgium, which is a Marxist party that I think I can do a lot of good campaigning and advocating for. Maybe by working with them, I can ensure a better future in some way, but right now, things are bleak. I'm going to try to make the most of the extension of life I was given, but it is hollow, and the guilt I have will stay with me for the rest of my life. Ironic, isn’t it?
Jesus, dude, you’ve been doing some digging, huh? And yet the line you clipped out still seems pretty clearly in the “get out of Germany before it’s too late” vein, not the “they’re already putting people in camps” vein. You’re trying to get mileage on the ambiguity of the phrase “It’s already started,” but that’s absolutely something you could have said when the first laws starting to track Jews, require registration, etc. were going into effect.
Like, it’s fine dude, you can just say “I was a bit unfair, in retrospect they were probably saying we’re in the lead-up to a Holocaust-like mass casualty event, not that the mass casualty event is already in progress. I still think that’s too melodramatic but I shouldn’t have misrepresented it.” Doesn’t that sound easier than typing “Nazi” in the search bar and “plasmidghost” in username and digging through pages of search results trying to find an imprecisely-worded post from a full year ago?
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On July 03 2023 04:27 Salazarz wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2023 04:01 BlackJack wrote:On July 03 2023 03:48 Magic Powers wrote:On July 03 2023 03:26 Elroi wrote:On July 02 2023 22:15 Magic Powers wrote:On July 02 2023 20:55 Elroi wrote:On July 01 2023 15:08 BlackJack wrote:On July 01 2023 10:29 plasmidghost wrote:On July 01 2023 01:42 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 01 2023 01:11 Kyadytim wrote:For me, the most upsetting part of the Creative LLC case is that the request that triggered the lawsuit seems to be fake. The person who allegedly sent it claims to not have sent it, and also has been happily married in a heterosexual relationship for 15 years. It was also sent the day after the case was filed. This case existed entirely so that conservative litigation teams could give the Supreme Court an opportunity to rule in favor of legal discrimination. www.theguardian.com That might be upsetting in terms of how you view the court, but it could also be encouraging in terms of what impact it'll have. If they had to make up a case it prolly won't be difficult to find a web designer, even for gay couples. I'm guessing today, this is a case where being publicly known for refusing to provide services for gay weddings will cost you more than you gain. Not saying it's not problematic but I'm pretty confident gay acceptance isn't contingent on legislation. I can also accept the argument that a website is more related to free speech than other services are (even if this is disingenuous from the people making that claim), and thus I dunno if this creates a precedent for other services. Maybe it does but I dunno. This post is super emblematic of why I don't post on this site anymore. You and many others have no fucking clue how bad this ruling is for queer people and how bad things are for us or y'all simply don't care and I've come to realize that there is no amount of evidence or experience I can show that will make y'all or other people change their minds. People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. The Civil Rights Act is dead and the Democrats and Biden will not do anything to fix the SC, they'll just send out links to ActBlue. The US is a decaying police state with no revolutionary potential and will not get better, and I've given up hope in general for most everywhere else, so fuck it, I'll just post this and leave for good: [img]https://images2.imgbox.com/54/51/uegyih58_o.jpg[/im] I think the last time you posted here you were saying that trans kids were being removed from homes with loving parents to be put into foster homes. When I asked you for a single example you couldn’t provide one and told me that’s what people on Twitter who you trusted were telling you. A few months ago it was front page news everywherewhen a woman at the cheesecake factory that probably had one too many Skinnylicious margaritas said some nasty things to an LGBT person. The idea that there’s some epidemic of nazis beating up queer people while the conservatives cheer them on sounds a little far fetched. Why is it not all over the news? If saying nasty things is front page news worthy than these assaults should be even more newsworthy and if they are as prevalent as you make it seem we should hear about it. Are they just not getting captured on some of the 300 million smartphones? You’ve been posting for years now constantly invoking genocide and nazism and hitler. It’s absurd. The LGBTQ population is exploding. 20% of gen Z identifies as LGBTQ. That’s 1 in 5. That’s double the rate of millennials and millennials are double the rate of Gen X and Gen X is double the rate of baby boomers. Either your posts have no basis in reality or this is the worst attempt at genocide in history. This kind of language seems to have become quite common. I saw a manifestation against restrictions on sex altering surgery where many of the protesters called it "genocide" and here is a male transgender cyclist calling restrictions on her participation in tournaments "genocide". I'm not denying that there are many legitimate problems to discuss, but throwing around words like that seems to have become a trend. Regarding MTF athletes, for every person who calls their exclusion "genocide" you have a number of (not right-wing) people arguing over the nuances of inclusion vs fairness vs science. Yes, they're having a debate. For people who are politically neutral or left-leaning, they're unsure of what to do and they're having a conversation. For people who are politically right-wing, there is no debate. All of them are completely certain of what to do: strict exclusion of all MTF athletes. The whole of the right-wing is ideologically driven, but only the fringe left is ideologically driven, while the overwhelming majority of remaining people between these two groups is thinking about the dilemma fairly rationally. The distinction is clear: left-wingers are not generally being radical about MTF athlete inclusion. They're debating the issue. They're not just winging it and blindly following the personal interests of a small fraction of the population. We certainly can't say the same thing about many right-wingers. They're just blocking the path and they're never going to budge. It's like arguing with a wall. And this is regarding a tiny issue in the vastness of the transgender landscape. MTF athletes are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the population. "Would transgender women 'take over' women's sport? Harper: Trans women are never going to take over women's sport. First of all, trans people make up roughly 1% of the population. The best example of a population study to look at comes from America. If you look at NCAA sports, there are more than 200,000 women competing every year in NCAA sports. Trans women make up 0.5-1% of the population so we should be seeing 1,000-2,000 trans women every year. The NCAA 11 years ago allowed trans women to compete, based on hormone therapy. We should be seeing 1,000-2,000. We see a handful every year." Somehow an issue that affects very few people in the world is front and center for conservatives regarding their issues with transgender people. How? Why? Is this really such a big deal that it has to result in anti-LGBTQ legislation? The answer is obviously no. The sports associations can figure this out for themselves, they don't need laws interfering with the process. Mistakes will be made on the way to a better solution, but these are not going to "ruin women's sports" in any meaningful capacity. So yet again conservatives (pretend to) care more about a much smaller fraction of the population than about a much larger fraction. This is called a "red herring fallacy". https://www.bbc.com/sport/61346517 I don't really see how your response has anything to do with my post. BJ pointed to comments like this, from this thread: People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. and talk about "genocide" on trans people in the US. And said that it is wildly exaggerated and that you should be able to back such claims up with evidence. I only gave other examples of the same kind of exaggerations (such as calling a ban on trans women in women's sport genocide). No one in this thread said that transgender people are experiencing genocide, BJ made that up. Ironic, isn't it? "Backing claims up with evidence" and all that, right? On July 01 2022 15:33 plasmidghost wrote:+ Show Spoiler +In one month, I will move from Texas to Belgium, and I will most likely never return to the United States.
On 12 December 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States terminated a recount of Florida's votes for president. In a 5-4 decision on party lines, the court gave the presidency to George W. Bush, and less than a year later, we were at war and the post-WWII party that had defined American capitalism and excess came to an abrupt and permanent end. On 16 June 2015, Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for president, and the forces of decades of conservative lobbying, Christian fundamentalism, and fascist recruiting killed off any mirage of America being a country based on freedom, justice, and equality. On 24 June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and many Americans suddenly realized that the war had come home.
When you cross a black hole's event horizon, time ceases to exist. Your body gets torn limb from limb, cell from cell, atom from atom, until several infinites later, your body ha been reunited with the cosmic dust it was formed out of. While some physical manifestation of you still exists, your past, present, and futures collapse onto one another into one perpetual scream. You see infinitely many lifetimes born from every decision you could've made or not made and are forced to reckon with seeing the life of your dreams fade away and be replaced with a nightmare, ad infinitum, tormenting you until you've gone insane. But just as suddenly as your hell began, it ends, and all that's left of you is your soul, the pure essence of you as a human being, and then you enter it.
When I entered a black hole, I was greeted with the void. No sound, no light, nothing. I was, for the first time in my life, truly alone, despite my many feelings of loneliness before. Or so I thought. The voice of Death spoke my name and it echoed around me and inside me. I turned fearful, then sighed in resignation, accepting that I was dead. Or so I thought, once again. Death started to take a physical form in front of me and told me that I was in fact, not dead. When I heard Their voice, it was not one of malice, or evil, or temptation. It was gentle, soft, and tranquil. I told Death how terrified I was of Them, and They told me that I had a fundamental misunderstanding of Them. They are not some malevolent spectre, haunting and stalking people, trying to lure them into recklessness and death. They just simply are. No more, no less, and then I understood Them. Death told me to remember what I had seen during my infinite lifetimes and I promised Them that I would make the most out of the rest of my life, until I was finally reunited with Them.
But I should not be alive right now, despite my new lease on life. On Valentine's Day 2022, I had an unintentional drug overdose in a nondescript hotel room in Orange County, California, resulting in me developing severe serotonin syndrome. I rapidly lost consciousness, had a seizure that jolted me awake, then nearly choked on my own vomit a few seconds later. Whether by G-d's mercy, or kismet, or the pure chaos of the universe, that seizure woke me up just before I choked to death, and I survived while so many others haven't. A true undeserved miracle.
The most consequential day of my political radicalization was on 17 July 2014, when Eric Garner was murdered by NYPD. I watched the video of him saying "I Can't Breathe" over and over while the life was choked out of him for the "crime" of selling loose cigarettes, and his dying words have never left my mind since then. Over the next month, I confronted the nature of my upbringing in small-town Texas where it was deeply ingrained in me to always respect police and that they were just doing what they had to do, and that if they murdered someone, regardless of the circumstances, it was justified. I started reading a bunch of writings and speeches that Black activists on Twitter were recommending, my first being the autobiography of Malcolm X, arguably still one of the biggest influences on me politically. From there was a deep dive into the life of one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, Fred Hampton, who I believe would've completely changed the face of America if he wasn't assassinated by the FBI. The works of Angela Davis and Assata Shakur helped to open my eyes to Black feminist perspectives that I greatly support and advocate for to this day.
For the several years that followed, I rarely discussed my political beliefs in any serious capacity online because I never could get people to see the warning signs that came from the response to the 2008 recession and realize that we were heading into a late-capitalist hell. I watched as far-right forces coalesced in the GOP and the Democrats utterly failed the country in so many ways, but no one wanted to see what was going to happen. As I steadily became more militant in my beliefs, many millennials and Gen Zers around my age were experiencing firsthand the absolute nightmare American society had become with student loans, wage stagnation, healthcare, and so much more, but instead of fighting, they gave into nihilism, despair, misanthropy, and apathy, all combining into doomerism. Our generation was going to go silently, never achieving a better world. The Black Lives Matter movement probably was one of my only glimmers of hope during the 2010s, but the GOP and Dems swiftly came down to stop any meaningful change to policing occurring. It truly drove the point home that the liberals will always side with the far-right over the progressives because ultimately, the liberals with all the power and money benefit from a far-right government because they get to push for fundraising while knowing that their massive wealth compared to the average American will never be touched.
When the anti-transgender legislation and societal forces started spreading in 2019, none of us knew what to do. As things got worse and worse over the next three years, we were completely alone. The Dems never did anything noteworthy to help us while the GOP dehumanized us and stripped us of rights across the country. The only queer organizations and advocacy groups that cared about us were trans-focused ones. It wasn't until Florida's Don't Say Gay bill was being pushed that the queer orgs actually started fighting back. To them, we were expendable. They cared more about cis gay men not being able to donate blood than trans people not being allowed to exist. We kept sounding the alarm bells about the broader implications of what attacking us could mean, and no one listened. For decades, trans people had existed in a dark forest, intentionally not being seen or heard, because the moment we would be spotted, we would be labelled an existential threat and target for elimination by overwhelming forces that we had no chance of defeating.
When Roe v Wade was overturned, it completely changed the mood of nearly everyone I know, myself included. At this point, all of my friends and close associates knew I was extremely far-left and I had countless furious people reaching out to me to ask things like how to make Molotov cocktails, how to force change when no politicians want it to happen, and the nature and morals of political violence. My go-to quote for them was by the legendary Kwame Ture: "In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none." No group of oppressed people in the United States were ever handed their rights without violence, and it seemed many people finally realized that simple truth.
If you have a million people ready to die for your cause, you are going to fail. You can send unit after unit of people to fight and die, but it will not make a difference to the neo-Nazis and fascists in power. If you want to win, you have to be willing to kill quickly and kill repeatedly. To them, we are not human. To them, we are merely vermin to be squashed, and I am going to treat them in kind. They have long lost the capability to be shown the error of their ways, and I am not going to go the way my ancestors did, killed by the Nazi scum. If I can secure a better future for trans people in America and the world, even if it meant sacrificing my freedom or my life, I will do it. After all, I shouldn't even be alive. I am not going to let trans joy be eradicated by these monsters. If they say we're not human, then I'm going to show them how not human I can get.
That was my thought process on the weekend of 24 June 2022. The week since then has been sobering. I came to realize while talking with cis people that nearly all don't have the conviction to die or kill, and that is not something I would ever ask of someone. The trans community can band together and arm ourselves, but very few people will fight with us. If I decide to actually get violent with the fascists, it's going to cause the rapid destruction of trans people across America. As it stands, I don't see a way forward for me as a trans person in America, and I don't want to die for nothing.
I don't know what the future has in store for transgender people in the United States, but it looks horrifying. I fully expect a genocide to occur against us here and that it's already started. + Show Spoiler +I live every moment of my life thinking that I'm going to lose the people here I love to horrific violence and society at large will encourage it or simply not care. And I get to flee. I get to leave the United States, move to Belgium, and have a job there. I do not deserve this. There is no special quality I have that makes me more worthy of being safe than any other trans person. It's pure luck. I am going to leave in a cowardly way, and I will be a worse person for it. I have effectively abandoned my community to die at the hands of overwhelming forces we cannot hope to win against while I save my own skin. I have benefitted from life without doing anything to earn it.
At the end of the day, I just hope we survive, and I hope all trans people can endure. I decided to join a political party for the first time in my life: PTB-PVDA, the Workers' Party of Belgium, which is a Marxist party that I think I can do a lot of good campaigning and advocating for. Maybe by working with them, I can ensure a better future in some way, but right now, things are bleak. I'm going to try to make the most of the extension of life I was given, but it is hollow, and the guilt I have will stay with me for the rest of my life. Ironic, isn’t it? Nothing ironic about that, because it's quite obvious that Plasmid was talking about what the future might look like and where things are heading in her opinion, not that there are trans people being queued up for gas chambers right here and now. Also, who cares? It's one post from one person a year ago, but I guess that invalidates literally anything anyone could say on the topic now because LiBeRaL CrYbAbIeS aLwAyS ExAgGeRaTe EvErYtHiNg MeAnWhIlE SaN FrAnCiScO iS LiTeRaLLy BuRnInG RiGhT NoW.
What do you mean who cares? MP said I made something up so I posted something to the contrary. Are you throwing a tantrum because I didn’t just concede that I was making it up?
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On July 03 2023 04:30 Liquid`Drone wrote:+ Show Spoiler +Tbh the discussion around what did the person who is no longer part of the thread say in the past isn't really interesting enough to warrant a whole lot of back and forth replies on.
I'm not sure there's even that big disagreements on 'the facts' here. Does anybody here think transgendered people are actually subject to a genocide, or was that just a bit flowery language?
In the same vein, I'm guessing nobody here thinks transgendered people are a group that encounters little opposition of substance. They're clearly an oppressed group, and I think it's also fair that particularly hateful groups have become emboldened in targeting them, and that they're also subject to more vitriol than before because they've become a more visible group as more people have started identifying as trans. This is obviously unacceptable and we should fight this trend.
But invoking nazi germany is something people should know to be careful with, and I think if people do, they should be especially mindful to specify whether they mean 1930s nazi germany or 1940s nazi germany. Even though one led to the other, there's also nothing inevitable about some people having misguided beliefs about jewish worldly influence eventually turning into the holocaust. I honestly don't fully know how views on trans people have evolved over the past few years. My impression is that people are generally more supportive of stuff like using the preferred pronouns than they used to be (and that people who refuse to do so are increasingly, by greater society, considered trolls/assholes), but that there might be some evolution in the other direction on other questions. I don't have time to summarize, or even fully read this study right now, but it seemed like interesting food for thought, so maybe we can try to steer the discussion over to segments of this that people find particularly interesting: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/
Not really interested in this discussion as it exists (trans rights are human rights), but I can't help but notice that the link you provided indicates your impression is wrong.
Six-in-ten U.S. adults say that whether a person is a man or a woman is determined by their sex assigned at birth. This is up from 56% one year ago and 54% in 2017.
On July 03 2023 04:36 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2023 03:57 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 03 2023 03:17 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2023 18:27 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2023 09:38 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2023 08:55 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2023 07:44 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2023 02:40 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2023 00:09 Mohdoo wrote:
As I always say: There is no legal mechanism for the supreme court to enforce their rulings. It is purely theater and tradition
Biden has the option to just kinda look at the supreme court, flip them off, and do what he wants with student loans or whatever else. The US political system would probably implode rather quickly. Granted Biden could stand to do something drastic since he's currently losing to a fashy insurrectionist. One problem Biden's facing is that the net loss of rights under his administration can't be changed by simply reelecting him. In fact, there's no indication electing him (or Democrats at the national level) will do anything to stop the ongoing decay of people's rights. As it sits I get the feeling Democrats/their supporters are going to basically end up saying "well the rules say that's how it works, so fascism wins. We'll get them next election!" like they have with SCOTUS. If anything, what we have learned is that whoever happens to be sitting in the president's chair at the time of a supreme court justice dying is the most important parameter in american politics. Voting dem, regardless of who, has only become further ingrained. Let's say some fiery socialist dem won in 2020 instead. We just learned their student loan forgiveness would have been shot down. All that matters right now is the supreme court. Abortion, student loans, affirmative action, all of the hot button items are just settled by the court. So all you can really do is camp out the chair for the next time one needs to be replaced. Realistically speaking, you're looking at more than a decade before that has a possibility of paying off and hoping Sotomayor retires at a favorable time, unlike RBG. Losing the presidency just once in the next 3-6 cycles (or failing to fill a vacancy again) could easily extend the time horizon for a SCOTUS that isn't stripping people of bodily autonomy, voting rights, etc. into several decades away. All that assumes the fashy insurrectionist that's polling ahead of Biden and/or his proteges/supporters don't destroy US democracy in the intervening decade(s). "You'll lose even more rights even faster if you don't elect us!" isn't exactly an inspirational message to carry you through several must win elections in a row. What do you see as the way of breaking the impact the supreme court has? What can a progressive candidate do that isn't vulnerable to the supreme court deciding they disagree? As gobbledy points out there's adding Justices. Even if Republicans just do it back when they win, at least then it's a back and forth instead of one loss costing you a decade+ on top of the decade+ it seems people will already have to wait to get their rights back (and maybe stop losing them). As is indicated by plasmids amazing post, it's already immeasurably bad here. If one is relatively comfortable, and doesn't want to truly empathize with people outside a very small circle, it seems passable enough. But if you just scratch the surface a little bit, you uncover a gaping, festering, horrific wound stretching across great swaths of marginalized and oppressed communities. If you focus in for a moment on individuals instead of the statistics, it's absolutely gutting and enough to bring just about anyone tears. That's without even pausing for a moment to consider we do worse abroad. People are still being maimed, killed, and born with various (sometimes terminal) disabilities from the toxic and undetonated ordinance that's just littered around the warzones where we slaughtered innocent families en masse and poisoned the land of those they didn't burn while looting anything of value. The illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians continues under the auspices of US diplomacy, more coups than you have phalanges, and a level of cynical hegemonic domination over so much of world affairs that the current dependence on the dollar that underpins so much of the US economy is something that even I don't think Kwark is exaggerating about when describing how inexorable it is from the existing world economic system. Basically, Pre WWII Germany picked up where the post civil war US left off and post WWII US picked up where Nazi Germany left off. But the US focused on the world domination part first and is now flirting (I can't stress enough how bad it is Trump is even able to compete let alone is leading in polls) with going full mask-off fascism. That's all ominous enough on it's own, but when you realize that Democrats plan is to just never lose again or win back control from what even some of the more moderate among them readily identify as fascists through elections in/over the next 20 years (and maybe you get some rights back then, or maybe just lose more of them slower), it's hard for things not to feel hopeless. It's not easy, but I'm still holding out for a mass awakening of people's revolutionary spirit in the US. Granted this forum hasn't exactly inspired a lot of hope in my capacity to help realize that. I agree with all of this and I think Frantz Fanon’s perspectives on the issue are a good fit for what ought to be done. And until enough people are on board, there is value in doing what we can. I think the recent Supreme Court rulings have shown legislation can only be done through the court right now due to political gridlock, so the only real option is executive orders and disregard for the Supreme Court. Would greatly favor more direct approaches, but it seems we have a bit to go before Fanon’s perspectives can be applied to the situation. I can dig it I'd just say on the "value in doing what we can" I'm firmly in the nonreformist reforms camp. It's important to recognize the differences between those and standard liberal reforms that further entrench the status quo. So then what do we do now? How do we still do what we can without entrenching the status quo? I agree with the gist of not allowing the status quote to continue to dig it’s teeth into culture, but there needs to be a mechanism of doing that while also mitigating bad situations in the meantime.
Organize and push for nonreformist reforms. Part of the problem is people, ostensibly supportive of socialist policy, failing to identify Democrats as part of their opposition. So they see the reformism as a best effort rather than working as intended as a sort of overflow valve to quell revolutionary energy.
Basically you encounter a problem, that problem raises people's revolutionary spirit and they take to the streets, then politicians want to stop the disorder with palliative policy until the next time.
We all have to hop off that misery-go-round and part of breaking that cycle is recognizing the counterproductive consequences of palliative policy.
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On July 03 2023 05:08 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2023 04:01 BlackJack wrote:On July 03 2023 03:48 Magic Powers wrote:On July 03 2023 03:26 Elroi wrote:On July 02 2023 22:15 Magic Powers wrote:On July 02 2023 20:55 Elroi wrote:On July 01 2023 15:08 BlackJack wrote:On July 01 2023 10:29 plasmidghost wrote:On July 01 2023 01:42 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 01 2023 01:11 Kyadytim wrote:For me, the most upsetting part of the Creative LLC case is that the request that triggered the lawsuit seems to be fake. The person who allegedly sent it claims to not have sent it, and also has been happily married in a heterosexual relationship for 15 years. It was also sent the day after the case was filed. This case existed entirely so that conservative litigation teams could give the Supreme Court an opportunity to rule in favor of legal discrimination. www.theguardian.com That might be upsetting in terms of how you view the court, but it could also be encouraging in terms of what impact it'll have. If they had to make up a case it prolly won't be difficult to find a web designer, even for gay couples. I'm guessing today, this is a case where being publicly known for refusing to provide services for gay weddings will cost you more than you gain. Not saying it's not problematic but I'm pretty confident gay acceptance isn't contingent on legislation. I can also accept the argument that a website is more related to free speech than other services are (even if this is disingenuous from the people making that claim), and thus I dunno if this creates a precedent for other services. Maybe it does but I dunno. This post is super emblematic of why I don't post on this site anymore. You and many others have no fucking clue how bad this ruling is for queer people and how bad things are for us or y'all simply don't care and I've come to realize that there is no amount of evidence or experience I can show that will make y'all or other people change their minds. People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. The Civil Rights Act is dead and the Democrats and Biden will not do anything to fix the SC, they'll just send out links to ActBlue. The US is a decaying police state with no revolutionary potential and will not get better, and I've given up hope in general for most everywhere else, so fuck it, I'll just post this and leave for good: [img]https://images2.imgbox.com/54/51/uegyih58_o.jpg[/im] I think the last time you posted here you were saying that trans kids were being removed from homes with loving parents to be put into foster homes. When I asked you for a single example you couldn’t provide one and told me that’s what people on Twitter who you trusted were telling you. A few months ago it was front page news everywherewhen a woman at the cheesecake factory that probably had one too many Skinnylicious margaritas said some nasty things to an LGBT person. The idea that there’s some epidemic of nazis beating up queer people while the conservatives cheer them on sounds a little far fetched. Why is it not all over the news? If saying nasty things is front page news worthy than these assaults should be even more newsworthy and if they are as prevalent as you make it seem we should hear about it. Are they just not getting captured on some of the 300 million smartphones? You’ve been posting for years now constantly invoking genocide and nazism and hitler. It’s absurd. The LGBTQ population is exploding. 20% of gen Z identifies as LGBTQ. That’s 1 in 5. That’s double the rate of millennials and millennials are double the rate of Gen X and Gen X is double the rate of baby boomers. Either your posts have no basis in reality or this is the worst attempt at genocide in history. This kind of language seems to have become quite common. I saw a manifestation against restrictions on sex altering surgery where many of the protesters called it "genocide" and here is a male transgender cyclist calling restrictions on her participation in tournaments "genocide". I'm not denying that there are many legitimate problems to discuss, but throwing around words like that seems to have become a trend. Regarding MTF athletes, for every person who calls their exclusion "genocide" you have a number of (not right-wing) people arguing over the nuances of inclusion vs fairness vs science. Yes, they're having a debate. For people who are politically neutral or left-leaning, they're unsure of what to do and they're having a conversation. For people who are politically right-wing, there is no debate. All of them are completely certain of what to do: strict exclusion of all MTF athletes. The whole of the right-wing is ideologically driven, but only the fringe left is ideologically driven, while the overwhelming majority of remaining people between these two groups is thinking about the dilemma fairly rationally. The distinction is clear: left-wingers are not generally being radical about MTF athlete inclusion. They're debating the issue. They're not just winging it and blindly following the personal interests of a small fraction of the population. We certainly can't say the same thing about many right-wingers. They're just blocking the path and they're never going to budge. It's like arguing with a wall. And this is regarding a tiny issue in the vastness of the transgender landscape. MTF athletes are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the population. "Would transgender women 'take over' women's sport? Harper: Trans women are never going to take over women's sport. First of all, trans people make up roughly 1% of the population. The best example of a population study to look at comes from America. If you look at NCAA sports, there are more than 200,000 women competing every year in NCAA sports. Trans women make up 0.5-1% of the population so we should be seeing 1,000-2,000 trans women every year. The NCAA 11 years ago allowed trans women to compete, based on hormone therapy. We should be seeing 1,000-2,000. We see a handful every year." Somehow an issue that affects very few people in the world is front and center for conservatives regarding their issues with transgender people. How? Why? Is this really such a big deal that it has to result in anti-LGBTQ legislation? The answer is obviously no. The sports associations can figure this out for themselves, they don't need laws interfering with the process. Mistakes will be made on the way to a better solution, but these are not going to "ruin women's sports" in any meaningful capacity. So yet again conservatives (pretend to) care more about a much smaller fraction of the population than about a much larger fraction. This is called a "red herring fallacy". https://www.bbc.com/sport/61346517 I don't really see how your response has anything to do with my post. BJ pointed to comments like this, from this thread: People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. and talk about "genocide" on trans people in the US. And said that it is wildly exaggerated and that you should be able to back such claims up with evidence. I only gave other examples of the same kind of exaggerations (such as calling a ban on trans women in women's sport genocide). No one in this thread said that transgender people are experiencing genocide, BJ made that up. Ironic, isn't it? "Backing claims up with evidence" and all that, right? On July 01 2022 15:33 plasmidghost wrote:+ Show Spoiler +In one month, I will move from Texas to Belgium, and I will most likely never return to the United States.
On 12 December 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States terminated a recount of Florida's votes for president. In a 5-4 decision on party lines, the court gave the presidency to George W. Bush, and less than a year later, we were at war and the post-WWII party that had defined American capitalism and excess came to an abrupt and permanent end. On 16 June 2015, Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for president, and the forces of decades of conservative lobbying, Christian fundamentalism, and fascist recruiting killed off any mirage of America being a country based on freedom, justice, and equality. On 24 June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and many Americans suddenly realized that the war had come home.
When you cross a black hole's event horizon, time ceases to exist. Your body gets torn limb from limb, cell from cell, atom from atom, until several infinites later, your body ha been reunited with the cosmic dust it was formed out of. While some physical manifestation of you still exists, your past, present, and futures collapse onto one another into one perpetual scream. You see infinitely many lifetimes born from every decision you could've made or not made and are forced to reckon with seeing the life of your dreams fade away and be replaced with a nightmare, ad infinitum, tormenting you until you've gone insane. But just as suddenly as your hell began, it ends, and all that's left of you is your soul, the pure essence of you as a human being, and then you enter it.
When I entered a black hole, I was greeted with the void. No sound, no light, nothing. I was, for the first time in my life, truly alone, despite my many feelings of loneliness before. Or so I thought. The voice of Death spoke my name and it echoed around me and inside me. I turned fearful, then sighed in resignation, accepting that I was dead. Or so I thought, once again. Death started to take a physical form in front of me and told me that I was in fact, not dead. When I heard Their voice, it was not one of malice, or evil, or temptation. It was gentle, soft, and tranquil. I told Death how terrified I was of Them, and They told me that I had a fundamental misunderstanding of Them. They are not some malevolent spectre, haunting and stalking people, trying to lure them into recklessness and death. They just simply are. No more, no less, and then I understood Them. Death told me to remember what I had seen during my infinite lifetimes and I promised Them that I would make the most out of the rest of my life, until I was finally reunited with Them.
But I should not be alive right now, despite my new lease on life. On Valentine's Day 2022, I had an unintentional drug overdose in a nondescript hotel room in Orange County, California, resulting in me developing severe serotonin syndrome. I rapidly lost consciousness, had a seizure that jolted me awake, then nearly choked on my own vomit a few seconds later. Whether by G-d's mercy, or kismet, or the pure chaos of the universe, that seizure woke me up just before I choked to death, and I survived while so many others haven't. A true undeserved miracle.
The most consequential day of my political radicalization was on 17 July 2014, when Eric Garner was murdered by NYPD. I watched the video of him saying "I Can't Breathe" over and over while the life was choked out of him for the "crime" of selling loose cigarettes, and his dying words have never left my mind since then. Over the next month, I confronted the nature of my upbringing in small-town Texas where it was deeply ingrained in me to always respect police and that they were just doing what they had to do, and that if they murdered someone, regardless of the circumstances, it was justified. I started reading a bunch of writings and speeches that Black activists on Twitter were recommending, my first being the autobiography of Malcolm X, arguably still one of the biggest influences on me politically. From there was a deep dive into the life of one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, Fred Hampton, who I believe would've completely changed the face of America if he wasn't assassinated by the FBI. The works of Angela Davis and Assata Shakur helped to open my eyes to Black feminist perspectives that I greatly support and advocate for to this day.
For the several years that followed, I rarely discussed my political beliefs in any serious capacity online because I never could get people to see the warning signs that came from the response to the 2008 recession and realize that we were heading into a late-capitalist hell. I watched as far-right forces coalesced in the GOP and the Democrats utterly failed the country in so many ways, but no one wanted to see what was going to happen. As I steadily became more militant in my beliefs, many millennials and Gen Zers around my age were experiencing firsthand the absolute nightmare American society had become with student loans, wage stagnation, healthcare, and so much more, but instead of fighting, they gave into nihilism, despair, misanthropy, and apathy, all combining into doomerism. Our generation was going to go silently, never achieving a better world. The Black Lives Matter movement probably was one of my only glimmers of hope during the 2010s, but the GOP and Dems swiftly came down to stop any meaningful change to policing occurring. It truly drove the point home that the liberals will always side with the far-right over the progressives because ultimately, the liberals with all the power and money benefit from a far-right government because they get to push for fundraising while knowing that their massive wealth compared to the average American will never be touched.
When the anti-transgender legislation and societal forces started spreading in 2019, none of us knew what to do. As things got worse and worse over the next three years, we were completely alone. The Dems never did anything noteworthy to help us while the GOP dehumanized us and stripped us of rights across the country. The only queer organizations and advocacy groups that cared about us were trans-focused ones. It wasn't until Florida's Don't Say Gay bill was being pushed that the queer orgs actually started fighting back. To them, we were expendable. They cared more about cis gay men not being able to donate blood than trans people not being allowed to exist. We kept sounding the alarm bells about the broader implications of what attacking us could mean, and no one listened. For decades, trans people had existed in a dark forest, intentionally not being seen or heard, because the moment we would be spotted, we would be labelled an existential threat and target for elimination by overwhelming forces that we had no chance of defeating.
When Roe v Wade was overturned, it completely changed the mood of nearly everyone I know, myself included. At this point, all of my friends and close associates knew I was extremely far-left and I had countless furious people reaching out to me to ask things like how to make Molotov cocktails, how to force change when no politicians want it to happen, and the nature and morals of political violence. My go-to quote for them was by the legendary Kwame Ture: "In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none." No group of oppressed people in the United States were ever handed their rights without violence, and it seemed many people finally realized that simple truth.
If you have a million people ready to die for your cause, you are going to fail. You can send unit after unit of people to fight and die, but it will not make a difference to the neo-Nazis and fascists in power. If you want to win, you have to be willing to kill quickly and kill repeatedly. To them, we are not human. To them, we are merely vermin to be squashed, and I am going to treat them in kind. They have long lost the capability to be shown the error of their ways, and I am not going to go the way my ancestors did, killed by the Nazi scum. If I can secure a better future for trans people in America and the world, even if it meant sacrificing my freedom or my life, I will do it. After all, I shouldn't even be alive. I am not going to let trans joy be eradicated by these monsters. If they say we're not human, then I'm going to show them how not human I can get.
That was my thought process on the weekend of 24 June 2022. The week since then has been sobering. I came to realize while talking with cis people that nearly all don't have the conviction to die or kill, and that is not something I would ever ask of someone. The trans community can band together and arm ourselves, but very few people will fight with us. If I decide to actually get violent with the fascists, it's going to cause the rapid destruction of trans people across America. As it stands, I don't see a way forward for me as a trans person in America, and I don't want to die for nothing.
I don't know what the future has in store for transgender people in the United States, but it looks horrifying. I fully expect a genocide to occur against us here and that it's already started. + Show Spoiler +I live every moment of my life thinking that I'm going to lose the people here I love to horrific violence and society at large will encourage it or simply not care. And I get to flee. I get to leave the United States, move to Belgium, and have a job there. I do not deserve this. There is no special quality I have that makes me more worthy of being safe than any other trans person. It's pure luck. I am going to leave in a cowardly way, and I will be a worse person for it. I have effectively abandoned my community to die at the hands of overwhelming forces we cannot hope to win against while I save my own skin. I have benefitted from life without doing anything to earn it.
At the end of the day, I just hope we survive, and I hope all trans people can endure. I decided to join a political party for the first time in my life: PTB-PVDA, the Workers' Party of Belgium, which is a Marxist party that I think I can do a lot of good campaigning and advocating for. Maybe by working with them, I can ensure a better future in some way, but right now, things are bleak. I'm going to try to make the most of the extension of life I was given, but it is hollow, and the guilt I have will stay with me for the rest of my life. Ironic, isn’t it? Jesus, dude, you’ve been doing some digging, huh? And yet the line you clipped out still seems pretty clearly in the “get out of Germany before it’s too late” vein, not the “they’re already putting people in camps” vein. You’re trying to get mileage on the ambiguity of the phrase “It’s already started,” but that’s absolutely something you could have said when the first laws starting to track Jews, require registration, etc. were going into effect. Like, it’s fine dude, you can just say “I was a bit unfair, in retrospect they were probably saying we’re in the lead-up to a Holocaust-like mass casualty event, not that the mass casualty event is already in progress. I still think that’s too melodramatic but I shouldn’t have misrepresented it.” Doesn’t that sound easier than typing “Nazi” in the search bar and “plasmidghost” in username and digging through pages of search results trying to find an imprecisely-worded post from a full year ago?
My complaint was that PG repeatedly “invokes” the holocaust, genocide, Jews, etc when speaking of trans people in America. I think I’ve sufficiently shown that with the posts I’ve cited. The idea that I have to find a post where he talks about trans people being led into gas chambers to prove that is a little far-fetched.
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On July 03 2023 05:10 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2023 04:27 Salazarz wrote:On July 03 2023 04:01 BlackJack wrote:On July 03 2023 03:48 Magic Powers wrote:On July 03 2023 03:26 Elroi wrote:On July 02 2023 22:15 Magic Powers wrote:On July 02 2023 20:55 Elroi wrote:On July 01 2023 15:08 BlackJack wrote:On July 01 2023 10:29 plasmidghost wrote:On July 01 2023 01:42 Liquid`Drone wrote:
[quote]
That might be upsetting in terms of how you view the court, but it could also be encouraging in terms of what impact it'll have. If they had to make up a case it prolly won't be difficult to find a web designer, even for gay couples. I'm guessing today, this is a case where being publicly known for refusing to provide services for gay weddings will cost you more than you gain.
Not saying it's not problematic but I'm pretty confident gay acceptance isn't contingent on legislation. I can also accept the argument that a website is more related to free speech than other services are (even if this is disingenuous from the people making that claim), and thus I dunno if this creates a precedent for other services. Maybe it does but I dunno. This post is super emblematic of why I don't post on this site anymore. You and many others have no fucking clue how bad this ruling is for queer people and how bad things are for us or y'all simply don't care and I've come to realize that there is no amount of evidence or experience I can show that will make y'all or other people change their minds. People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. The Civil Rights Act is dead and the Democrats and Biden will not do anything to fix the SC, they'll just send out links to ActBlue. The US is a decaying police state with no revolutionary potential and will not get better, and I've given up hope in general for most everywhere else, so fuck it, I'll just post this and leave for good: [img]https://images2.imgbox.com/54/51/uegyih58_o.jpg[/im] I think the last time you posted here you were saying that trans kids were being removed from homes with loving parents to be put into foster homes. When I asked you for a single example you couldn’t provide one and told me that’s what people on Twitter who you trusted were telling you. A few months ago it was front page news everywherewhen a woman at the cheesecake factory that probably had one too many Skinnylicious margaritas said some nasty things to an LGBT person. The idea that there’s some epidemic of nazis beating up queer people while the conservatives cheer them on sounds a little far fetched. Why is it not all over the news? If saying nasty things is front page news worthy than these assaults should be even more newsworthy and if they are as prevalent as you make it seem we should hear about it. Are they just not getting captured on some of the 300 million smartphones? You’ve been posting for years now constantly invoking genocide and nazism and hitler. It’s absurd. The LGBTQ population is exploding. 20% of gen Z identifies as LGBTQ. That’s 1 in 5. That’s double the rate of millennials and millennials are double the rate of Gen X and Gen X is double the rate of baby boomers. Either your posts have no basis in reality or this is the worst attempt at genocide in history. This kind of language seems to have become quite common. I saw a manifestation against restrictions on sex altering surgery where many of the protesters called it "genocide" and here is a male transgender cyclist calling restrictions on her participation in tournaments "genocide". I'm not denying that there are many legitimate problems to discuss, but throwing around words like that seems to have become a trend. Regarding MTF athletes, for every person who calls their exclusion "genocide" you have a number of (not right-wing) people arguing over the nuances of inclusion vs fairness vs science. Yes, they're having a debate. For people who are politically neutral or left-leaning, they're unsure of what to do and they're having a conversation. For people who are politically right-wing, there is no debate. All of them are completely certain of what to do: strict exclusion of all MTF athletes. The whole of the right-wing is ideologically driven, but only the fringe left is ideologically driven, while the overwhelming majority of remaining people between these two groups is thinking about the dilemma fairly rationally. The distinction is clear: left-wingers are not generally being radical about MTF athlete inclusion. They're debating the issue. They're not just winging it and blindly following the personal interests of a small fraction of the population. We certainly can't say the same thing about many right-wingers. They're just blocking the path and they're never going to budge. It's like arguing with a wall. And this is regarding a tiny issue in the vastness of the transgender landscape. MTF athletes are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the population. "Would transgender women 'take over' women's sport? Harper: Trans women are never going to take over women's sport. First of all, trans people make up roughly 1% of the population. The best example of a population study to look at comes from America. If you look at NCAA sports, there are more than 200,000 women competing every year in NCAA sports. Trans women make up 0.5-1% of the population so we should be seeing 1,000-2,000 trans women every year. The NCAA 11 years ago allowed trans women to compete, based on hormone therapy. We should be seeing 1,000-2,000. We see a handful every year." Somehow an issue that affects very few people in the world is front and center for conservatives regarding their issues with transgender people. How? Why? Is this really such a big deal that it has to result in anti-LGBTQ legislation? The answer is obviously no. The sports associations can figure this out for themselves, they don't need laws interfering with the process. Mistakes will be made on the way to a better solution, but these are not going to "ruin women's sports" in any meaningful capacity. So yet again conservatives (pretend to) care more about a much smaller fraction of the population than about a much larger fraction. This is called a "red herring fallacy". https://www.bbc.com/sport/61346517 I don't really see how your response has anything to do with my post. BJ pointed to comments like this, from this thread: People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. and talk about "genocide" on trans people in the US. And said that it is wildly exaggerated and that you should be able to back such claims up with evidence. I only gave other examples of the same kind of exaggerations (such as calling a ban on trans women in women's sport genocide). No one in this thread said that transgender people are experiencing genocide, BJ made that up. Ironic, isn't it? "Backing claims up with evidence" and all that, right? On July 01 2022 15:33 plasmidghost wrote:+ Show Spoiler +In one month, I will move from Texas to Belgium, and I will most likely never return to the United States.
On 12 December 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States terminated a recount of Florida's votes for president. In a 5-4 decision on party lines, the court gave the presidency to George W. Bush, and less than a year later, we were at war and the post-WWII party that had defined American capitalism and excess came to an abrupt and permanent end. On 16 June 2015, Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for president, and the forces of decades of conservative lobbying, Christian fundamentalism, and fascist recruiting killed off any mirage of America being a country based on freedom, justice, and equality. On 24 June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and many Americans suddenly realized that the war had come home.
When you cross a black hole's event horizon, time ceases to exist. Your body gets torn limb from limb, cell from cell, atom from atom, until several infinites later, your body ha been reunited with the cosmic dust it was formed out of. While some physical manifestation of you still exists, your past, present, and futures collapse onto one another into one perpetual scream. You see infinitely many lifetimes born from every decision you could've made or not made and are forced to reckon with seeing the life of your dreams fade away and be replaced with a nightmare, ad infinitum, tormenting you until you've gone insane. But just as suddenly as your hell began, it ends, and all that's left of you is your soul, the pure essence of you as a human being, and then you enter it.
When I entered a black hole, I was greeted with the void. No sound, no light, nothing. I was, for the first time in my life, truly alone, despite my many feelings of loneliness before. Or so I thought. The voice of Death spoke my name and it echoed around me and inside me. I turned fearful, then sighed in resignation, accepting that I was dead. Or so I thought, once again. Death started to take a physical form in front of me and told me that I was in fact, not dead. When I heard Their voice, it was not one of malice, or evil, or temptation. It was gentle, soft, and tranquil. I told Death how terrified I was of Them, and They told me that I had a fundamental misunderstanding of Them. They are not some malevolent spectre, haunting and stalking people, trying to lure them into recklessness and death. They just simply are. No more, no less, and then I understood Them. Death told me to remember what I had seen during my infinite lifetimes and I promised Them that I would make the most out of the rest of my life, until I was finally reunited with Them.
But I should not be alive right now, despite my new lease on life. On Valentine's Day 2022, I had an unintentional drug overdose in a nondescript hotel room in Orange County, California, resulting in me developing severe serotonin syndrome. I rapidly lost consciousness, had a seizure that jolted me awake, then nearly choked on my own vomit a few seconds later. Whether by G-d's mercy, or kismet, or the pure chaos of the universe, that seizure woke me up just before I choked to death, and I survived while so many others haven't. A true undeserved miracle.
The most consequential day of my political radicalization was on 17 July 2014, when Eric Garner was murdered by NYPD. I watched the video of him saying "I Can't Breathe" over and over while the life was choked out of him for the "crime" of selling loose cigarettes, and his dying words have never left my mind since then. Over the next month, I confronted the nature of my upbringing in small-town Texas where it was deeply ingrained in me to always respect police and that they were just doing what they had to do, and that if they murdered someone, regardless of the circumstances, it was justified. I started reading a bunch of writings and speeches that Black activists on Twitter were recommending, my first being the autobiography of Malcolm X, arguably still one of the biggest influences on me politically. From there was a deep dive into the life of one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, Fred Hampton, who I believe would've completely changed the face of America if he wasn't assassinated by the FBI. The works of Angela Davis and Assata Shakur helped to open my eyes to Black feminist perspectives that I greatly support and advocate for to this day.
For the several years that followed, I rarely discussed my political beliefs in any serious capacity online because I never could get people to see the warning signs that came from the response to the 2008 recession and realize that we were heading into a late-capitalist hell. I watched as far-right forces coalesced in the GOP and the Democrats utterly failed the country in so many ways, but no one wanted to see what was going to happen. As I steadily became more militant in my beliefs, many millennials and Gen Zers around my age were experiencing firsthand the absolute nightmare American society had become with student loans, wage stagnation, healthcare, and so much more, but instead of fighting, they gave into nihilism, despair, misanthropy, and apathy, all combining into doomerism. Our generation was going to go silently, never achieving a better world. The Black Lives Matter movement probably was one of my only glimmers of hope during the 2010s, but the GOP and Dems swiftly came down to stop any meaningful change to policing occurring. It truly drove the point home that the liberals will always side with the far-right over the progressives because ultimately, the liberals with all the power and money benefit from a far-right government because they get to push for fundraising while knowing that their massive wealth compared to the average American will never be touched.
When the anti-transgender legislation and societal forces started spreading in 2019, none of us knew what to do. As things got worse and worse over the next three years, we were completely alone. The Dems never did anything noteworthy to help us while the GOP dehumanized us and stripped us of rights across the country. The only queer organizations and advocacy groups that cared about us were trans-focused ones. It wasn't until Florida's Don't Say Gay bill was being pushed that the queer orgs actually started fighting back. To them, we were expendable. They cared more about cis gay men not being able to donate blood than trans people not being allowed to exist. We kept sounding the alarm bells about the broader implications of what attacking us could mean, and no one listened. For decades, trans people had existed in a dark forest, intentionally not being seen or heard, because the moment we would be spotted, we would be labelled an existential threat and target for elimination by overwhelming forces that we had no chance of defeating.
When Roe v Wade was overturned, it completely changed the mood of nearly everyone I know, myself included. At this point, all of my friends and close associates knew I was extremely far-left and I had countless furious people reaching out to me to ask things like how to make Molotov cocktails, how to force change when no politicians want it to happen, and the nature and morals of political violence. My go-to quote for them was by the legendary Kwame Ture: "In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none." No group of oppressed people in the United States were ever handed their rights without violence, and it seemed many people finally realized that simple truth.
If you have a million people ready to die for your cause, you are going to fail. You can send unit after unit of people to fight and die, but it will not make a difference to the neo-Nazis and fascists in power. If you want to win, you have to be willing to kill quickly and kill repeatedly. To them, we are not human. To them, we are merely vermin to be squashed, and I am going to treat them in kind. They have long lost the capability to be shown the error of their ways, and I am not going to go the way my ancestors did, killed by the Nazi scum. If I can secure a better future for trans people in America and the world, even if it meant sacrificing my freedom or my life, I will do it. After all, I shouldn't even be alive. I am not going to let trans joy be eradicated by these monsters. If they say we're not human, then I'm going to show them how not human I can get.
That was my thought process on the weekend of 24 June 2022. The week since then has been sobering. I came to realize while talking with cis people that nearly all don't have the conviction to die or kill, and that is not something I would ever ask of someone. The trans community can band together and arm ourselves, but very few people will fight with us. If I decide to actually get violent with the fascists, it's going to cause the rapid destruction of trans people across America. As it stands, I don't see a way forward for me as a trans person in America, and I don't want to die for nothing.
I don't know what the future has in store for transgender people in the United States, but it looks horrifying. I fully expect a genocide to occur against us here and that it's already started. + Show Spoiler +I live every moment of my life thinking that I'm going to lose the people here I love to horrific violence and society at large will encourage it or simply not care. And I get to flee. I get to leave the United States, move to Belgium, and have a job there. I do not deserve this. There is no special quality I have that makes me more worthy of being safe than any other trans person. It's pure luck. I am going to leave in a cowardly way, and I will be a worse person for it. I have effectively abandoned my community to die at the hands of overwhelming forces we cannot hope to win against while I save my own skin. I have benefitted from life without doing anything to earn it.
At the end of the day, I just hope we survive, and I hope all trans people can endure. I decided to join a political party for the first time in my life: PTB-PVDA, the Workers' Party of Belgium, which is a Marxist party that I think I can do a lot of good campaigning and advocating for. Maybe by working with them, I can ensure a better future in some way, but right now, things are bleak. I'm going to try to make the most of the extension of life I was given, but it is hollow, and the guilt I have will stay with me for the rest of my life. Ironic, isn’t it? Nothing ironic about that, because it's quite obvious that Plasmid was talking about what the future might look like and where things are heading in her opinion, not that there are trans people being queued up for gas chambers right here and now. Also, who cares? It's one post from one person a year ago, but I guess that invalidates literally anything anyone could say on the topic now because LiBeRaL CrYbAbIeS aLwAyS ExAgGeRaTe EvErYtHiNg MeAnWhIlE SaN FrAnCiScO iS LiTeRaLLy BuRnInG RiGhT NoW. What do you mean who cares? MP said I made something up so I posted something to the contrary. Are you throwing a tantrum because I didn’t just concede that I was making it up?
All of this would be a lot easier if only you engaged more in good faith argumentation. One of the things required for that is to assume that other people are typically neither stupid nor malicious, but also that they're not perfect at all times.
In other words you should suspect that, when someone uses a word like "genocide" to describe something that you think is definitely not a genocide, you may not have interpreted their words correctly, and therefore you should ask them what they meant if possible, or if that isn't possible then refrain from making a claim that you can't entirely substantiate.
But I don't know. Judging from experience my guess is that you'll reject the possibility that either you could have misinterpreted plasmid's choice of words, or that they may've been too emotional during the moment of writing to make a specific correction of their comment before posting it.
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On July 03 2023 05:16 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2023 05:08 ChristianS wrote:On July 03 2023 04:01 BlackJack wrote:On July 03 2023 03:48 Magic Powers wrote:On July 03 2023 03:26 Elroi wrote:On July 02 2023 22:15 Magic Powers wrote:On July 02 2023 20:55 Elroi wrote:On July 01 2023 15:08 BlackJack wrote:On July 01 2023 10:29 plasmidghost wrote:On July 01 2023 01:42 Liquid`Drone wrote:
[quote]
That might be upsetting in terms of how you view the court, but it could also be encouraging in terms of what impact it'll have. If they had to make up a case it prolly won't be difficult to find a web designer, even for gay couples. I'm guessing today, this is a case where being publicly known for refusing to provide services for gay weddings will cost you more than you gain.
Not saying it's not problematic but I'm pretty confident gay acceptance isn't contingent on legislation. I can also accept the argument that a website is more related to free speech than other services are (even if this is disingenuous from the people making that claim), and thus I dunno if this creates a precedent for other services. Maybe it does but I dunno. This post is super emblematic of why I don't post on this site anymore. You and many others have no fucking clue how bad this ruling is for queer people and how bad things are for us or y'all simply don't care and I've come to realize that there is no amount of evidence or experience I can show that will make y'all or other people change their minds. People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. The Civil Rights Act is dead and the Democrats and Biden will not do anything to fix the SC, they'll just send out links to ActBlue. The US is a decaying police state with no revolutionary potential and will not get better, and I've given up hope in general for most everywhere else, so fuck it, I'll just post this and leave for good: [img]https://images2.imgbox.com/54/51/uegyih58_o.jpg[/im] I think the last time you posted here you were saying that trans kids were being removed from homes with loving parents to be put into foster homes. When I asked you for a single example you couldn’t provide one and told me that’s what people on Twitter who you trusted were telling you. A few months ago it was front page news everywherewhen a woman at the cheesecake factory that probably had one too many Skinnylicious margaritas said some nasty things to an LGBT person. The idea that there’s some epidemic of nazis beating up queer people while the conservatives cheer them on sounds a little far fetched. Why is it not all over the news? If saying nasty things is front page news worthy than these assaults should be even more newsworthy and if they are as prevalent as you make it seem we should hear about it. Are they just not getting captured on some of the 300 million smartphones? You’ve been posting for years now constantly invoking genocide and nazism and hitler. It’s absurd. The LGBTQ population is exploding. 20% of gen Z identifies as LGBTQ. That’s 1 in 5. That’s double the rate of millennials and millennials are double the rate of Gen X and Gen X is double the rate of baby boomers. Either your posts have no basis in reality or this is the worst attempt at genocide in history. This kind of language seems to have become quite common. I saw a manifestation against restrictions on sex altering surgery where many of the protesters called it "genocide" and here is a male transgender cyclist calling restrictions on her participation in tournaments "genocide". I'm not denying that there are many legitimate problems to discuss, but throwing around words like that seems to have become a trend. Regarding MTF athletes, for every person who calls their exclusion "genocide" you have a number of (not right-wing) people arguing over the nuances of inclusion vs fairness vs science. Yes, they're having a debate. For people who are politically neutral or left-leaning, they're unsure of what to do and they're having a conversation. For people who are politically right-wing, there is no debate. All of them are completely certain of what to do: strict exclusion of all MTF athletes. The whole of the right-wing is ideologically driven, but only the fringe left is ideologically driven, while the overwhelming majority of remaining people between these two groups is thinking about the dilemma fairly rationally. The distinction is clear: left-wingers are not generally being radical about MTF athlete inclusion. They're debating the issue. They're not just winging it and blindly following the personal interests of a small fraction of the population. We certainly can't say the same thing about many right-wingers. They're just blocking the path and they're never going to budge. It's like arguing with a wall. And this is regarding a tiny issue in the vastness of the transgender landscape. MTF athletes are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the population. "Would transgender women 'take over' women's sport? Harper: Trans women are never going to take over women's sport. First of all, trans people make up roughly 1% of the population. The best example of a population study to look at comes from America. If you look at NCAA sports, there are more than 200,000 women competing every year in NCAA sports. Trans women make up 0.5-1% of the population so we should be seeing 1,000-2,000 trans women every year. The NCAA 11 years ago allowed trans women to compete, based on hormone therapy. We should be seeing 1,000-2,000. We see a handful every year." Somehow an issue that affects very few people in the world is front and center for conservatives regarding their issues with transgender people. How? Why? Is this really such a big deal that it has to result in anti-LGBTQ legislation? The answer is obviously no. The sports associations can figure this out for themselves, they don't need laws interfering with the process. Mistakes will be made on the way to a better solution, but these are not going to "ruin women's sports" in any meaningful capacity. So yet again conservatives (pretend to) care more about a much smaller fraction of the population than about a much larger fraction. This is called a "red herring fallacy". https://www.bbc.com/sport/61346517 I don't really see how your response has anything to do with my post. BJ pointed to comments like this, from this thread: People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. and talk about "genocide" on trans people in the US. And said that it is wildly exaggerated and that you should be able to back such claims up with evidence. I only gave other examples of the same kind of exaggerations (such as calling a ban on trans women in women's sport genocide). No one in this thread said that transgender people are experiencing genocide, BJ made that up. Ironic, isn't it? "Backing claims up with evidence" and all that, right? On July 01 2022 15:33 plasmidghost wrote:+ Show Spoiler +In one month, I will move from Texas to Belgium, and I will most likely never return to the United States.
On 12 December 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States terminated a recount of Florida's votes for president. In a 5-4 decision on party lines, the court gave the presidency to George W. Bush, and less than a year later, we were at war and the post-WWII party that had defined American capitalism and excess came to an abrupt and permanent end. On 16 June 2015, Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for president, and the forces of decades of conservative lobbying, Christian fundamentalism, and fascist recruiting killed off any mirage of America being a country based on freedom, justice, and equality. On 24 June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and many Americans suddenly realized that the war had come home.
When you cross a black hole's event horizon, time ceases to exist. Your body gets torn limb from limb, cell from cell, atom from atom, until several infinites later, your body ha been reunited with the cosmic dust it was formed out of. While some physical manifestation of you still exists, your past, present, and futures collapse onto one another into one perpetual scream. You see infinitely many lifetimes born from every decision you could've made or not made and are forced to reckon with seeing the life of your dreams fade away and be replaced with a nightmare, ad infinitum, tormenting you until you've gone insane. But just as suddenly as your hell began, it ends, and all that's left of you is your soul, the pure essence of you as a human being, and then you enter it.
When I entered a black hole, I was greeted with the void. No sound, no light, nothing. I was, for the first time in my life, truly alone, despite my many feelings of loneliness before. Or so I thought. The voice of Death spoke my name and it echoed around me and inside me. I turned fearful, then sighed in resignation, accepting that I was dead. Or so I thought, once again. Death started to take a physical form in front of me and told me that I was in fact, not dead. When I heard Their voice, it was not one of malice, or evil, or temptation. It was gentle, soft, and tranquil. I told Death how terrified I was of Them, and They told me that I had a fundamental misunderstanding of Them. They are not some malevolent spectre, haunting and stalking people, trying to lure them into recklessness and death. They just simply are. No more, no less, and then I understood Them. Death told me to remember what I had seen during my infinite lifetimes and I promised Them that I would make the most out of the rest of my life, until I was finally reunited with Them.
But I should not be alive right now, despite my new lease on life. On Valentine's Day 2022, I had an unintentional drug overdose in a nondescript hotel room in Orange County, California, resulting in me developing severe serotonin syndrome. I rapidly lost consciousness, had a seizure that jolted me awake, then nearly choked on my own vomit a few seconds later. Whether by G-d's mercy, or kismet, or the pure chaos of the universe, that seizure woke me up just before I choked to death, and I survived while so many others haven't. A true undeserved miracle.
The most consequential day of my political radicalization was on 17 July 2014, when Eric Garner was murdered by NYPD. I watched the video of him saying "I Can't Breathe" over and over while the life was choked out of him for the "crime" of selling loose cigarettes, and his dying words have never left my mind since then. Over the next month, I confronted the nature of my upbringing in small-town Texas where it was deeply ingrained in me to always respect police and that they were just doing what they had to do, and that if they murdered someone, regardless of the circumstances, it was justified. I started reading a bunch of writings and speeches that Black activists on Twitter were recommending, my first being the autobiography of Malcolm X, arguably still one of the biggest influences on me politically. From there was a deep dive into the life of one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, Fred Hampton, who I believe would've completely changed the face of America if he wasn't assassinated by the FBI. The works of Angela Davis and Assata Shakur helped to open my eyes to Black feminist perspectives that I greatly support and advocate for to this day.
For the several years that followed, I rarely discussed my political beliefs in any serious capacity online because I never could get people to see the warning signs that came from the response to the 2008 recession and realize that we were heading into a late-capitalist hell. I watched as far-right forces coalesced in the GOP and the Democrats utterly failed the country in so many ways, but no one wanted to see what was going to happen. As I steadily became more militant in my beliefs, many millennials and Gen Zers around my age were experiencing firsthand the absolute nightmare American society had become with student loans, wage stagnation, healthcare, and so much more, but instead of fighting, they gave into nihilism, despair, misanthropy, and apathy, all combining into doomerism. Our generation was going to go silently, never achieving a better world. The Black Lives Matter movement probably was one of my only glimmers of hope during the 2010s, but the GOP and Dems swiftly came down to stop any meaningful change to policing occurring. It truly drove the point home that the liberals will always side with the far-right over the progressives because ultimately, the liberals with all the power and money benefit from a far-right government because they get to push for fundraising while knowing that their massive wealth compared to the average American will never be touched.
When the anti-transgender legislation and societal forces started spreading in 2019, none of us knew what to do. As things got worse and worse over the next three years, we were completely alone. The Dems never did anything noteworthy to help us while the GOP dehumanized us and stripped us of rights across the country. The only queer organizations and advocacy groups that cared about us were trans-focused ones. It wasn't until Florida's Don't Say Gay bill was being pushed that the queer orgs actually started fighting back. To them, we were expendable. They cared more about cis gay men not being able to donate blood than trans people not being allowed to exist. We kept sounding the alarm bells about the broader implications of what attacking us could mean, and no one listened. For decades, trans people had existed in a dark forest, intentionally not being seen or heard, because the moment we would be spotted, we would be labelled an existential threat and target for elimination by overwhelming forces that we had no chance of defeating.
When Roe v Wade was overturned, it completely changed the mood of nearly everyone I know, myself included. At this point, all of my friends and close associates knew I was extremely far-left and I had countless furious people reaching out to me to ask things like how to make Molotov cocktails, how to force change when no politicians want it to happen, and the nature and morals of political violence. My go-to quote for them was by the legendary Kwame Ture: "In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none." No group of oppressed people in the United States were ever handed their rights without violence, and it seemed many people finally realized that simple truth.
If you have a million people ready to die for your cause, you are going to fail. You can send unit after unit of people to fight and die, but it will not make a difference to the neo-Nazis and fascists in power. If you want to win, you have to be willing to kill quickly and kill repeatedly. To them, we are not human. To them, we are merely vermin to be squashed, and I am going to treat them in kind. They have long lost the capability to be shown the error of their ways, and I am not going to go the way my ancestors did, killed by the Nazi scum. If I can secure a better future for trans people in America and the world, even if it meant sacrificing my freedom or my life, I will do it. After all, I shouldn't even be alive. I am not going to let trans joy be eradicated by these monsters. If they say we're not human, then I'm going to show them how not human I can get.
That was my thought process on the weekend of 24 June 2022. The week since then has been sobering. I came to realize while talking with cis people that nearly all don't have the conviction to die or kill, and that is not something I would ever ask of someone. The trans community can band together and arm ourselves, but very few people will fight with us. If I decide to actually get violent with the fascists, it's going to cause the rapid destruction of trans people across America. As it stands, I don't see a way forward for me as a trans person in America, and I don't want to die for nothing.
I don't know what the future has in store for transgender people in the United States, but it looks horrifying. I fully expect a genocide to occur against us here and that it's already started. + Show Spoiler +I live every moment of my life thinking that I'm going to lose the people here I love to horrific violence and society at large will encourage it or simply not care. And I get to flee. I get to leave the United States, move to Belgium, and have a job there. I do not deserve this. There is no special quality I have that makes me more worthy of being safe than any other trans person. It's pure luck. I am going to leave in a cowardly way, and I will be a worse person for it. I have effectively abandoned my community to die at the hands of overwhelming forces we cannot hope to win against while I save my own skin. I have benefitted from life without doing anything to earn it.
At the end of the day, I just hope we survive, and I hope all trans people can endure. I decided to join a political party for the first time in my life: PTB-PVDA, the Workers' Party of Belgium, which is a Marxist party that I think I can do a lot of good campaigning and advocating for. Maybe by working with them, I can ensure a better future in some way, but right now, things are bleak. I'm going to try to make the most of the extension of life I was given, but it is hollow, and the guilt I have will stay with me for the rest of my life. Ironic, isn’t it? Jesus, dude, you’ve been doing some digging, huh? And yet the line you clipped out still seems pretty clearly in the “get out of Germany before it’s too late” vein, not the “they’re already putting people in camps” vein. You’re trying to get mileage on the ambiguity of the phrase “It’s already started,” but that’s absolutely something you could have said when the first laws starting to track Jews, require registration, etc. were going into effect. Like, it’s fine dude, you can just say “I was a bit unfair, in retrospect they were probably saying we’re in the lead-up to a Holocaust-like mass casualty event, not that the mass casualty event is already in progress. I still think that’s too melodramatic but I shouldn’t have misrepresented it.” Doesn’t that sound easier than typing “Nazi” in the search bar and “plasmidghost” in username and digging through pages of search results trying to find an imprecisely-worded post from a full year ago? My complaint was that PG repeatedly “invokes” the holocaust, genocide, Jews, etc when speaking of trans people in America. I think I’ve sufficiently shown that with the posts I’ve cited. The idea that I have to find a post where he talks about trans people being led into gas chambers to prove that is a little far-fetched.
You didn’t say “invokes the Holocaust.” You said “thinks trans people are going through the same thing as European Jews during WW2.” We said “uh, no?” and you spent however many pages and however many hours trawling through their post history trying to show you were right, but you weren’t! I and everybody else are perfectly happy to move on as soon as you’re ready to step out of this hole, but you’re still digging! Why are we still doing this?
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On July 03 2023 05:23 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2023 05:16 BlackJack wrote:On July 03 2023 05:08 ChristianS wrote:On July 03 2023 04:01 BlackJack wrote:On July 03 2023 03:48 Magic Powers wrote:On July 03 2023 03:26 Elroi wrote:On July 02 2023 22:15 Magic Powers wrote:On July 02 2023 20:55 Elroi wrote:On July 01 2023 15:08 BlackJack wrote:On July 01 2023 10:29 plasmidghost wrote:
[quote]
This post is super emblematic of why I don't post on this site anymore. You and many others have no fucking clue how bad this ruling is for queer people and how bad things are for us or y'all simply don't care and I've come to realize that there is no amount of evidence or experience I can show that will make y'all or other people change their minds. People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. The Civil Rights Act is dead and the Democrats and Biden will not do anything to fix the SC, they'll just send out links to ActBlue. The US is a decaying police state with no revolutionary potential and will not get better, and I've given up hope in general for most everywhere else, so fuck it, I'll just post this and leave for good:
[img]https://images2.imgbox.com/54/51/uegyih58_o.jpg[/im] I think the last time you posted here you were saying that trans kids were being removed from homes with loving parents to be put into foster homes. When I asked you for a single example you couldn’t provide one and told me that’s what people on Twitter who you trusted were telling you. A few months ago it was front page news everywherewhen a woman at the cheesecake factory that probably had one too many Skinnylicious margaritas said some nasty things to an LGBT person. The idea that there’s some epidemic of nazis beating up queer people while the conservatives cheer them on sounds a little far fetched. Why is it not all over the news? If saying nasty things is front page news worthy than these assaults should be even more newsworthy and if they are as prevalent as you make it seem we should hear about it. Are they just not getting captured on some of the 300 million smartphones? You’ve been posting for years now constantly invoking genocide and nazism and hitler. It’s absurd. The LGBTQ population is exploding. 20% of gen Z identifies as LGBTQ. That’s 1 in 5. That’s double the rate of millennials and millennials are double the rate of Gen X and Gen X is double the rate of baby boomers. Either your posts have no basis in reality or this is the worst attempt at genocide in history. This kind of language seems to have become quite common. I saw a manifestation against restrictions on sex altering surgery where many of the protesters called it "genocide" and here is a male transgender cyclist calling restrictions on her participation in tournaments "genocide". I'm not denying that there are many legitimate problems to discuss, but throwing around words like that seems to have become a trend. Regarding MTF athletes, for every person who calls their exclusion "genocide" you have a number of (not right-wing) people arguing over the nuances of inclusion vs fairness vs science. Yes, they're having a debate. For people who are politically neutral or left-leaning, they're unsure of what to do and they're having a conversation. For people who are politically right-wing, there is no debate. All of them are completely certain of what to do: strict exclusion of all MTF athletes. The whole of the right-wing is ideologically driven, but only the fringe left is ideologically driven, while the overwhelming majority of remaining people between these two groups is thinking about the dilemma fairly rationally. The distinction is clear: left-wingers are not generally being radical about MTF athlete inclusion. They're debating the issue. They're not just winging it and blindly following the personal interests of a small fraction of the population. We certainly can't say the same thing about many right-wingers. They're just blocking the path and they're never going to budge. It's like arguing with a wall. And this is regarding a tiny issue in the vastness of the transgender landscape. MTF athletes are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the population. "Would transgender women 'take over' women's sport? Harper: Trans women are never going to take over women's sport. First of all, trans people make up roughly 1% of the population. The best example of a population study to look at comes from America. If you look at NCAA sports, there are more than 200,000 women competing every year in NCAA sports. Trans women make up 0.5-1% of the population so we should be seeing 1,000-2,000 trans women every year. The NCAA 11 years ago allowed trans women to compete, based on hormone therapy. We should be seeing 1,000-2,000. We see a handful every year." Somehow an issue that affects very few people in the world is front and center for conservatives regarding their issues with transgender people. How? Why? Is this really such a big deal that it has to result in anti-LGBTQ legislation? The answer is obviously no. The sports associations can figure this out for themselves, they don't need laws interfering with the process. Mistakes will be made on the way to a better solution, but these are not going to "ruin women's sports" in any meaningful capacity. So yet again conservatives (pretend to) care more about a much smaller fraction of the population than about a much larger fraction. This is called a "red herring fallacy". https://www.bbc.com/sport/61346517 I don't really see how your response has anything to do with my post. BJ pointed to comments like this, from this thread: People are jumping at the opportunity to attack queer people throughout the US. Nazis are actively assaulting queer people and being celebrated for it by the conservative base. and talk about "genocide" on trans people in the US. And said that it is wildly exaggerated and that you should be able to back such claims up with evidence. I only gave other examples of the same kind of exaggerations (such as calling a ban on trans women in women's sport genocide). No one in this thread said that transgender people are experiencing genocide, BJ made that up. Ironic, isn't it? "Backing claims up with evidence" and all that, right? On July 01 2022 15:33 plasmidghost wrote:+ Show Spoiler +In one month, I will move from Texas to Belgium, and I will most likely never return to the United States.
On 12 December 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States terminated a recount of Florida's votes for president. In a 5-4 decision on party lines, the court gave the presidency to George W. Bush, and less than a year later, we were at war and the post-WWII party that had defined American capitalism and excess came to an abrupt and permanent end. On 16 June 2015, Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for president, and the forces of decades of conservative lobbying, Christian fundamentalism, and fascist recruiting killed off any mirage of America being a country based on freedom, justice, and equality. On 24 June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and many Americans suddenly realized that the war had come home.
When you cross a black hole's event horizon, time ceases to exist. Your body gets torn limb from limb, cell from cell, atom from atom, until several infinites later, your body ha been reunited with the cosmic dust it was formed out of. While some physical manifestation of you still exists, your past, present, and futures collapse onto one another into one perpetual scream. You see infinitely many lifetimes born from every decision you could've made or not made and are forced to reckon with seeing the life of your dreams fade away and be replaced with a nightmare, ad infinitum, tormenting you until you've gone insane. But just as suddenly as your hell began, it ends, and all that's left of you is your soul, the pure essence of you as a human being, and then you enter it.
When I entered a black hole, I was greeted with the void. No sound, no light, nothing. I was, for the first time in my life, truly alone, despite my many feelings of loneliness before. Or so I thought. The voice of Death spoke my name and it echoed around me and inside me. I turned fearful, then sighed in resignation, accepting that I was dead. Or so I thought, once again. Death started to take a physical form in front of me and told me that I was in fact, not dead. When I heard Their voice, it was not one of malice, or evil, or temptation. It was gentle, soft, and tranquil. I told Death how terrified I was of Them, and They told me that I had a fundamental misunderstanding of Them. They are not some malevolent spectre, haunting and stalking people, trying to lure them into recklessness and death. They just simply are. No more, no less, and then I understood Them. Death told me to remember what I had seen during my infinite lifetimes and I promised Them that I would make the most out of the rest of my life, until I was finally reunited with Them.
But I should not be alive right now, despite my new lease on life. On Valentine's Day 2022, I had an unintentional drug overdose in a nondescript hotel room in Orange County, California, resulting in me developing severe serotonin syndrome. I rapidly lost consciousness, had a seizure that jolted me awake, then nearly choked on my own vomit a few seconds later. Whether by G-d's mercy, or kismet, or the pure chaos of the universe, that seizure woke me up just before I choked to death, and I survived while so many others haven't. A true undeserved miracle.
The most consequential day of my political radicalization was on 17 July 2014, when Eric Garner was murdered by NYPD. I watched the video of him saying "I Can't Breathe" over and over while the life was choked out of him for the "crime" of selling loose cigarettes, and his dying words have never left my mind since then. Over the next month, I confronted the nature of my upbringing in small-town Texas where it was deeply ingrained in me to always respect police and that they were just doing what they had to do, and that if they murdered someone, regardless of the circumstances, it was justified. I started reading a bunch of writings and speeches that Black activists on Twitter were recommending, my first being the autobiography of Malcolm X, arguably still one of the biggest influences on me politically. From there was a deep dive into the life of one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, Fred Hampton, who I believe would've completely changed the face of America if he wasn't assassinated by the FBI. The works of Angela Davis and Assata Shakur helped to open my eyes to Black feminist perspectives that I greatly support and advocate for to this day.
For the several years that followed, I rarely discussed my political beliefs in any serious capacity online because I never could get people to see the warning signs that came from the response to the 2008 recession and realize that we were heading into a late-capitalist hell. I watched as far-right forces coalesced in the GOP and the Democrats utterly failed the country in so many ways, but no one wanted to see what was going to happen. As I steadily became more militant in my beliefs, many millennials and Gen Zers around my age were experiencing firsthand the absolute nightmare American society had become with student loans, wage stagnation, healthcare, and so much more, but instead of fighting, they gave into nihilism, despair, misanthropy, and apathy, all combining into doomerism. Our generation was going to go silently, never achieving a better world. The Black Lives Matter movement probably was one of my only glimmers of hope during the 2010s, but the GOP and Dems swiftly came down to stop any meaningful change to policing occurring. It truly drove the point home that the liberals will always side with the far-right over the progressives because ultimately, the liberals with all the power and money benefit from a far-right government because they get to push for fundraising while knowing that their massive wealth compared to the average American will never be touched.
When the anti-transgender legislation and societal forces started spreading in 2019, none of us knew what to do. As things got worse and worse over the next three years, we were completely alone. The Dems never did anything noteworthy to help us while the GOP dehumanized us and stripped us of rights across the country. The only queer organizations and advocacy groups that cared about us were trans-focused ones. It wasn't until Florida's Don't Say Gay bill was being pushed that the queer orgs actually started fighting back. To them, we were expendable. They cared more about cis gay men not being able to donate blood than trans people not being allowed to exist. We kept sounding the alarm bells about the broader implications of what attacking us could mean, and no one listened. For decades, trans people had existed in a dark forest, intentionally not being seen or heard, because the moment we would be spotted, we would be labelled an existential threat and target for elimination by overwhelming forces that we had no chance of defeating.
When Roe v Wade was overturned, it completely changed the mood of nearly everyone I know, myself included. At this point, all of my friends and close associates knew I was extremely far-left and I had countless furious people reaching out to me to ask things like how to make Molotov cocktails, how to force change when no politicians want it to happen, and the nature and morals of political violence. My go-to quote for them was by the legendary Kwame Ture: "In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none." No group of oppressed people in the United States were ever handed their rights without violence, and it seemed many people finally realized that simple truth.
If you have a million people ready to die for your cause, you are going to fail. You can send unit after unit of people to fight and die, but it will not make a difference to the neo-Nazis and fascists in power. If you want to win, you have to be willing to kill quickly and kill repeatedly. To them, we are not human. To them, we are merely vermin to be squashed, and I am going to treat them in kind. They have long lost the capability to be shown the error of their ways, and I am not going to go the way my ancestors did, killed by the Nazi scum. If I can secure a better future for trans people in America and the world, even if it meant sacrificing my freedom or my life, I will do it. After all, I shouldn't even be alive. I am not going to let trans joy be eradicated by these monsters. If they say we're not human, then I'm going to show them how not human I can get.
That was my thought process on the weekend of 24 June 2022. The week since then has been sobering. I came to realize while talking with cis people that nearly all don't have the conviction to die or kill, and that is not something I would ever ask of someone. The trans community can band together and arm ourselves, but very few people will fight with us. If I decide to actually get violent with the fascists, it's going to cause the rapid destruction of trans people across America. As it stands, I don't see a way forward for me as a trans person in America, and I don't want to die for nothing.
I don't know what the future has in store for transgender people in the United States, but it looks horrifying. I fully expect a genocide to occur against us here and that it's already started. + Show Spoiler +I live every moment of my life thinking that I'm going to lose the people here I love to horrific violence and society at large will encourage it or simply not care. And I get to flee. I get to leave the United States, move to Belgium, and have a job there. I do not deserve this. There is no special quality I have that makes me more worthy of being safe than any other trans person. It's pure luck. I am going to leave in a cowardly way, and I will be a worse person for it. I have effectively abandoned my community to die at the hands of overwhelming forces we cannot hope to win against while I save my own skin. I have benefitted from life without doing anything to earn it.
At the end of the day, I just hope we survive, and I hope all trans people can endure. I decided to join a political party for the first time in my life: PTB-PVDA, the Workers' Party of Belgium, which is a Marxist party that I think I can do a lot of good campaigning and advocating for. Maybe by working with them, I can ensure a better future in some way, but right now, things are bleak. I'm going to try to make the most of the extension of life I was given, but it is hollow, and the guilt I have will stay with me for the rest of my life. Ironic, isn’t it? Jesus, dude, you’ve been doing some digging, huh? And yet the line you clipped out still seems pretty clearly in the “get out of Germany before it’s too late” vein, not the “they’re already putting people in camps” vein. You’re trying to get mileage on the ambiguity of the phrase “It’s already started,” but that’s absolutely something you could have said when the first laws starting to track Jews, require registration, etc. were going into effect. Like, it’s fine dude, you can just say “I was a bit unfair, in retrospect they were probably saying we’re in the lead-up to a Holocaust-like mass casualty event, not that the mass casualty event is already in progress. I still think that’s too melodramatic but I shouldn’t have misrepresented it.” Doesn’t that sound easier than typing “Nazi” in the search bar and “plasmidghost” in username and digging through pages of search results trying to find an imprecisely-worded post from a full year ago? My complaint was that PG repeatedly “invokes” the holocaust, genocide, Jews, etc when speaking of trans people in America. I think I’ve sufficiently shown that with the posts I’ve cited. The idea that I have to find a post where he talks about trans people being led into gas chambers to prove that is a little far-fetched. You didn’t say “invokes the Holocaust.” You said “thinks trans people are going through the same thing as European Jews during WW2.” We said “uh, no?” and you spent however many pages and however many hours trawling through their post history trying to show you were right, but you weren’t! I and everybody else are perfectly happy to move on as soon as you’re ready to step out of this hole, but you’re still digging! Why are we still doing this?
I’m no history buff so I don’t know when the extermination started but I didn’t think it was on day 1. I’m happy to clear up that I definitely do not think PG thinks trans people are being gassed. There are countless genocides in history but PG repeatedly invoked this one so it’s my assumption that something about what Jews experienced then is relatable to what’s trans people experience now.
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I think that’s the least defensive mode I’m gonna get. As you were, I’m not doing this any more.
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EPT
