Joe Rogan’s comments on transwomen in sport are based on science and most people outside of Twitter agree. He probably agrees with everything else you posted regarding military service and bathroom usage. Joe’s arguments are that transwomen who go through male puberty will have an advantage based on muscle twitch fibers, bone density and other irreversible parts of male puberty that affect the body. He also believes children shouldn’t be allowed to transition medically until they’re adults. Because we don’t know the affects of blockers and hormones long term on young children, although one study was recently released that showed decreased bone density. Children also change their minds. Adults don’t allow them to make medical decisions for good reason.
Matt if you’re going to disagree at least post his actual views on the issues. He thinks transmen should be allowed to compete with men. Your post seems a bit dishonest. This issue is only hard for people on the far left who have screamed that TWAW and can’t really have an honest conversation on Joe Rogan’s views , because it would be obvious that TWATW.
Joe is an athlete and expert on combat sports, there’s a reason he talks about it with authority.
//Matt if you’re going to disagree at least post his actual views on the issues.//
I said I disagreed with the rude and disrespectful way that he talked about the issue, and I do disagree!
I am not well-versed in the technical aspects of hormone therapy's relationship to athletic prowess and I think the general subject of sex-segregation in sports is a little undertheorized.
In fairness I think the most visceral response everyone cites “You’re a man” was him speaking about Fallon Fox who quite literally beat the living shit out of a few female MMA fighters and was taunting other female MMA fighters who (understandably) didn’t think it was fair she was able to compete in the female division. This isn’t an isolated incident and there are a fair number of examples of female athletes feeling unfairly disadvantaged by a trans athlete competing in a sex segregated divisions and I think their grievances and the science behind it are pretty sound. We separate sports by biological sex for a reason.
One other point I forgot to mention which, if I remember correctly, added to his anger is, I believe she hid the fact she wasn’t a biological female before a few of her earliest fights, which is bullshit.
"This isn’t an isolated incident and there are a fair number of examples of female athletes feeling unfairly disadvantaged by a trans athlete competing in a sex segregated divisions"
What does it take to qualify as "an isolated incident" or "a fair number of examples"? My understanding is that there are three or four individuals in a few sports that have led to most of the complaints, which sounds like a few isolated incidents to me, and not a fair number of examples.
I guess my point is that MMA isn’t unique in terms of it being a competitive problem to allow trans women to compete in female divisions (there are examples in other sports) and there have been examples not only at high levels of competition but also lower down the ladder at the high school level. I think the easiest solution would be to keep female competition limited to biological females and then an open division for anyone but the reality is most men’s divisions are already open. If you’re a female and wanted to compete in the men’s division of a sport you can, it just never happens bc males on average are at a biological advantage when it comes to athletics. Which was the whole point of creating female specific divisions in the first place.
I wonder if anyone's done a statistical analysis of regional junior sports leagues with a very dominant individual. It seems to me anecdotally that this sort of thing has not been uncommon historically, particularly with individuals that eventually go on to significant professional careers in a sport, though there are a few incidents recently where a trans person has been involved. If this is a lot more common with trans participants in sports, then maybe there's a discussion to be had, but it seems like it should be easy enough to gather data on times over the past few decades when a single individual keeps winning contest after contest, and I don't know that anyone has bothered to do this analysis.
I think this issue is generally overblown by both sides because 1. Transgender individuals are an extremely minuscule part of the population so naturally any examples that happen at all are going to be rare 2. There is overlap in athletic ability between sexes. Like if I took the fastest female track star and put them against a male in the lowest quartile of all males in terms of speed, the female would probably win.
But the rules are not for those cases. The rules are for someone like Fallon Fox who would be a reasonably athletic and strong biological male but nowhere near the top echelon of male MMA, but because of her biological advantages inherent to her biological sex she becomes a top tier fighter against women’s fighters.
Is it a threat to the entire sport? Of course not. But when you play competitive sports at any level, you are doing so under the pretense of some base level of catergorization via biological sex. Certain sports then further categorize on weight where it present a very clear and defined advantage (like fighting sports).
For example, Stef Curry and Shaq are both considered top nba players in their times. Even though Shaq is way larger, it wouldn’t be a given Shaq in his prime would dominate Stef one on one bc stef is faster, better at range. But if I put Shaq against the WNBA’s top PG or Center he’d crush both of them. If I put Stef against the WNBA’s top PG or center he’d crush both of them. Men on average are just advantaged in physical competition and I think people underestimate how big that gap truly is.
I'm not sure if this will address your questions about sex segregation, but I would say its basis is that sport depends on fair competition, and in practice female athletes will underperform male athletes even adjusting for factors like weight. So sex segregation makes female participation in sport possible. It's an equity issue: when Title IX mandated that colleges had to spend equal resources on women's sports, women's participation in sports exploded.
While I think there are nuances involved in trans participation, I don't fear, as some conservatives say they do, that scores of male athletes would claim to be trans women in order to dominate those sports. But getting rid of sex discrimination, as some progressives I know have called for, would be tantamount to banning women from playing sports (unless we mandated quotas or something, I suppose).
It is odd how frequently people on "the wrong side" of trans issues have their views misrepresented. Like, spend any time on twitter and you'll hear that Jesse Singal is the biggest transphobe around and his positions on trans rights are indistinguishable from any progressive democrat.
It seems like for most of the online progressivesphere, trans support is more about affect or team signaling than like, actual policy positions.
Yeah it drives me nuts. I actually saw this in the Weeds Facebook group - Matt’s JRE episode came up, someone started foaming at the mouth about how Matt shouldn’t have gone because Rogan hates trans people. So I asked “can you provide any evidence at all that he hates trans people?” and the response was “he had Abigail Shrier on his podcast.” Like, come on!
Outside of the far right, very few people oppose employment protections for trans people or have an issue with them serving in the military. This is certainly true for most of the UK feminists who have been relentlessly slandered and misrepresented in the US media, including by Vox. The most recent example is in the Atlantic. I can't believe the people who write these articles are incapable of faithfully summarizing the gender critical position. It isn't *that* complicated, and yet it is misrepresented over and over and over.
The debate is mostly over areas that, like athletics, call for nuance. It is not crazy or transphobic, for example, to want some standard beyond self-id to govern access to women's prisons. The reasons for concern are obvious to anyone who isn't wearing idealogical blinders, but it's nearly impossible to discuss these issues in a subtle way online because most activists demand 100% agreement across the board.
My radicalization into the alt-center probably began around 2015 when I couldn't reconcile what my Twitter friends were saying about Singal with what I saw in his actual output.
and when people are asked to specify what, exactly, they disagree with Singal about it almost invariably leads to a "it's not my job to educate you"-style response
Completely agree. I have listened to Rogan talk about trans issues and I don’t find any of his takes, opinions and assertions to be transphobic at all. They seem fairly reasonable. And I wouldn’t call myself transphobic either as I also agree with many of the rights that Yglesias contends they should have.
However, I do think that having completely de-gendered restrooms may be going a step too far.
I say this thinking about the comfort and safety of women. Many many women do not want to share a bathroom with a Cis man and I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable for them to feel that way.
Men commit far more violent and sexually related crimes than women. It’s not even close. And if a woman needs to relieve herself without being in earshot and proximity to men, I think she she have that opportunity without being forced to hold it until she reaches a restroom where she feels safe.
In my experience women’s bathrooms aren’t any cleaner! (At home, I mean, not public places.)
Another good thing about traveling - you'll learn that European bathrooms are mixed gender and handle this with much more private stalls. Also they charge $1 to use, which is super inconvenient.
The trans sports thing is always really funny to me. Because I think it's pretty obvious that the people with the Rogan view are right. But I also cannot imagine in a million years caring enough about it for it to affect my politics one single iota.
I remember listening to an Andrew Sullivan interview a couple years ago and he was just breathing fire about how terrible it was that this like 17 year old Texas high jumper was competing against girls, and I remember thinking "relax man, who gives a shit, its a fucking youth sport"
Well it is a big deal, because scholarships for college and possible exposure for professional sports are at stake. It wouldn’t make me vote Republican, but it makes me support people who are willing to discuss the issue openly. Serena Williams would lose against nearly all professional top male tennis athletes, despite being the best female to ever do it. Same with Amanda Leoa in MMA, she would get hurt fighting any male in the UFC. The women’s soccer team lost to high schoolers.
You know what, you are right, it does matter for a great deal for certain people. I just feel like the amount of discussion of this issue far outstrips its importance, but you can say that about all sorts of issues.
This topic generates so much discussion online precisely because it is controversial and divisive. For thousands of years, we've been fighting for 'our side' against 'the other', however defined. We've staked out positions on the tribal battlefield - physical or idealogical - and fought over them.
Online activity has continued the fracturing of our definitions of 'our side' into more sub-national and sub-ethnic communities while simultaneously making those sub-groups more connected across geographies. The battle lines between groups are therefore almost exclusively online and increasingly ferocious. Trump's presence connected the more online left groups together against a common enemy. As he departs, I predict more skirmishes as each sub-group battles for its territory.
Just to add if you love MMA you absolutely appreciate the athletic prowess of Amanda Leoa, Weili Zhang and Joanna Jędrzejczyk. Weili and Joanna had arguably one of the best battle in UFC history. It’s a top fight of all time and contender for FOTY. I can’t imagine these women not competing, as a man who loves combat sports. It would never be fair to put them against biological males for obvious reasons. It doesn’t mean that their hard work and skill should be ignored.
Do you happen to know if there are any trans women tennis players that would be competitive against Serena Williams? Or are you trying to protect her from a non-existent threat?
For me at least, as someone who wants to belong to an evidence-based, rational coalition of like-minded people, it distresses me a bit that a number of them are willing to throw all that out in order to signal that they are a good ally. Furthermore, the zeal with which they try to cancel anyone who expresses even mild pushback at the edges of the issue is downright disturbing.
So yes, trans women in sex-segregated sports not a particularly broad issue in and of itself, but the takes on it are sometimes demonstrative of some very bad traits. I also think a lot of the people expressing these views just don't like sports very much, but that may be an unfair characterization.
I agree with you until you get to combat sports. Part of the (fictional) premise of combat sports is that everyone’s on a level playing field, to the extent possible, and that it’s really about skill vs. skill. Moreover, keeping the playing field level that way helps avoid catastrophes like serious injury or death. If it were any other sport I’d care much less (well if I’m being honest I don’t care about it much in MMA either) but I can perfectly understand why he’d get fired up about it with MMA.
It's not a big deal isn't an argument for allowing transgender women to compete against women. If its not a big deal, then it's not a big deal to not allow them to compete. Regardless of whether, you think its a big deal, others on both sides, think it is a big deal.
To be clear, I think that Sullivan or Rogan are correct on the merits, I just think this issue gets a lot more coverage and excites a lot more ire than it should
If only you had been on the Senate floor to defeat Title IX with the "relax man, who gives a shit" argument. We would never have had the scourge of girls and women competing in sports at all.
I guess I don't see that an occasional individual being particularly dominant in a particular regional youth sports league for a couple years is anywhere near as bad as having the sport defunded because it involves women. After all, *many* regional youth sports leagues are often dominated for a couple years by a single individual, *regardless* of gender or gender identity of individuals involved.
Honestly, I think we're going to find over the next few decades that those individuals who dominate at a youth level are not uncommonly intersex or have one hormone disorder or another. Which goes back to the point that the justifications for sex-segregation, while obvious, are also under-theorized.
I tend to agree the IDW folks spend too much time obsessing over “woke” academics and their students. That said, it’s disingenuous to say that their far-left notions don’t leave campus. Recent graduates of elite coastal universities disproportionately work in media and tech, they’re bringing their politics with them, and they’ve been pretty successful at influencing the higher-ups to play along.
I think it’s worth pushing back on this as I think you’re not correct.
First, the Olympics have been allowing trans women to compete for 15 years. (The requirement is simply that your testosterone levels have been at levels typical of cis women for two years.) In that time, no trans women have qualified, for any sport. You see the same in other leagues with similar rules. This strongly suggests to me that having two puberties is a disadvantage not an advantage - which incidentally is what trans people themselves report - and high-level sports will not have any issue with allowing trans women to participate.
Second, GNrH agonists (“puberty blockers”) have been around since the 1980s and there have been plenty of studies on their long-term effects. Here’s one from 2015 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4342775/ - and it cites several more. The main effect seems to be an increase of a couple inches in adult height. Some studies seem to show an increase in obesity risk but it doesn’t appear consistently. Meanwhile the strong psychological benefits are very well documented.
This misinformation is widespread and is frequently printed as fact by major newspapers! So it’s not surprising that people would believe it to be true. But it’s not true, papers shouldn’t print it as fact, and I think people should push back when they see it repeated.
I am not incorrect. Bottom surgery was required and even now the IOC is weighing new changes based on mistakes they made after the new games. We are talking advantages, not winning. Not the same. If someone takes steroids in sports, but loses, they are still disqualified. Because steroids are an advantage. Different, but comparable here. There is no evidence that going through male puberty is a disadvantage in female sports. Nor do taking blockers and hormones undo all of the reminiscences of male puberty (muscle, bones, hip structure).
Puberty blockers were used on children with precocious puberty. A medical condition that is viewable, diagnosable and treatable. A 5 year old getting breasts and menstruation wouldn’t be normal. So they use blockers to stop it. Using them on children without said medical condition isn’t the same, these children have nothing physically wrong with them. They are developing normal physically. It’s like treating kids with chemo who don’t have cancer.
I am not trying to continue with this, I done a lot of research on this topic. I live in the town regarding the CT lawsuit. I started after trying to figure what was going on with the Selina Soule case. There is a lot of misinformation and it’s coming from activists on the left. I also want trans teens to participate in sports, but fairly. Which is doable. No one will be 100% happy, but the point is to allow as much participation as possible while also keep things as fair as possible for females.
In one case a child has a metabolic and physiological disorder which you are counteracting by holding back the onset of puberty till it occurs at the typical time range.
In the other case, you are preventing puberty from actually happening in a child who would otherwise experience as part of their natural development.
So, they're not the same physiologically, or for that matter psychologically in terms of their ultimate outcome. In the first case, the child goes through puberty at what would be considered the normal time. In the second case, the overwhelming number of children never proceed through puberty at all.
"The requirement is simply that your testosterone levels have been at levels typical of cis women for two years."
No, that is not correct. It is very incorrect. The requirement currently is one year with testosterone levels below 10nmol/L (which means the levels can be substantially higher than in natal females). No surgery required.
This is a pretty comprehensive review of the literature on trans-women's sporting performance which just published:
I shouldn't have included the aside, especially since I was just working from memory and didn't stop to look it up. Sorry.
That paper is interesting, but it seems to be mostly about muscle mass? There's no "muscle mass" Olympic event. The only discussion I could see (on a quick read) of something I would call "athletic performance" involved some transgender runners, who... saw their times drop a lot. If you have more muscle mass but you can't run as fast, you still lose the race!
I still think the real test is whether people can meet the hormone-level standards and still compete at a high level. In the 2020/21 Olympics there are 3 trans women, of 11,000 competitors, being considered for their teams. This doesn't look to me like cis women being outcompeted en masse.
We can start to worry if those numbers change, but right now I think the IOC has it in hand.
No "muscle mass" Olympic event? I'm sorry, but you are not arguing in good faith. Or if you have never heard of "weight-lifting." And that's just for starters, the number of athletic events, such as sprinting, shot putt, hammer throwing, and sundry others in which "muscle mass" is clearly a huge factor is extremely long. But, sure, whatever.
So he argues that trans women (I hope others will note your willful elision of a space here) who go through male puberty should be barred from sports but also that all trans women should be forced to undergo male puberty? Pretty fucked up to think people should be forced to undergo changes that your own ideology claims are irreversibly altering.
Certainly could be but it seems pretty likely to me given the comments at large that Ang is trying to create a separate noun (transwomen no space) in order to avoid acknowledging trans women as a subset of women.
This another crazy thing about wokists. They will take a minor distinction that only they understand or even intend and then assume the rest of the world has the same intentions when they do something as minor as put a space between two words.
You could look to the other parts of the comment, notably the vehement denial that “trans women are women” in favor of the weird tautology “transwomen are transwomen” and see that I’m pretty clearly correct about the poster’s intentions.
I think it’s important to learn a non-English language so that you can recognize surface level features like this that wouldn’t survive being translated to another language and back. This also applies to arguments about “x people” vs “people who are x”.
(There are important things that might not survive translation even when they should - an example being using the right pronouns, when other languages don’t use them as much.)
Transwomen should be allowed to transition with support (e.g. insurance, job), “woman” =adult. I don’t support, neither does Rogan, young children transitioning for the same reason we don’t allow them to vote, drive, get sentenced to death, or other adult level activities. What it comes down to is whether one believes that children can consent to adult choices. I don’t think so, they don’t have the mental maturity for it. Also be specific and say what you mean. No one is using vague terms like “people”, we are specifically addressing children.
We don't allow children to do those things because they involve judgment amidst unclear realities and discernment of extremely subtle shades of meaning, and it's not clear to me why "knowing what gender you are" would obviously be assumed to be one of those situations. Almost everyone finds the answer to that question extremely obvious extremely early in their development, and trans kids don't actually seem to be different in that regard.
I went through a gender identity questioning, and didn't resolve it until I was in my 30's. I played with Transformers, GI Joe, and my sister's My Little Pony as a child. I identify as a cis-man now because I am of the male sex, and realized that I didn't care about social constructs, like gender. (This is not to put down anyone who does care, I am speaking exclusively about my personal experience) Who cares if I am a 43 year old who has stuffed unicorns on his desk.
People assumed that a woman sat there for a long time, but now I am the unicorn guy.
The point is, it took me decades to come to stable point in my journey, and I still think, at times, that it would be so awesome if I was of the female sex, but I'm not. And nothing is going to change that.
However, I can still embrace my femininity and be myself. I am glad that I did not take hormone blockers, because I am in a loving relationship with a cis, straight female.
So, while I am not opposed to adults choosing hormone blockers, children really aren't very good at seeing long term effects of their actions. I read about some teenagers dropping ice on cars passing below, because it was funny to watch the cars swerve. Then one of the pieces smashed through the windshield and killed a woman. The kids didn't want to harm anyone, it just never occurred to them that what they were doing was a bad idea.
Gender is incredibly confusing for adults, I am still working to understand it fully. How much more for children?
Yes, there's a tendency for many on the pro-trans/LGBTQ side (which is also the side I consider myself on) to portray the issue of gender identity as being extremely simple, something that everyone has a clear sense of, or would were it not for bigotry from without. (A random, probably inconsequential example of this: on the show Big Mouth, which is about kids going through puberty, the only characters who are portrayed as well-adjusted and confident are gay, bi, or pansexual.) I understand the rhetorical purpose of this—it defuses the dismissive claim "you're just confused" and puts the problem with society rather than the individual—but it does leave some people out. Jesse Singal has been criticized for talking about "desistance," people who identify as trans when they're young but then realize later that they aren't, with some people saying that desistance causes no problem because it's a simple matter to go back to using the other pronouns, name, etc. It just seems like a mistake to ignore the times when things aren't so clear-cut.
You hit upon one of the problems I have been noticing with the LGBT movement, which I also side with.
Many of the arguments being presented by the left are meant to defuse, or answer criticisms from the right, but they just ignore, at best, or demonizes, as worst, LGBT people who think differently.
When Justice Barrett was being confirmed, she used the term Sexual Preference, and as was attacked as being homophobic (which she may or may not be) because Preference implies choice, and there is no choice involved in ones Sexual Orientation.
Couple of glaring problems with at argument.:
First, and the most damaging, is that it dismisses LGBT people whose lived experience has choice as part of it. Like this gentleman.
Genetics only accounts for between 8 and 25 percent of one's orientation, which leaves a lot of room for the possibility of choice and science is incapable, by it's very nature, to say that something is absolutely not there. You can't prove a negative, and science can't prove anything, it comes up with theories and evidence, but is constantly changing.
So, to say that there is no possibility of choice being involved is science denial.
Third, and this is more of interest to people interested in the English Language, it actually makes no sense to say that Orientation precludes choice. For example, we often talk about Political Orientation, and no one thinks that one is 'born a Democrat', and cannot change.
And finally,, the most damaging thing, is this implication that if it was a choice, it would be the wrong one. Otherwise, why would be it be so important to make it clear that one does not have a choice in these matters, unless the only way one can justify it is to say that I had say in this decision? That is, the responsibility is on biology, not me.
The reason that "Born this way" is so prominent, is that it deflects the Conservative accusation that one is 'living sinfully'. If I was born this way, and cannot help who I am attracted to, then you can't judge me. The problem however, is that it doesn't actually solve anything.
Let's say, theoretically, we can prove beyond a doubt that who one is sexually attracted to is completely outside your control. So what? It does not take away the choice that one makes in how one acts on those desires.
As a heterosocial male, I might find a 16 year old girl attractive. I still can choose whether to do the right thing, recognize that to pursue her would be morally wrong, or I can do the wrong thing. It is up to me. I personally choose the right thing.
So, for those who condemn homosexuality, they can still argue "Well, you were born that way, but you still chose to do the wrong thing."
It doesn't actually solve anything, and in the process harms actual Gays and Lesbians by demonetizing them, and their lived experience, which I consider more harmful overall.
It was one thing to be rejected and attacked by the "other side". it is bad, but there is some insulation there, as you kind of expect it.
But when you own so-called allies and tribe (Those who you align yourself with), attack you, it hurts. Badly. It is no different than a parent casting their child out for being LGBT. This is your family, the LGBT community should understand and accept you for who you are. But they don't.
I genuinely hope nobody's talking about pushing puberty blockers on kids because they play with their sister's dolls (I did too and nobody in my family, entirely conservative Evangelicals in the rural Midwest all, thought that was weird.)
Thanks for sharing this. Really appreciate your experience and views and it enforces the fact that this is a nuanced issue that can't be viewed in a black and white way. Having said that I absolutely agree that giving children hormones is a grave mistake.
I don’t believe transwoman should participate against women in physical supports. Because females can get hurt. There could make a third category for people that want to participate in unisex physical sports. I think transwomen should be allowed in some women’s support, but that their times (track, cross country) should be weighted based on their advantage.
I don't believe tall people should participate in physical sports, because short people can get hurt. I think tall people should be allowed in some sports, but that their times (track, cross country) should be weighted based on their advantage.
This is already a thing. Most leagues have divisions based on size and age. 12 year olds can’t play with 4 year olds who can’t play with 18 year olds. It’s based on size and development. In professional combat sports 155er don’t fight 170ers. They have separate divisions.
Yes, I think it's quite reasonable that many sports do that kind of thing! But they don't do it in sports like tennis or track. If the arguments against trans people competing are ones that would naturally lead to weight classes or height classes, and yet there's no interest in weight classes or height classes, then that suggests that the arguments aren't actually doing the work here.
Practically all competitive sports are segregated by sex because speed and strength are integral to them. High school boys could dominate olympic women in most events ( http://boysvswomen.com/ ).
I not being facetious, but do you know anything about sports? Henry Cejudo is a champion ufc fighter. He’s 5’4 135 pounds. He could beat any woman in the 135 division and 145. Not only would he beat them , but would cause irreparable damage. Any male could be the best female. It’s not just height or weight with regard to sex, but the response times. The brains for males works different. There are male ufc fighters and boxers who can throw hundred of strikes and kicks in a matter of 15 minutes. It’s muscle twitch fibers, the way the pelvis and hips are structured and bone density.
Think you might’ve gotten confused. Trans women (2 words) is the construction most people use. “Transwomen” (one word) is the construction Ang is using that’s common in anti-trans circles for ideological reasons explained elsewhere in the thread.
Progressives have an unhealthy tendency to view everything as dog-whistling rather than just ignorance to the (often very esoteric) sensitivities of extremely online leftists. Your assumption that his not using a space is anti-trans rather than an innocent and meaningless omission of a keystroke is a case in point.
Given Ang’s clear familiarity with the discussion and endorsement of anti-trans slogans (so common to the poster that they are abbreviated) like “transwomen are transwomen” I feel extremely confident the omission was not one of ignorance. Certainly there are some people who would omit a space without thinking about it or meaning anything by it, but this is pretty clearly a different phenomenon.
I think when having these discussions we have to make distinctions without referencing bio sex. If I misgendered someone I could see being upset, but you’re annoyed I’m not using the language you want. I won’t. Also I only make distinctions when discussing these topics. Outside these topics I just say woman or man. I am a trans alli. I think it’s wrong that insurance companies don’t cover SRS, hormones and I want to see more job protections for trans people, as well as investments in opportunities. We agree more than disagree.
You think onmitting a space is anti-trans dog whistling??? Good lord, you are really too deep in this online subculture. Please argue ideas and not missing spaces.
The idea underlying the dogwhistle, as explained elsewhere in the thread, is that Ang thinks trans women aren’t women (as stated in the initial post) and so insists on creating a separate noun for trans women instead of using an adjective noun situation like most people do when discussing trans people. Maybe the linguistics are not important to you but there’s the idea.
That seems like splitting an awfully fine hair, and I wholly agree with Matt (if not here, then in other posts of his) that the relentless focus on "linguistics" issues over actual ideas is not accomplishing a whole lot outside of tightly encased elite circles, while turning off or alienating the persuadable middle.
What if - I know this is crazy - the dogwhistle isn't a dogwhistle but in fact a sincerely held opinion with no ulterior motive and no signal of a deeper antagonism? That sincerely held opinion might even be incoherent. But it's a possibility, right?
The dog whistle isn’t an opinion, the dog whistle is a linguistic construction. The opinion being emphasized by the dog whistle is that trans women are not a subset of women. I think most readers of Slow Boring would find this opinion distasteful, which is why it’s being hid behind the dogwhistle of the linguistic construction and behind some acronyms that those unfamiliar with anti-trans rhetoric may not be able to decipher.
I think that people dislike Joe Rogan for a really simple reason - his aesthetic, and that this reveals something flawed about the progressive movement that has been true for a long time.
It makes me think of The Road to Wigan Pier by Orwell where he talks about - and I'm paraphrasing, how most socialists are sandal wearing vegetarians who are more committed to socialism as an aesthetic than actually improving the material conditions of the working class.
Progressives seem to revile uneducated white working class males. Rogan is a representative of those people. So, progressives revile him.
If progressives want to win then they need to learn how to speak to those people. They don't need to change their policies - their policies are quite popular, but they need to learn how to sell them to those who stand to benefit the most.
When commitment to aesthetics and improving material conditions come into conflict then improving material conditions should almost always win out.
Well I mean what I would say is that disliking Joe Rogan or Rogan’s show on the basis of aesthetics is fine. You don’t need to like everyone and you certainly don’t need to like every podcast! But majoritarian politics has to be about more than what programs do you, personally, enjoy.
So maybe we should just ignore the aesthetic left instead of trying to win them over? Outside of twitter and the media this is an amazingly small group of people. The more we engage and placate them, the more ground we cede to the culture war.
If state politics are important, there’s actually a lot of them in important positions. Berkeley and SF are run by aesthetic liberals who are okay with any policy except for anything that could possibly reduce their property values.
Maybe part of the aesthetics argument is that Joe Rogan embodies a type of person who will do just fine in a hypothetical world where conservatives win the culture war (he’s white, straight and athletic. Superficially, he’s no threat to social conservatism), so he’s automatically held in suspicion.
I think this is very astute, and it maps to my experience. I think people dislike Joe's jock persona, and to some extent are jealous that it is so successful and that this subconsciously has them looking for a reason to throw him overboard.
As I grow increasingly old and crusty, I feel the gulf between the very online youth and the very offline me growing wider. I mean, I use the internet, but not social media and my use is mostly passive information gathering.
If you are young enough to have gone through puberty and "socialized" in the social media age, I can imagine that you feel online threats as viscerally as offline threats. And there are entire online hate-groups organized against trans people, who are such a small percentage of the population that they effectively can only exist as a community online. So I think I get why there is so much youth activism around trans rights and why, to me, said youth over-reacts to any perceived threat.
What I don't get, though, is the tendency to avoid debate and discussion, opting instead to affix the suffix "phobic" to people and then refuse to hear anything they have to say. What makes even less sense to me is to extend that banishment to anyone who would associate with said phobic people in any way shape or form, even if it takes the form of debating and disagreeing with them.
The bigger issue to me is how it is possible that such obviously rational, reasonable and good things like open forums, discussions across ideological lines, debates, persuasion are rejected by what appears to be a loud minority of people that is growing (in numbers or influence). Of course Matt is right that it is good to go on popular shows and talk to people --- but it terrifies me that I cannot even begin to understand, let alone empathize with people who do not think that is a good thing.
Something that helped me understand this is a concept of "argumentative hyperliteracy" (which is maybe not formally written about anywhere, I just saw it in a tweet.)
Basically if you've spent the last five years seeing the exact same arguments, over and over and over, as any trans person on the Internet has, you get to the point where you can predict the initial bad tweet, counterargument, digging in, ripostes, ironic quote-tweeting, and eventual namecalling, practically word-for-word. You've seen it a thousand times!
So it's natural to jump right to meta-level "why are you saying this now, what agenda are you trying to advance by bringing it up."
This can be very confusing and alienating to someone who hasn't been following the debate, who *really did* just see a random article and thinks it maybe has a point.
I don't really know what to do about this other than shut down the Internet, but I think it helps explain the situation.
I think that dovetails with my feeling that I am out of touch with the very online youth. They are often living in an online world that is totally alien to me, using words like "violence" in different ways that I do, etc. So I get that they might roll their eyes at a fossil like myself who really do just randomly see an article and think maybe it has a point. That also explains my perception that (especially young) activists take the position that the onus is on me to go read all of Twitter and educate myself on their position; if I am perceived as just another uniformed idiot, why should they have to explain their position to me, personally again? That is, perhaps, something that I take for granted as common courtesy, but that a 30 year-old who is used to mining subreddits for hours on end interprets as unearned privileged.
Argumentative hyperliteracy is a great term, thanks for that!
Though I do think that, if I am to meet them (young, very online activists) half-way, they need to compromise, too, and realize that they will get nowhere without learning how to persuade people who went to college before cell phones, let alone social media. And that might mean not just repeating their arguments, but accepting that a Twitter consensus is not the same thing as a political or societal consensus. I am still bothered that Matt goes on Joe Rogan's podcast and comes away feeling it necessary to write an entire post that is effectively a justification to trans activists for trying to engage a very, very large audience... about his book.
And I suppose you could find yourself both "argumentatively hyperliterate" and perceiving that you are part of a broad consensus as a direct result of the filter bubbles that are algorithmically reinforced by social media platforms.
I still view it as a generational gap because I think that social media fundamentally changed how children and adolescence develop socially. I grew up with landlines and push media like TV and radio and still treat the Internet that way, as something that I receive content from. Watching my kids grow up with screens everywhere has been instructive; they seamlessly move between socializing through apps and socializing in person and do not hesitate to put their lives on display digitally.
My theory is that this is specific to trans itself: what you’re looking for as a trans person is to cement your own self-identification as a person of this other gender. When you encounter people who view you differently, their views influence yours, which puts that project at risk. Hence the maximalist demands for recognition.
I’ll be honest: I don’t actually know any trans people in real life, so I could be totally utterly completely wrong. But that’s my guess right now.
I am familiar with those books (they're in my queue), but aren't they more of a sharp diagnosis than an exploration of motives? What I mean is that, and this is especially true of Cynical Theories, they aren't going to persuade you of a different view so much as dissuade you from going full-Woke.
It's really hard to answer this exactly and the truth is I'm barely literate in these topics although I find them fascinating.
I guess you could say Haidt and Lukianoff's work is something of a diagnosis, but for me it's more about furthering understanding and seeking to persuade people. In particular, it emphasizes the importance of raising kids to be anti-fragile rather than training them to focus on vulnerability, victimhood, and powerlessness. Lukianoff struggles with an anxiety disorder and found cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to be very helpful for treating it. He was struck by early woke culture's emphasis on avoiding difficult subjects (eg trigger warnings)and by its emphasis on powerlessness and an external locus of control. He felt it was exactly opposite of the way a CBT approach would teach people to think about these things. Here's an early and short essay version of their thesis:
Pluckrose's work seems mostly about understanding the history, philosophy and mindset of postmodernism and intersectionality. It isn't trying to persuade as much as inform. It explains the tools the woke left uses and how they work. One takeaway for me is that postmodernist thinking is explicitly about disrupting a society's sense making apparatus. At the theoretical level, It's intentionally designed to make all truth subjective, all knowledge suspect, and all language malleable to the whims of the speaker. That's really interesting from an intellectual standpoint, but Pluckrose goes on to claim its ideas have been weaponized by "cynical" people and groups on the left. Pluckrose also covers the intersectionality which I understand to be about systems of power, hierarchy and dynamics of groups. Intersectionality seems to view every conflict as a zero sum power struggle between an oppressor group and an oppressed group. One of the fascinating tenets of intersectionality is that it seems to erase individuality and to some extent, I think, even free will. It basically has us all acting as cogs in a machine pushed mindlessly into action by the groups we belong to based on our immutable characteristics. Again, this is fascinating stuff from an intellectual standpoint, but also pretty scary, imo.
I don’t think of myself as “crusty,” though my knees hurt sometimes.
I wade into discussions like these unequipped with some of the basic assumptions that people who care about these things cling to like holy writ. (I also don’t really know who Joe Rogan is. Nor do I care.) And so when I read the phrase “trans woman” I have to stop for a moment and try to remember the grammar rules for this particular topic. Is a “trans woman” a biological man pretending to be a woman, or the other way around? To set myself straight I googled Deirdre McCloskey and got the answer.
I'm cisgendered, but I have to imagine that debating with bigots who think you have a mental illness is unpleasant, and I wouldn't begrudge anyone for bowing out of "discussions across ideological lines" when that's the content of the discussion.
I grew up around people who thought much worse of me than being mentally ill; they thought my soul needed to saved and that I didn't know what I was saying because the devil had corrupted my mind and whatnot. And they felt very free to tell me all about it all the time in just about every forum. But I still engaged with them because it afforded me an opportunity to give them a glimpse of a different viewpoint instead of the homogeneous, single-minded discussions that tended to happen in their social circles. And I can imagine that I find myself in the same situation, where I'm surrounded by like-minded people having discussions that we think are broad and open-minded, but in reality are the same kind of narrowing purity spiral of the aforementioned (just not about souls and afterlives).
I get that not every trans person wants to have the same argument over and over with every person that disagrees with or doesn't understand their existence. But what I don't get is pushing aside any and all discussion and labeling dissent as bigotry. Why can't we have a rational discussion around things like high school sports, where it is clear that we need some agreed upon guidelines and rules that people on either side of a disagreement can point to when conflict arises? And why is it almost always young cis people who spring to action on behalf of the trans community and lecture us on what terrible people we are for not doing our homework and learning to agree with them?
Normally I can ingest information and opinion from an opposing view until I can at least understand it, even if I vehemently disagree with it. But I'm truly at a loss to understand the breadth and absolutism of the unwillingness of trans activists, in particular, to engage in any discussion, especially when they are so willing to do whatever they did to Matt to prompt him to write this article, just for appearing on the podcast of someone who holds opinions they disagree with. (To be clear, I don't know what, exactly, Rogan said, so maybe his rhetoric was so over the top that I would be appalled by it too, my sense is that these things are usually over phrasing or vocabulary that seems benign and/or in good faith to me, vis-a-vis JK Rowling.)
Sure, but I don't think there's any conflict about people's right to bow out of discussions they don't want to participate in.
The conflict is over trans people and allies trying to exercise total control over the discourse. They want to have the power to decide what positions are allowed to be discussed and who is allowed to discuss them.
It sure seems to me like there is conflict. RC is positing that "open forums" and "discussions across ideological lines" are "obviously rational, reasonable and good things". I don't think that's true at all--I would say that engaging in a debate about whether gay sex is sinful, or trans people are mentally ill, can actually be bad, especially if it's not handled carefully (and the type of people who are most vociferous about loving discussions across ideological lines rarely handle it carefully). Matt's case for not shunning Joe Rogan is reasonable; RC's case for engaging in a debate with Ben Shapiro about trans rights is not.
While I understand that engaging in some topics involves real risk, my belief is that trying to push these conflicts under the carpet and pretend they don't exist creates even more risk.
I'm on the opposite side Ben Shapiro on nearly every issue. He's often a jerk and I routinely catch him misrepresenting people or ideas in a way that I feel represents bad faith. Still, I watch him on youtube often, especially when he has a guest I'm trying to understand better or is covering an issue where I can't wrap my head around the other side's view. It's usually a very frustrating experience, but I learn something important every time I do it.
The thing is, I'm just not willing to be told by other people what ideas I'm "allowed" to engage with and which people I'm "allowed" to try to learn things from.
Again, the key for me is that this particular aspect is entirely about groups of people trying to exercise control over the intimate intellectual activities of other people.
Not every single subject is a good topic for formal debate. E.g. imagine if Ben Shapiro came up to you and challenged you to a formal debate, in front of an audience, on the proposition "Jim hates his wife and only married her for her money" (I have no idea if you're married, roll with me here on this journey through the hypothetical). You wouldn't be all thrilled about the contest of ideas; you'd punch him in the mouth, because the mere existence of that debate is an insult to you. The debate about whether trans people are mentally ill is similar.
Sort of, but there are important differences between these two scenarios. Mainly, the topic of "Jim hates his wife" is an assertion only about me. There's nothing generalizable. OTOH, something like "your trans and all trans people are mentally ill" is both a personal attack and a general assertion.
If I were to steel-man your argument, I'd say a better scenario would be a situation where Shapiro challenges a trans activist to a debate after they call Abigail Shrier a transphobe for claiming that rapid onset gender dysphoria among teens is at least partly driven by social contagion, similar to anorexia or cutting.
Why is it bad though? I think engaging in these debates is helpful. What is wrong with having a mental illness? Do you not think dysphoria is mental illness?
Whether gay sex is sinful is dependent on the person’s morality. I don’t accept it is sinful based on my morals as an atheist. Another person would, based on their religion and morals. As long as your morals don’t interfere with mine, who cares? Many catholic won’t eat meat on Friday’s during lent, it is sinful for them. Do I care? No and I will continue to enjoy meat on Fridays.
I wish more people challenged Shapiro’s trans views. He talks suicide and then dunks on 18 year old college students. Yes, there are suicides, but they decrease with treatment (transition) and supports. So logically we would try to continue treatment and supports so we see more decreases. Transition is the treatment for gender dysphoria in adults based on medical consensus. Somehow Ben thinks his opinions trump the views of psychologist and psychiatrists with decades of clinical experience.
I wonder how much is an old-young divide (that's definitely a part of it) and how much is that the wide tent of the left was held together for four years by being in unified opposition to Trump. Now that he has lost reelection, suppressed fault lines on the left can start to crack.
"Republican Carnage" was a fantastic post-mortem of what happened to the Republican big tent over the decade leading up to Trump. It does make me wonder how much the wider left light be wrenched by factions. There are lots of reasons why the parties aren't symmetrical at all, but seeing different democrats take very different conclusions away from 2020's down-ballot results gave me pause.
Even for a show like Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro, the real value is not just to change one`s mind about the idea of one billion Americans but to change the statistical profile these viewers have of liberals or progressives in general. I think a good example is when Ezra Klein went on the Ben Shapiro Show, and came out looking very reasonable and smart! Its a form of respectability politics if one wants to be crass, but it works pretty well - especially since this does not cost you much or anything to go on a show! The conservative media ecosystem, with the Ben Shapiro Show in particular likes to say that liberals are not just wrong or dangerous but they can`t have a rational debate. So prove them wrong, go on the show!
There will always be a portion of people who will actively hate your guts on these shows, but there are a lot of passive haters and people who relied on other people`s opinions to form their opinion. Making a dent in these groups not only gets you them but also helps tip some people on the margins of those people.
Does anyone currently engaged in politics arguments like Jon Stewart, though? I think the common sentiment is the Rally to Restore Sanity was West Wing loving lib shit that’s destroyed the country.
There is something to be said for the point that Rogan has a conservative aesthetic but is high in openness like liberals, which rubs "twitter progressives" the wrong way but the left vs right dichotomy really doesn't apply when talking about people like Rogan, and doesn't explain why the left hates him.
I've been listening to him on and off for years and the sense I get is that he's a well-meaning guy who isn't all that well-informed about the world but is eager to learn with the caveat that he is antagonistic to placing trust in government and other institutions made up of over-educated elites who have failed time and time again. If he had Nassim Taleb on his show, they'd hit it off. It explains why in one podcast Rogan can talk about why we need universal healthcare but then in another podcast will say that he doesn't trust the government to implement it properly. It explains why Bernie appeals to him but Warren wouldn't. I don't blame him for having low trust in elites - as this pandemic has shown, left and right leaders have very little idea of what they're doing.
A lot of "twitter progressives" are the products of those very institutions. They either work there, their parents work there, or they have degrees from those places. Despite the repeated profound failings of these institutions, the left still has a lot of faith in the ability for these institutions to transform people's lives in a beneficial way. It's very difficult for these people to convince someone like Rogan that he and people like him should once again place their faith in these same institutions. (For the record, i don't think institutions today are that much worse run than institutions than in the past - our expectations are higher and we have 24/7 news telling us how bad they're failing).
And then there's the point of status. Having a fancy degree confers status to people and they feel threatened by people like Rogan who essentially disregard their status and in turn their power to wield the power of these institutions. It's the same story with Trump and Brexit.
"as this pandemic has shown, left and right leaders have very little idea of what they're doing."
The highly educated elites have produced a vaccine that is at this very moment being administered all across the country. A mere 9 months after this crisis first hit. They seem to have done a fine job.
“The highly educated elites have produced a vaccine that is at this very moment being administered all across the country.”
That was a subset of the elites: The ones not in government and working at a for-profit corporation. It’s unsurprising that they are the ones who succeeded.
He means Pfizer didn’t join Operation Warp Speed. They did get some very large preorders from governments, who are now the ones administering the vaccine to health care workers, which is good.
I think they would’ve survived on their own capital though. mRNA vaccines take less than one day to develop.
When I refer to elites, I'm mostly talking about government officials and politicians. Scientists and technologists have clearly been able to deliver the goods over and over again, albeit sometimes creating such profound changes that government elites have been caught off guard and don't know to deal with them
Do you have an argument? I don’t get what’s stupid and inflammatory about stating that government leaders are the elites of our society, and that a huge swathe of the population does not like or trust them
" I don’t get what’s stupid and inflammatory about stating that government leaders are the elites of our society, "
You're needlessly conflating them with all the other elites in our society. Someone with a Nobel Prize in medicine is also very much a member of the elite.
You're right - there's a difference and all sorts of gradations. But keep in mind plenty of elite scientists have also bungled public health messaging and certain doctors and scientists have said some bizzare things about covid.
I guess the point I'm sloppily trying to make is that for low-trust people like Rogan the "elites" can fall in one bucket, and they focus on the failings of one group of elite and then use that to make the case that all elites and their institutions are bad. It's sort of weird that Rogan will have on pretty distinguished smart scientists but then also rail against elites. Sometimes the difference exists and sometimes it doesn't. It's motivated by this anti-establishment feeling and it's why he'll have anti-establishment people like Bernie, Tulsi, Greenwald, or Crenshaw regardless of their politics. It seems to be motivating a lot of his world view.
There’s no need to call someone’s argument stupid and honestly that’s the kind of thing I come here to avoid. Please be more civil for the sake of our little nascent online community. We have all of Twitter in which to name-call.
I live in a liberal east coast bubble, both generally and personally, and it was illuminating when I slowly went public with my MMA fandom. Several others in my bubble quietly came out of the woodwork, even though the general atmosphere in our social circles is vocally against such base activities as mixed martial arts. There was a surprising number of people who just didn't want to be identified, I guess because of fear of mockery.
This comment is only tangential to the post, but Rogan is a case where I think most of the controversy is performative Twitter outrage. A lot of the anti-Rogan posturing is driven by online media figures that all went to the same 30 elite undergrad institutions, and operate in a scarcity culture where jealousy of professional success of the "non-deserving" like Rogan is normal behavior.
Good lord, there is nothing I can say here that hasn't been said 50 times. So just a couple quick points. First, I think Joe Rogan is pro trans rights and wants to support trans people as people. He has a specific view about sporting competitions that activate his human sense of unfairness. And he has a thing about letting kids, who are notorious dummies, make permanent life-altering decisions. Second, Joe knows that he is wrong about some things and he is open about it. I tend to think he is wrong about 30% of everything he says. Matt's post here talks about how important it is for people (who are wrong about 30% of everything) to engage with other people (who are wrong about 30% of everything) and I agree. But I think that misses an important point about Joe Rogan that he is a role model for good public discourse by admitting that he is often wrong, but wrong while still remaining curious and engaged.
I think many of us listen to JRE specifically because it is a space where you can be wrong.
My view back then on them is the same I have with people complaining about trans athletes: fine, you can have the same advantage; just amputate your legs. You think these trans folks have unfair advantage? Fine, you adopt the trans life permanently, and we'll give you a head start in your races.
Mind you, I don't know Rogan's position here. I've never listened to him.
You, sir, are responding to my point with logic and reason. This wounds me deeply. :-)
IOW, I haven't thought through the details (clearly!) But my point stands as in my comment above that I have limited sympathy for those who whine about the unfair advantage in athletic competitions gained by those who in the entirety of the rest of their lives are pretty screwed.
Given how society is these days, I think people who find they are trans have to deal with obstacles most of us can't begin to contemplate. I don't have much sympathy for the athletes they compete against complaining about the "unfairness" they have to face against them as competitors.
I get the strong impression that most of Rogan's critics haven't actually listened to his show and assume his opinions are more regressive than they actually are, because he's a muscular white guy who likes hunting and fighting. You're arguing that Rogan should not be shunned but not really addressing the specifics of what he's even being shunned for, other than just "insufficient nuance" on trans issues. Whether he should be shunned or not is actually a meta-concern--I'd argue he isn't even right of center in the first place, except relative to the Twitter hive.
I don't think there's anything wrong with going on Joe Rogan's show. I was actually moderately surprised to see you go on Ben Shapiro's show. (I'm not sure it's wrong, I was just surprised by it).
I guess for me, the difference is that the point of Ben Shapiro's show is to spew right-wing hate, but Joe Rogan is just a talk show host who happens to have other offensive views.
The case for shunning Shapiro seems more coherent to me — his audience is not going to be like highly persuadable marginal voters. I personally found doing his show to be surprisingly pleasant, but I don’t think “eschew hard-core right wing podcasts” is a crazy idea in the way that shunning Rogan is.
You’re dressing up a normative concern in practical terms. It’s only less crazy in practical terms to shun Ben Shapiro because there’s less likelihood of persuasion; that’s fine, but as you said on JRE, it’s crazy for non-practical reasons to shun people this way. It’s both a bad practice for developing better ideas, and it’s not very nice thing to do to people who, whatever their faults and hypocrisies, honestly believe the things they say they do.
(I’d also argue that Ben Shapiro’s audience is much more persuadable than you’re claiming here but that’s not the main point.)
Exactly! Conversely, is practicality always sufficient? I'm still not convinced that Nazis should be engaged even if they're a critical mass of people in the US. But I'm also not convinced they should be shunned!
I know this is not the spirit of the debate - but I do think it's relevant that politics aside, Ben Shapiro is kind of an asshole who makes a career shitting on people he perceives as dumber than him, and straw-manning folks on the left who don't like him.
Your post made me think about the ongoing debate on whether progressives/Democrats should go on Fox. I wonder if you think going on Hannity or Tucker Carlson is a useful means of making the progressive case. It seems to me the number of persuadable voters there is almost zero and the hosts will use you as a punching bag or misrepresent your views.
All this depends on the host and tenor of the show, right? There's a difference between a 30 minute polite back and forth with a conservative host and being the token democrat on a 5 person panel where everyone yells at you for 5 minutes then goes to commercial break.
Agreed. And that’s why I have no problem with a lefty going on Shapiro’s show. Say what you want about Ben’s views, many of which suck, but he’s a polite, fair, thoughtful conversation partner in that type of one-on-one setting. At a campus event? Not as much.
I think this is true. If I'm recalling directly, the original "Dems don't go on Fox" rule was sort-of an organic realization that if you showed-up on there it would be a set-up. A lot of rank-and-file politicians don't have the media skills to turn that.
I do think that there are probably a lot more persuadable voters watching Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity than listening to Ben Shapiro. You've really got to seek out any given podcast to listen to it, whereas in all sorts of places Fox News is just on all the time for anybody to watch
Greenwald cares most passionately about the national security apparatus. Historically, being opposed to that group, to things like domestic intelligence gathering and foreign adventurism, used to be pretty much a given among liberals. Ask yourself: did guys like Clapper and Brennan convert to liberalism, or did Trump drive them over there by kicking them out of the Republican tent? I have no love for Carlson, but some of my liberal friends have suddenly become a little too good at defending Forever War, "Intelligence sources say" and many of the journalistic habits of the same access "journalism" that gave us Iraq. Many of the same usual suspects, unfortunately.
So did Glenn go on Tucker to condemn Trump for vetoing a bill defunding the war in Yemen, or for stepping up the drone war, or getting into bed with dictators? Did he ever condemn Trump for punishing whistleblowers, Glenn's other purported passion? No; he went on to talk about Democrats losing their minds over Russia. The closest he ever came in four years to criticizing Trump's foreign policy was to say "well, Democrats do that too," the kind of both-sidesism he excoriated during the Obama years. The simple fact is that the national security apparatus hasn't been Glenn's chief concern for many years; his chief concern has been sticking it to the Democrats and MSNBC.
I think Clapper and Brennan and them were kicked out, not by Trump's opposition to war (which isn't a thing), but by his abandonment of our alliances. That was bad when Bush did it—remember "we'll go it alone" and the "coalition of the willing?"—and it was bad when Trump did it too, even if it was for the sake of his hotels rather than some dream of being a great liberator.
To be clear, I'd hate to find myself defending any of these things. But I'm also no great fan of "liberals" being grateful to have Bill Kristol on the show today.
Seems easier to have your views represented by not stating them yourself, no? It's not like Hannity or Tucker are *only* going to misrepresent your views if you go on their show.
Good point. Whenever I talk to "conservatives" who disagree with me, I usually come away with the impression they have never met a real life (as opposed to a right wing caricature) Liberal.
My point was that my "typical" "conservatives" is well familiar with what I find to be a caricature of Liberal views, which are very different to MY views.
I'm familiar with the proposed "test" and doubt that many people on either side are skilled enough to convincingly mimic the other's rhetoric.
Well said! There are many people whom we can’t persuade, no matter how sound our arguments, but if they respect our ideas enough to debate them in earnest, as opposed to dismissing them as illegitimate (or worse), then we have made progress.
And there are many who are willing to be persuaded, once they see that the 'other side' is not some bigoted, hate-filled, authoritarian who attacks everyone who disagrees with them. When they see that there are actual reasons behind their position.
Not exactly. Ross is a Conservative that tries to explain "Conservatives" to Liberals. Matt is not trying to explain Liberals to "Conservatives," but Liberals to Progressives.
How does Ben spew right wing hate? Are there topics that he constantly brings up in hateful ways or is he automatically hateful, because he a conservative Republican?
One of the most interesting conversations was between Rogan and Shapiro discussing economics, poverty, and other issues. I believe Rogan had the upper hand in explaining generational poverty and how conservative approaches to resolve it likely wouldn’t help.
His daily “news” show sucks, but in his Sunday long form interviews he’s much better behaved.
I’d also note that if treating one half of the political spectrum as a “monolith” = spewing hate, then much of left Twitter, including many with blue check marks, is guilty, too.
I think there might be even more value in going on Shapiro. Is Shapiro's audience persuadable? Probably not in a big way. But if Matt can reliably tell that a Sunday show interview isn't going to be a partisan mess and can get in front of an audience that's _really_ different from his home crowd, that has value too.
One of my friends listens to Shapiro religiously. I'd like him to switch to getting current events news and current takes from someone who isn't going to cherry-pick facts and history to portray the left as bad-faithed anti-capitalist fascists who want to seize power to minimize American's freedom because we hate everyone on the right.
But realistically I'm not going to persuade him to change what he views - so if he sees Matt or Ezra or anyone else on the left, I think that's valuably depolarizing.
I’m not familiar with exactly what Joe Rogan said so I’ll avoid commenting on it specifically. I will say generally that I realized this fall that as a “woke” progressive, I’d lost the calibration of my moral compass. Anyone who challenged someone I deemed to be less privileged on anything related to their identity or privilege was The Bad Guy, full stop. It caused a mental breakdown when I realized these people had legitimate concerns and woke ideology left no route to raise them. They then resorted to yelling, screaming, and lashing out at being judged, which further justified my judgement. I’m working on it.
I agree with Matt's case that shunning is counterproductive, but I want to illustrate how this dynamic works more explicitly. It's not just some random minority of progressives who think this way. This way of thinking is the mainstream in almost all institutions where college-educated people predominate.
The idea isn't to shun wrongthinkers because they can be effectively shunned like a vanishingly small minority can be (e.g. actual Nazis). The idea is to enforce these left-wing cultural values on the entire populace via these institutions. The thinking here is inherently elitist: We, the good people at the top who have the righteous opinions, need to make sure the ignorant peons at the bottom know the correct way to think. If anyone disagree, they have to keep quiet about it or they risk shunning. If everyone keeps quiet for long enough, we win!
This dynamic makes people who disagree (both elite and non-elite) understandably very angry. To them, they are being called bigoted for no reason. This leads some people to prefer alternative institutions: in Joe Rogan's case, a podcast. People in mainstream media are threatened by this new dynamic which leads them to double down on their tactic of shunning, which, in turn, leads more people to turn toward media like Rogan's podcast.
Again, the idea of cultural change here isn't bottom-up. It's top-down. The movement for gay marriage was a little bit of both, but I think it was mostly bottom-up, which is why its legacy endures.
Not to pick on Matt too much, but this dynamic is why we're all here and not on Vox.com's comment section.
I understand that that was the throat-clearing “I am not a transphobe and don’t agree with Rogan’s comments from 2013” section of the post, but isn’t it worth noting that that linked comment was from 2013? To the extent that we’re allowed to entertain the possibility that people change their minds (as opposed to permanently shunning them for decades) Rogan has changed his approach to a lot of things, especially politics, quite drastically since then. I’d be surprised if Rogan didn’t approach the discussion of Fallon Fox with quite a bit more sensitivity if it were happening now. In fact it’s not clear to me that it’s fair to describe Rogan as a transphobe in 2020 on the basis of those comments from 2013.
I wondered about this, too, since my own views on trans politics have changed since 2013. But if you make a public comment that you later disagree with, you should probably retract it publicly.
Matthew appeals to progressives' self-interest. Shunning is wrong, he argues, because it will not be efficacious for progressives. He seems to be defending open dialogue and free speech only as a tactic not as a foundational concept of western liberalism and democracy.
I mean that's the thing with Matt. Some people who don't like the left like to read him because he sometimes criticizes the left, but at the end of the day he's "on the team" in a way that isn't true of, Sam Harris or Andrew Sullivan or a lot of the other folks with liberal policy views who spend a lot of time criticizing the left.
Maybe I brought my own thinking to the article - I read it more as "if shunning is going to be pragmatically counter-productive, we can skip having a zero-sum trade-off hand-wringing debate about whether shunning is morally right (in a "I did not provide some kind of moral cover to this other person who I am shunning who thinks immoral things") vs morally wrong (in a "free speech and open discourse have their own moral imperative") way. We can skip all that and go "it's doing more harm than good to the people you want to help so stop".
Writing it out that way, the impetus to shun (I'm not in that camp so I can only speculate) is perhaps motivated by non-pragmatic reasons, which might limit how persuasive Matt's article is.
I don't want to be overly cynical but it seems like self-interest manifests itself more as "improving my place in the online social pecking order" as opposed to "passing legislation I agree with."
This was something that I laughed onto in Ezra Klein’s discussion with Matt Bruenig a while back. They were discussing what improvements in health care policy Mr. Bruenig would accept, and he basically copped to not supporting any marginal improvement that fell short of M4A. He considered it (and I’m putting words in his mouth) pusillanimous, half-a-loaf counterrevolutionary liberalism, which was just a serious turn-off.
Democrats have a crummy brand right now, so I think there’s substantial virtue in enacting non-totalistic policies, implementing them well, and then touting the shit out of them. It builds faith in their ability to govern, and good will when they propose more sweeping reforms.
I would be interested in a follow up post extending this to the related controversy of the NY Times’ Tom Cotton oped. Specific issues with the factual content of the piece aside, it strikes me that readers’ and Times employees’ fury over its publishing was based in the same wrongheaded “if we shun this we will defeat it” logic you discuss here. It’s not the NY Times fault that Tom Cotton is a Senator or that he has bad ideas! I don’t think progressives are served well by demanding that widely-held ideas they (reasonably) disagree with are excluded from their view, vs being made to engage with them.
I agree. Another interesting aspect of Cotton’s piece was that Hispanics, when polled, supported Cotton’s position on deploying military to stop the riots. Hispanics supported 60% and Whites 52%. Would be interesting to see what the democratic autopsy reveals regarding these riots and drop in Hispanic support.
I live roughly a mile from where George Floyd died and a similar distance from where the majority of the riots happened. The most shocking thing about the coverage of the riots to me was the almost complete erasure of the Hispanic community in Minneapolis. You would never know it from the press, especially the national, but Hispanics may be a plurality in the neighborhood he died in and Hispanic owned business dominated Lake Street, the focal point of the riots. It's likely that no community in Minneapolis was hurt more by the riots than Hispanics, but those experiences were almost totally absent from mainstream coverage.
Cotton is a leading politician advocating violence against peaceful protesters, during a time of already fairly extensive physical attacks on protesters. Publishing that requires much more scrutiny than most forms of speech
Tom Cotton wasn't advocating any kind of action against peaceful protesters, but that's besides the point. Tom Cotton is, as you say, a leading politician who at the time was voicing an opinion that at the time had majority support. If the NYT is going to print op-eds from the Taliban and the CCP, they can print Tom Cotton.
If the Cotton op-ed bothered you more than the "Hong Kong is for China, Like it or Not" op-ed, then you only care about fighting a culture war, not actually fighting oppression or authoritarianism.
I think it’s debatable whether it had “majority support” but regardless the view was widely held enough that deciding to publish it should not be controversial. (The op-Ed itself can be controversial, that’s sort of the point.)
I think it grows from the broader misconception that how left-leaning publications talk about the right (or censor it) has important ramifications on public opinion. That if articles used a few more adverbs, people would see Trump is actually bad, etc.
Yes—while I definitely think someone like Trump who lies all the time poses some problems for journalism, I think the proliferation of qualifiers like "falsely," "without basis," etc. in Times and Post articles is regrettable, at least from a prose standpoint.
I disagreed with the idea but the argument was that clearly the local authorities did not have the capacity or legitimacy to ensure peace in the streets (indeed due to the various instances of attacks on protestors). I think Cotton was wrong in assuming how neutral the personnel themselves would actually be or whether the military deployed by a very unpopular president in the midst of a national crisis would play with protestors.
Isn’t that the opposite issue though? The NYT has a platform that Tom Cotton used. In this instance Joe Rogan had a platform that Matt used. Matt going onto Rogan’s podcast arguably lets him introduce new ideas to Rogan’s audience. But the NYT isn’t introducing conservatives to any liberal ideas by publishing a piece from Tom Cotton.
For those of us who believe this illiberal tendency on the left is a major hindrance to progress on almost any issue (trans rights being just one), and debating bad ideas is better than attacking people for having them, Yascha Mounk's excellent substack Persuasion is essential reading:
Oh, man, I just can't. I appreciate how Yascha tries to approach issues, but I just find his tone and hobbyhorses insufferable. There's no accounting for taste, and I may be in the minority on that around here.
Oh God, same. I told myself if he - a democracy scholar! - was still Tweeting incessantly about cancel culture the week of the election, while Trump was actively trying to end our democracy, I was going to unfollow him for good. And yep, that’s what happened! I’m concerned about cancel culture too but he’s gone full Intellectual Dark Web/obsessed and I now find him just so one-note and insufferable. Which makes me sad, because I really enjoyed the first couple of episodes he did on the Ezra Klein show, and I so wanted more of the version of him that he presented there.
I've also struggled with "Persuasion". There have been some thought-provoking pieces, but (as with Quillette) suuuchh a low bar for the intellectual rigor of takes as long as they are critiquing a progressive position from the right. I'm thinking, for example, of Coleman X. Hughes's piece in Persuasion, which I thought was just pretty stupid, frankly.
Fair enough. Taste is taste. The vast majority of the content on Persuasion (excluding the podcast) is by a variety of authors other than Yascha however.
Joe Rogan’s comments on transwomen in sport are based on science and most people outside of Twitter agree. He probably agrees with everything else you posted regarding military service and bathroom usage. Joe’s arguments are that transwomen who go through male puberty will have an advantage based on muscle twitch fibers, bone density and other irreversible parts of male puberty that affect the body. He also believes children shouldn’t be allowed to transition medically until they’re adults. Because we don’t know the affects of blockers and hormones long term on young children, although one study was recently released that showed decreased bone density. Children also change their minds. Adults don’t allow them to make medical decisions for good reason.
Matt if you’re going to disagree at least post his actual views on the issues. He thinks transmen should be allowed to compete with men. Your post seems a bit dishonest. This issue is only hard for people on the far left who have screamed that TWAW and can’t really have an honest conversation on Joe Rogan’s views , because it would be obvious that TWATW.
Joe is an athlete and expert on combat sports, there’s a reason he talks about it with authority.
//Matt if you’re going to disagree at least post his actual views on the issues.//
I said I disagreed with the rude and disrespectful way that he talked about the issue, and I do disagree!
I am not well-versed in the technical aspects of hormone therapy's relationship to athletic prowess and I think the general subject of sex-segregation in sports is a little undertheorized.
In fairness I think the most visceral response everyone cites “You’re a man” was him speaking about Fallon Fox who quite literally beat the living shit out of a few female MMA fighters and was taunting other female MMA fighters who (understandably) didn’t think it was fair she was able to compete in the female division. This isn’t an isolated incident and there are a fair number of examples of female athletes feeling unfairly disadvantaged by a trans athlete competing in a sex segregated divisions and I think their grievances and the science behind it are pretty sound. We separate sports by biological sex for a reason.
One other point I forgot to mention which, if I remember correctly, added to his anger is, I believe she hid the fact she wasn’t a biological female before a few of her earliest fights, which is bullshit.
"This isn’t an isolated incident and there are a fair number of examples of female athletes feeling unfairly disadvantaged by a trans athlete competing in a sex segregated divisions"
What does it take to qualify as "an isolated incident" or "a fair number of examples"? My understanding is that there are three or four individuals in a few sports that have led to most of the complaints, which sounds like a few isolated incidents to me, and not a fair number of examples.
I guess my point is that MMA isn’t unique in terms of it being a competitive problem to allow trans women to compete in female divisions (there are examples in other sports) and there have been examples not only at high levels of competition but also lower down the ladder at the high school level. I think the easiest solution would be to keep female competition limited to biological females and then an open division for anyone but the reality is most men’s divisions are already open. If you’re a female and wanted to compete in the men’s division of a sport you can, it just never happens bc males on average are at a biological advantage when it comes to athletics. Which was the whole point of creating female specific divisions in the first place.
I wonder if anyone's done a statistical analysis of regional junior sports leagues with a very dominant individual. It seems to me anecdotally that this sort of thing has not been uncommon historically, particularly with individuals that eventually go on to significant professional careers in a sport, though there are a few incidents recently where a trans person has been involved. If this is a lot more common with trans participants in sports, then maybe there's a discussion to be had, but it seems like it should be easy enough to gather data on times over the past few decades when a single individual keeps winning contest after contest, and I don't know that anyone has bothered to do this analysis.
Well a few thoughts.
I think this issue is generally overblown by both sides because 1. Transgender individuals are an extremely minuscule part of the population so naturally any examples that happen at all are going to be rare 2. There is overlap in athletic ability between sexes. Like if I took the fastest female track star and put them against a male in the lowest quartile of all males in terms of speed, the female would probably win.
But the rules are not for those cases. The rules are for someone like Fallon Fox who would be a reasonably athletic and strong biological male but nowhere near the top echelon of male MMA, but because of her biological advantages inherent to her biological sex she becomes a top tier fighter against women’s fighters.
Is it a threat to the entire sport? Of course not. But when you play competitive sports at any level, you are doing so under the pretense of some base level of catergorization via biological sex. Certain sports then further categorize on weight where it present a very clear and defined advantage (like fighting sports).
For example, Stef Curry and Shaq are both considered top nba players in their times. Even though Shaq is way larger, it wouldn’t be a given Shaq in his prime would dominate Stef one on one bc stef is faster, better at range. But if I put Shaq against the WNBA’s top PG or Center he’d crush both of them. If I put Stef against the WNBA’s top PG or center he’d crush both of them. Men on average are just advantaged in physical competition and I think people underestimate how big that gap truly is.
I'm not sure if this will address your questions about sex segregation, but I would say its basis is that sport depends on fair competition, and in practice female athletes will underperform male athletes even adjusting for factors like weight. So sex segregation makes female participation in sport possible. It's an equity issue: when Title IX mandated that colleges had to spend equal resources on women's sports, women's participation in sports exploded.
While I think there are nuances involved in trans participation, I don't fear, as some conservatives say they do, that scores of male athletes would claim to be trans women in order to dominate those sports. But getting rid of sex discrimination, as some progressives I know have called for, would be tantamount to banning women from playing sports (unless we mandated quotas or something, I suppose).
It is odd how frequently people on "the wrong side" of trans issues have their views misrepresented. Like, spend any time on twitter and you'll hear that Jesse Singal is the biggest transphobe around and his positions on trans rights are indistinguishable from any progressive democrat.
It seems like for most of the online progressivesphere, trans support is more about affect or team signaling than like, actual policy positions.
Yeah it drives me nuts. I actually saw this in the Weeds Facebook group - Matt’s JRE episode came up, someone started foaming at the mouth about how Matt shouldn’t have gone because Rogan hates trans people. So I asked “can you provide any evidence at all that he hates trans people?” and the response was “he had Abigail Shrier on his podcast.” Like, come on!
Outside of the far right, very few people oppose employment protections for trans people or have an issue with them serving in the military. This is certainly true for most of the UK feminists who have been relentlessly slandered and misrepresented in the US media, including by Vox. The most recent example is in the Atlantic. I can't believe the people who write these articles are incapable of faithfully summarizing the gender critical position. It isn't *that* complicated, and yet it is misrepresented over and over and over.
The debate is mostly over areas that, like athletics, call for nuance. It is not crazy or transphobic, for example, to want some standard beyond self-id to govern access to women's prisons. The reasons for concern are obvious to anyone who isn't wearing idealogical blinders, but it's nearly impossible to discuss these issues in a subtle way online because most activists demand 100% agreement across the board.
“...very few people oppose...have an issue with them serving in the military...”
The majority of people who actually know something about serving in the military oppose allowing trans people to serve.
My radicalization into the alt-center probably began around 2015 when I couldn't reconcile what my Twitter friends were saying about Singal with what I saw in his actual output.
and when people are asked to specify what, exactly, they disagree with Singal about it almost invariably leads to a "it's not my job to educate you"-style response
Although when Noah Berlatsky took it as his job to educate us on the topic the results weren't really pretty either. https://www.patreon.com/posts/jesse-singal-20353892
Completely agree. I have listened to Rogan talk about trans issues and I don’t find any of his takes, opinions and assertions to be transphobic at all. They seem fairly reasonable. And I wouldn’t call myself transphobic either as I also agree with many of the rights that Yglesias contends they should have.
However, I do think that having completely de-gendered restrooms may be going a step too far.
I say this thinking about the comfort and safety of women. Many many women do not want to share a bathroom with a Cis man and I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable for them to feel that way.
Men commit far more violent and sexually related crimes than women. It’s not even close. And if a woman needs to relieve herself without being in earshot and proximity to men, I think she she have that opportunity without being forced to hold it until she reaches a restroom where she feels safe.
In my experience women’s bathrooms aren’t any cleaner! (At home, I mean, not public places.)
Another good thing about traveling - you'll learn that European bathrooms are mixed gender and handle this with much more private stalls. Also they charge $1 to use, which is super inconvenient.
The horror stories I've heard from women about what they've seen in public restrooms outweigh anything I've ever seen in a men's room.
I have a solution for the bathroom issue.
We have a sit down room and a stand up room. People who pee standing up can use the stand up room. People who need to sit down, can use the other one.
The trans sports thing is always really funny to me. Because I think it's pretty obvious that the people with the Rogan view are right. But I also cannot imagine in a million years caring enough about it for it to affect my politics one single iota.
I remember listening to an Andrew Sullivan interview a couple years ago and he was just breathing fire about how terrible it was that this like 17 year old Texas high jumper was competing against girls, and I remember thinking "relax man, who gives a shit, its a fucking youth sport"
Well it is a big deal, because scholarships for college and possible exposure for professional sports are at stake. It wouldn’t make me vote Republican, but it makes me support people who are willing to discuss the issue openly. Serena Williams would lose against nearly all professional top male tennis athletes, despite being the best female to ever do it. Same with Amanda Leoa in MMA, she would get hurt fighting any male in the UFC. The women’s soccer team lost to high schoolers.
You know what, you are right, it does matter for a great deal for certain people. I just feel like the amount of discussion of this issue far outstrips its importance, but you can say that about all sorts of issues.
This topic generates so much discussion online precisely because it is controversial and divisive. For thousands of years, we've been fighting for 'our side' against 'the other', however defined. We've staked out positions on the tribal battlefield - physical or idealogical - and fought over them.
Online activity has continued the fracturing of our definitions of 'our side' into more sub-national and sub-ethnic communities while simultaneously making those sub-groups more connected across geographies. The battle lines between groups are therefore almost exclusively online and increasingly ferocious. Trump's presence connected the more online left groups together against a common enemy. As he departs, I predict more skirmishes as each sub-group battles for its territory.
Just to add if you love MMA you absolutely appreciate the athletic prowess of Amanda Leoa, Weili Zhang and Joanna Jędrzejczyk. Weili and Joanna had arguably one of the best battle in UFC history. It’s a top fight of all time and contender for FOTY. I can’t imagine these women not competing, as a man who loves combat sports. It would never be fair to put them against biological males for obvious reasons. It doesn’t mean that their hard work and skill should be ignored.
Do you happen to know if there are any trans women tennis players that would be competitive against Serena Williams? Or are you trying to protect her from a non-existent threat?
For me at least, as someone who wants to belong to an evidence-based, rational coalition of like-minded people, it distresses me a bit that a number of them are willing to throw all that out in order to signal that they are a good ally. Furthermore, the zeal with which they try to cancel anyone who expresses even mild pushback at the edges of the issue is downright disturbing.
So yes, trans women in sex-segregated sports not a particularly broad issue in and of itself, but the takes on it are sometimes demonstrative of some very bad traits. I also think a lot of the people expressing these views just don't like sports very much, but that may be an unfair characterization.
I agree with you until you get to combat sports. Part of the (fictional) premise of combat sports is that everyone’s on a level playing field, to the extent possible, and that it’s really about skill vs. skill. Moreover, keeping the playing field level that way helps avoid catastrophes like serious injury or death. If it were any other sport I’d care much less (well if I’m being honest I don’t care about it much in MMA either) but I can perfectly understand why he’d get fired up about it with MMA.
It's not a big deal isn't an argument for allowing transgender women to compete against women. If its not a big deal, then it's not a big deal to not allow them to compete. Regardless of whether, you think its a big deal, others on both sides, think it is a big deal.
To be clear, I think that Sullivan or Rogan are correct on the merits, I just think this issue gets a lot more coverage and excites a lot more ire than it should
If only you had been on the Senate floor to defeat Title IX with the "relax man, who gives a shit" argument. We would never have had the scourge of girls and women competing in sports at all.
I guess I don't see that an occasional individual being particularly dominant in a particular regional youth sports league for a couple years is anywhere near as bad as having the sport defunded because it involves women. After all, *many* regional youth sports leagues are often dominated for a couple years by a single individual, *regardless* of gender or gender identity of individuals involved.
Honestly, I think we're going to find over the next few decades that those individuals who dominate at a youth level are not uncommonly intersex or have one hormone disorder or another. Which goes back to the point that the justifications for sex-segregation, while obvious, are also under-theorized.
(to be clear I'm talking about cis individuals who've historically dominated for a few years.)
I tend to agree the IDW folks spend too much time obsessing over “woke” academics and their students. That said, it’s disingenuous to say that their far-left notions don’t leave campus. Recent graduates of elite coastal universities disproportionately work in media and tech, they’re bringing their politics with them, and they’ve been pretty successful at influencing the higher-ups to play along.
The IDW gets most fired up about...people being "mean on the internet" to people in the IDW. :-)
I think it’s worth pushing back on this as I think you’re not correct.
First, the Olympics have been allowing trans women to compete for 15 years. (The requirement is simply that your testosterone levels have been at levels typical of cis women for two years.) In that time, no trans women have qualified, for any sport. You see the same in other leagues with similar rules. This strongly suggests to me that having two puberties is a disadvantage not an advantage - which incidentally is what trans people themselves report - and high-level sports will not have any issue with allowing trans women to participate.
Second, GNrH agonists (“puberty blockers”) have been around since the 1980s and there have been plenty of studies on their long-term effects. Here’s one from 2015 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4342775/ - and it cites several more. The main effect seems to be an increase of a couple inches in adult height. Some studies seem to show an increase in obesity risk but it doesn’t appear consistently. Meanwhile the strong psychological benefits are very well documented.
This misinformation is widespread and is frequently printed as fact by major newspapers! So it’s not surprising that people would believe it to be true. But it’s not true, papers shouldn’t print it as fact, and I think people should push back when they see it repeated.
I am not incorrect. Bottom surgery was required and even now the IOC is weighing new changes based on mistakes they made after the new games. We are talking advantages, not winning. Not the same. If someone takes steroids in sports, but loses, they are still disqualified. Because steroids are an advantage. Different, but comparable here. There is no evidence that going through male puberty is a disadvantage in female sports. Nor do taking blockers and hormones undo all of the reminiscences of male puberty (muscle, bones, hip structure).
https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/28835943/ioc-publish-transgender-guidelines-tokyo-games
Puberty blockers were used on children with precocious puberty. A medical condition that is viewable, diagnosable and treatable. A 5 year old getting breasts and menstruation wouldn’t be normal. So they use blockers to stop it. Using them on children without said medical condition isn’t the same, these children have nothing physically wrong with them. They are developing normal physically. It’s like treating kids with chemo who don’t have cancer.
I am not trying to continue with this, I done a lot of research on this topic. I live in the town regarding the CT lawsuit. I started after trying to figure what was going on with the Selina Soule case. There is a lot of misinformation and it’s coming from activists on the left. I also want trans teens to participate in sports, but fairly. Which is doable. No one will be 100% happy, but the point is to allow as much participation as possible while also keep things as fair as possible for females.
If everybody in sports who took steroids lost to those who didn't, that should force us to re-evaluate our prior that they grant any advantage at all.
"GNrH agonists (“puberty blockers”) have been around since the 1980s and there have been plenty of studies on their long-term effects"
You are citing evidence regarding their use for precocious puberty, not in children diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Apples to oranges.
This is a study recently published on the effects of puberty blockers in kids with gender dysphoria:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.01.20241653v1.full.pdf
How is it different? Aren't you delaying puberty in both cases - only the reason for doing so is different?
In one case a child has a metabolic and physiological disorder which you are counteracting by holding back the onset of puberty till it occurs at the typical time range.
In the other case, you are preventing puberty from actually happening in a child who would otherwise experience as part of their natural development.
So, they're not the same physiologically, or for that matter psychologically in terms of their ultimate outcome. In the first case, the child goes through puberty at what would be considered the normal time. In the second case, the overwhelming number of children never proceed through puberty at all.
"The requirement is simply that your testosterone levels have been at levels typical of cis women for two years."
No, that is not correct. It is very incorrect. The requirement currently is one year with testosterone levels below 10nmol/L (which means the levels can be substantially higher than in natal females). No surgery required.
This is a pretty comprehensive review of the literature on trans-women's sporting performance which just published:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
I shouldn't have included the aside, especially since I was just working from memory and didn't stop to look it up. Sorry.
That paper is interesting, but it seems to be mostly about muscle mass? There's no "muscle mass" Olympic event. The only discussion I could see (on a quick read) of something I would call "athletic performance" involved some transgender runners, who... saw their times drop a lot. If you have more muscle mass but you can't run as fast, you still lose the race!
I still think the real test is whether people can meet the hormone-level standards and still compete at a high level. In the 2020/21 Olympics there are 3 trans women, of 11,000 competitors, being considered for their teams. This doesn't look to me like cis women being outcompeted en masse.
We can start to worry if those numbers change, but right now I think the IOC has it in hand.
No "muscle mass" Olympic event? I'm sorry, but you are not arguing in good faith. Or if you have never heard of "weight-lifting." And that's just for starters, the number of athletic events, such as sprinting, shot putt, hammer throwing, and sundry others in which "muscle mass" is clearly a huge factor is extremely long. But, sure, whatever.
So he argues that trans women (I hope others will note your willful elision of a space here) who go through male puberty should be barred from sports but also that all trans women should be forced to undergo male puberty? Pretty fucked up to think people should be forced to undergo changes that your own ideology claims are irreversibly altering.
Wait, is using or not using a space some signal???
This feels like a lot of tilting at windmills to me.
Certainly could be but it seems pretty likely to me given the comments at large that Ang is trying to create a separate noun (transwomen no space) in order to avoid acknowledging trans women as a subset of women.
This another crazy thing about wokists. They will take a minor distinction that only they understand or even intend and then assume the rest of the world has the same intentions when they do something as minor as put a space between two words.
You could look to the other parts of the comment, notably the vehement denial that “trans women are women” in favor of the weird tautology “transwomen are transwomen” and see that I’m pretty clearly correct about the poster’s intentions.
This seriously sounds Q-anon level insane.
I think it’s important to learn a non-English language so that you can recognize surface level features like this that wouldn’t survive being translated to another language and back. This also applies to arguments about “x people” vs “people who are x”.
(There are important things that might not survive translation even when they should - an example being using the right pronouns, when other languages don’t use them as much.)
Transwomen should be allowed to transition with support (e.g. insurance, job), “woman” =adult. I don’t support, neither does Rogan, young children transitioning for the same reason we don’t allow them to vote, drive, get sentenced to death, or other adult level activities. What it comes down to is whether one believes that children can consent to adult choices. I don’t think so, they don’t have the mental maturity for it. Also be specific and say what you mean. No one is using vague terms like “people”, we are specifically addressing children.
We don't allow children to do those things because they involve judgment amidst unclear realities and discernment of extremely subtle shades of meaning, and it's not clear to me why "knowing what gender you are" would obviously be assumed to be one of those situations. Almost everyone finds the answer to that question extremely obvious extremely early in their development, and trans kids don't actually seem to be different in that regard.
I went through a gender identity questioning, and didn't resolve it until I was in my 30's. I played with Transformers, GI Joe, and my sister's My Little Pony as a child. I identify as a cis-man now because I am of the male sex, and realized that I didn't care about social constructs, like gender. (This is not to put down anyone who does care, I am speaking exclusively about my personal experience) Who cares if I am a 43 year old who has stuffed unicorns on his desk.
People assumed that a woman sat there for a long time, but now I am the unicorn guy.
The point is, it took me decades to come to stable point in my journey, and I still think, at times, that it would be so awesome if I was of the female sex, but I'm not. And nothing is going to change that.
However, I can still embrace my femininity and be myself. I am glad that I did not take hormone blockers, because I am in a loving relationship with a cis, straight female.
So, while I am not opposed to adults choosing hormone blockers, children really aren't very good at seeing long term effects of their actions. I read about some teenagers dropping ice on cars passing below, because it was funny to watch the cars swerve. Then one of the pieces smashed through the windshield and killed a woman. The kids didn't want to harm anyone, it just never occurred to them that what they were doing was a bad idea.
Gender is incredibly confusing for adults, I am still working to understand it fully. How much more for children?
Yes, there's a tendency for many on the pro-trans/LGBTQ side (which is also the side I consider myself on) to portray the issue of gender identity as being extremely simple, something that everyone has a clear sense of, or would were it not for bigotry from without. (A random, probably inconsequential example of this: on the show Big Mouth, which is about kids going through puberty, the only characters who are portrayed as well-adjusted and confident are gay, bi, or pansexual.) I understand the rhetorical purpose of this—it defuses the dismissive claim "you're just confused" and puts the problem with society rather than the individual—but it does leave some people out. Jesse Singal has been criticized for talking about "desistance," people who identify as trans when they're young but then realize later that they aren't, with some people saying that desistance causes no problem because it's a simple matter to go back to using the other pronouns, name, etc. It just seems like a mistake to ignore the times when things aren't so clear-cut.
You hit upon one of the problems I have been noticing with the LGBT movement, which I also side with.
Many of the arguments being presented by the left are meant to defuse, or answer criticisms from the right, but they just ignore, at best, or demonizes, as worst, LGBT people who think differently.
When Justice Barrett was being confirmed, she used the term Sexual Preference, and as was attacked as being homophobic (which she may or may not be) because Preference implies choice, and there is no choice involved in ones Sexual Orientation.
Couple of glaring problems with at argument.:
First, and the most damaging, is that it dismisses LGBT people whose lived experience has choice as part of it. Like this gentleman.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160627-i-am-gay-but-i-wasnt-born-this-way
There was an outspoken Lesbian who also argues this, and was pile-driven by many on the left, although I can't recall her name.
Second, the prevailing science has actually debunked the "Gay Gene"
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-08-30/no-single-gay-gene-study-finds-science/11461114
Genetics only accounts for between 8 and 25 percent of one's orientation, which leaves a lot of room for the possibility of choice and science is incapable, by it's very nature, to say that something is absolutely not there. You can't prove a negative, and science can't prove anything, it comes up with theories and evidence, but is constantly changing.
https://www.thoughtco.com/can-science-prove-anything-3973922#:~:text=Science%20can%20collect%20data%20to%20support%20a%20hypothesis%2C,been%20researching%2C%20teaching%2C%20and%20writing%20for%2023%20years.
So, to say that there is no possibility of choice being involved is science denial.
Third, and this is more of interest to people interested in the English Language, it actually makes no sense to say that Orientation precludes choice. For example, we often talk about Political Orientation, and no one thinks that one is 'born a Democrat', and cannot change.
And finally,, the most damaging thing, is this implication that if it was a choice, it would be the wrong one. Otherwise, why would be it be so important to make it clear that one does not have a choice in these matters, unless the only way one can justify it is to say that I had say in this decision? That is, the responsibility is on biology, not me.
The reason that "Born this way" is so prominent, is that it deflects the Conservative accusation that one is 'living sinfully'. If I was born this way, and cannot help who I am attracted to, then you can't judge me. The problem however, is that it doesn't actually solve anything.
Let's say, theoretically, we can prove beyond a doubt that who one is sexually attracted to is completely outside your control. So what? It does not take away the choice that one makes in how one acts on those desires.
As a heterosocial male, I might find a 16 year old girl attractive. I still can choose whether to do the right thing, recognize that to pursue her would be morally wrong, or I can do the wrong thing. It is up to me. I personally choose the right thing.
So, for those who condemn homosexuality, they can still argue "Well, you were born that way, but you still chose to do the wrong thing."
It doesn't actually solve anything, and in the process harms actual Gays and Lesbians by demonetizing them, and their lived experience, which I consider more harmful overall.
It was one thing to be rejected and attacked by the "other side". it is bad, but there is some insulation there, as you kind of expect it.
But when you own so-called allies and tribe (Those who you align yourself with), attack you, it hurts. Badly. It is no different than a parent casting their child out for being LGBT. This is your family, the LGBT community should understand and accept you for who you are. But they don't.
I genuinely hope nobody's talking about pushing puberty blockers on kids because they play with their sister's dolls (I did too and nobody in my family, entirely conservative Evangelicals in the rural Midwest all, thought that was weird.)
Thanks for sharing this. Really appreciate your experience and views and it enforces the fact that this is a nuanced issue that can't be viewed in a black and white way. Having said that I absolutely agree that giving children hormones is a grave mistake.
Thanks for sharing this personal note.
I don’t believe transwoman should participate against women in physical supports. Because females can get hurt. There could make a third category for people that want to participate in unisex physical sports. I think transwomen should be allowed in some women’s support, but that their times (track, cross country) should be weighted based on their advantage.
I don't believe tall people should participate in physical sports, because short people can get hurt. I think tall people should be allowed in some sports, but that their times (track, cross country) should be weighted based on their advantage.
This is already a thing. Most leagues have divisions based on size and age. 12 year olds can’t play with 4 year olds who can’t play with 18 year olds. It’s based on size and development. In professional combat sports 155er don’t fight 170ers. They have separate divisions.
Yes, I think it's quite reasonable that many sports do that kind of thing! But they don't do it in sports like tennis or track. If the arguments against trans people competing are ones that would naturally lead to weight classes or height classes, and yet there's no interest in weight classes or height classes, then that suggests that the arguments aren't actually doing the work here.
Practically all competitive sports are segregated by sex because speed and strength are integral to them. High school boys could dominate olympic women in most events ( http://boysvswomen.com/ ).
I not being facetious, but do you know anything about sports? Henry Cejudo is a champion ufc fighter. He’s 5’4 135 pounds. He could beat any woman in the 135 division and 145. Not only would he beat them , but would cause irreparable damage. Any male could be the best female. It’s not just height or weight with regard to sex, but the response times. The brains for males works different. There are male ufc fighters and boxers who can throw hundred of strikes and kicks in a matter of 15 minutes. It’s muscle twitch fibers, the way the pelvis and hips are structured and bone density.
Think you might’ve gotten confused. Trans women (2 words) is the construction most people use. “Transwomen” (one word) is the construction Ang is using that’s common in anti-trans circles for ideological reasons explained elsewhere in the thread.
Because they might be called out for anti-trans dogwhistling? Seems easy enough to avoid (by not doing anti-trans dogwhistling).
Progressives have an unhealthy tendency to view everything as dog-whistling rather than just ignorance to the (often very esoteric) sensitivities of extremely online leftists. Your assumption that his not using a space is anti-trans rather than an innocent and meaningless omission of a keystroke is a case in point.
Given Ang’s clear familiarity with the discussion and endorsement of anti-trans slogans (so common to the poster that they are abbreviated) like “transwomen are transwomen” I feel extremely confident the omission was not one of ignorance. Certainly there are some people who would omit a space without thinking about it or meaning anything by it, but this is pretty clearly a different phenomenon.
I think when having these discussions we have to make distinctions without referencing bio sex. If I misgendered someone I could see being upset, but you’re annoyed I’m not using the language you want. I won’t. Also I only make distinctions when discussing these topics. Outside these topics I just say woman or man. I am a trans alli. I think it’s wrong that insurance companies don’t cover SRS, hormones and I want to see more job protections for trans people, as well as investments in opportunities. We agree more than disagree.
A lot of assumptions being made is all I'm saying.
You think onmitting a space is anti-trans dog whistling??? Good lord, you are really too deep in this online subculture. Please argue ideas and not missing spaces.
The idea underlying the dogwhistle, as explained elsewhere in the thread, is that Ang thinks trans women aren’t women (as stated in the initial post) and so insists on creating a separate noun for trans women instead of using an adjective noun situation like most people do when discussing trans people. Maybe the linguistics are not important to you but there’s the idea.
That seems like splitting an awfully fine hair, and I wholly agree with Matt (if not here, then in other posts of his) that the relentless focus on "linguistics" issues over actual ideas is not accomplishing a whole lot outside of tightly encased elite circles, while turning off or alienating the persuadable middle.
“...Ang thinks trans women aren’t women...”
They aren’t.
And if you can hear a dog whistle, you’re the dog.
What if - I know this is crazy - the dogwhistle isn't a dogwhistle but in fact a sincerely held opinion with no ulterior motive and no signal of a deeper antagonism? That sincerely held opinion might even be incoherent. But it's a possibility, right?
The dog whistle isn’t an opinion, the dog whistle is a linguistic construction. The opinion being emphasized by the dog whistle is that trans women are not a subset of women. I think most readers of Slow Boring would find this opinion distasteful, which is why it’s being hid behind the dogwhistle of the linguistic construction and behind some acronyms that those unfamiliar with anti-trans rhetoric may not be able to decipher.
You’re mad at me because I used the word might? That might could be the craziest thing I’ve heard all year.
I was thinking this! But I'm also still reading the thread... 😅
I think that people dislike Joe Rogan for a really simple reason - his aesthetic, and that this reveals something flawed about the progressive movement that has been true for a long time.
It makes me think of The Road to Wigan Pier by Orwell where he talks about - and I'm paraphrasing, how most socialists are sandal wearing vegetarians who are more committed to socialism as an aesthetic than actually improving the material conditions of the working class.
Progressives seem to revile uneducated white working class males. Rogan is a representative of those people. So, progressives revile him.
If progressives want to win then they need to learn how to speak to those people. They don't need to change their policies - their policies are quite popular, but they need to learn how to sell them to those who stand to benefit the most.
When commitment to aesthetics and improving material conditions come into conflict then improving material conditions should almost always win out.
Well I mean what I would say is that disliking Joe Rogan or Rogan’s show on the basis of aesthetics is fine. You don’t need to like everyone and you certainly don’t need to like every podcast! But majoritarian politics has to be about more than what programs do you, personally, enjoy.
So maybe we should just ignore the aesthetic left instead of trying to win them over? Outside of twitter and the media this is an amazingly small group of people. The more we engage and placate them, the more ground we cede to the culture war.
What's the fun in that?
If state politics are important, there’s actually a lot of them in important positions. Berkeley and SF are run by aesthetic liberals who are okay with any policy except for anything that could possibly reduce their property values.
https://twitter.com/ShantMM/status/1288860824728039429
This is exactly what I was trying to say. Thank you!
Maybe part of the aesthetics argument is that Joe Rogan embodies a type of person who will do just fine in a hypothetical world where conservatives win the culture war (he’s white, straight and athletic. Superficially, he’s no threat to social conservatism), so he’s automatically held in suspicion.
I think this is very astute, and it maps to my experience. I think people dislike Joe's jock persona, and to some extent are jealous that it is so successful and that this subconsciously has them looking for a reason to throw him overboard.
As I grow increasingly old and crusty, I feel the gulf between the very online youth and the very offline me growing wider. I mean, I use the internet, but not social media and my use is mostly passive information gathering.
If you are young enough to have gone through puberty and "socialized" in the social media age, I can imagine that you feel online threats as viscerally as offline threats. And there are entire online hate-groups organized against trans people, who are such a small percentage of the population that they effectively can only exist as a community online. So I think I get why there is so much youth activism around trans rights and why, to me, said youth over-reacts to any perceived threat.
What I don't get, though, is the tendency to avoid debate and discussion, opting instead to affix the suffix "phobic" to people and then refuse to hear anything they have to say. What makes even less sense to me is to extend that banishment to anyone who would associate with said phobic people in any way shape or form, even if it takes the form of debating and disagreeing with them.
The bigger issue to me is how it is possible that such obviously rational, reasonable and good things like open forums, discussions across ideological lines, debates, persuasion are rejected by what appears to be a loud minority of people that is growing (in numbers or influence). Of course Matt is right that it is good to go on popular shows and talk to people --- but it terrifies me that I cannot even begin to understand, let alone empathize with people who do not think that is a good thing.
Something that helped me understand this is a concept of "argumentative hyperliteracy" (which is maybe not formally written about anywhere, I just saw it in a tweet.)
Basically if you've spent the last five years seeing the exact same arguments, over and over and over, as any trans person on the Internet has, you get to the point where you can predict the initial bad tweet, counterargument, digging in, ripostes, ironic quote-tweeting, and eventual namecalling, practically word-for-word. You've seen it a thousand times!
So it's natural to jump right to meta-level "why are you saying this now, what agenda are you trying to advance by bringing it up."
This can be very confusing and alienating to someone who hasn't been following the debate, who *really did* just see a random article and thinks it maybe has a point.
I don't really know what to do about this other than shut down the Internet, but I think it helps explain the situation.
I think that dovetails with my feeling that I am out of touch with the very online youth. They are often living in an online world that is totally alien to me, using words like "violence" in different ways that I do, etc. So I get that they might roll their eyes at a fossil like myself who really do just randomly see an article and think maybe it has a point. That also explains my perception that (especially young) activists take the position that the onus is on me to go read all of Twitter and educate myself on their position; if I am perceived as just another uniformed idiot, why should they have to explain their position to me, personally again? That is, perhaps, something that I take for granted as common courtesy, but that a 30 year-old who is used to mining subreddits for hours on end interprets as unearned privileged.
Argumentative hyperliteracy is a great term, thanks for that!
Though I do think that, if I am to meet them (young, very online activists) half-way, they need to compromise, too, and realize that they will get nowhere without learning how to persuade people who went to college before cell phones, let alone social media. And that might mean not just repeating their arguments, but accepting that a Twitter consensus is not the same thing as a political or societal consensus. I am still bothered that Matt goes on Joe Rogan's podcast and comes away feeling it necessary to write an entire post that is effectively a justification to trans activists for trying to engage a very, very large audience... about his book.
“...accepting that a Twitter consensus is not the same thing as a political or societal consensus.”
There isn’t really even a Twitter consensus. Just a consensus among the people one follows on Twitter. It’s all very parochial.
And I suppose you could find yourself both "argumentatively hyperliterate" and perceiving that you are part of a broad consensus as a direct result of the filter bubbles that are algorithmically reinforced by social media platforms.
I still view it as a generational gap because I think that social media fundamentally changed how children and adolescence develop socially. I grew up with landlines and push media like TV and radio and still treat the Internet that way, as something that I receive content from. Watching my kids grow up with screens everywhere has been instructive; they seamlessly move between socializing through apps and socializing in person and do not hesitate to put their lives on display digitally.
My theory is that this is specific to trans itself: what you’re looking for as a trans person is to cement your own self-identification as a person of this other gender. When you encounter people who view you differently, their views influence yours, which puts that project at risk. Hence the maximalist demands for recognition.
I’ll be honest: I don’t actually know any trans people in real life, so I could be totally utterly completely wrong. But that’s my guess right now.
For me, understanding of this recent trend came from combining two related but different strains of analysis.
The first is the work Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff (Coddling of the American Mind)
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=coddling+of+american+mind&i=stripbooks&crid=TSHQIXI6B6EQ&sprefix=coddling+of+%2Cstripbooks%2C151&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-da-p_1_12
and the second is that of Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (Cynical Theories).
https://www.amazon.com/Cynical-Theories-Scholarship-Everything-Identity_and/dp/1634312023
I am familiar with those books (they're in my queue), but aren't they more of a sharp diagnosis than an exploration of motives? What I mean is that, and this is especially true of Cynical Theories, they aren't going to persuade you of a different view so much as dissuade you from going full-Woke.
It's really hard to answer this exactly and the truth is I'm barely literate in these topics although I find them fascinating.
I guess you could say Haidt and Lukianoff's work is something of a diagnosis, but for me it's more about furthering understanding and seeking to persuade people. In particular, it emphasizes the importance of raising kids to be anti-fragile rather than training them to focus on vulnerability, victimhood, and powerlessness. Lukianoff struggles with an anxiety disorder and found cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to be very helpful for treating it. He was struck by early woke culture's emphasis on avoiding difficult subjects (eg trigger warnings)and by its emphasis on powerlessness and an external locus of control. He felt it was exactly opposite of the way a CBT approach would teach people to think about these things. Here's an early and short essay version of their thesis:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
Pluckrose's work seems mostly about understanding the history, philosophy and mindset of postmodernism and intersectionality. It isn't trying to persuade as much as inform. It explains the tools the woke left uses and how they work. One takeaway for me is that postmodernist thinking is explicitly about disrupting a society's sense making apparatus. At the theoretical level, It's intentionally designed to make all truth subjective, all knowledge suspect, and all language malleable to the whims of the speaker. That's really interesting from an intellectual standpoint, but Pluckrose goes on to claim its ideas have been weaponized by "cynical" people and groups on the left. Pluckrose also covers the intersectionality which I understand to be about systems of power, hierarchy and dynamics of groups. Intersectionality seems to view every conflict as a zero sum power struggle between an oppressor group and an oppressed group. One of the fascinating tenets of intersectionality is that it seems to erase individuality and to some extent, I think, even free will. It basically has us all acting as cogs in a machine pushed mindlessly into action by the groups we belong to based on our immutable characteristics. Again, this is fascinating stuff from an intellectual standpoint, but also pretty scary, imo.
I don’t think of myself as “crusty,” though my knees hurt sometimes.
I wade into discussions like these unequipped with some of the basic assumptions that people who care about these things cling to like holy writ. (I also don’t really know who Joe Rogan is. Nor do I care.) And so when I read the phrase “trans woman” I have to stop for a moment and try to remember the grammar rules for this particular topic. Is a “trans woman” a biological man pretending to be a woman, or the other way around? To set myself straight I googled Deirdre McCloskey and got the answer.
I'm cisgendered, but I have to imagine that debating with bigots who think you have a mental illness is unpleasant, and I wouldn't begrudge anyone for bowing out of "discussions across ideological lines" when that's the content of the discussion.
I grew up around people who thought much worse of me than being mentally ill; they thought my soul needed to saved and that I didn't know what I was saying because the devil had corrupted my mind and whatnot. And they felt very free to tell me all about it all the time in just about every forum. But I still engaged with them because it afforded me an opportunity to give them a glimpse of a different viewpoint instead of the homogeneous, single-minded discussions that tended to happen in their social circles. And I can imagine that I find myself in the same situation, where I'm surrounded by like-minded people having discussions that we think are broad and open-minded, but in reality are the same kind of narrowing purity spiral of the aforementioned (just not about souls and afterlives).
I get that not every trans person wants to have the same argument over and over with every person that disagrees with or doesn't understand their existence. But what I don't get is pushing aside any and all discussion and labeling dissent as bigotry. Why can't we have a rational discussion around things like high school sports, where it is clear that we need some agreed upon guidelines and rules that people on either side of a disagreement can point to when conflict arises? And why is it almost always young cis people who spring to action on behalf of the trans community and lecture us on what terrible people we are for not doing our homework and learning to agree with them?
Normally I can ingest information and opinion from an opposing view until I can at least understand it, even if I vehemently disagree with it. But I'm truly at a loss to understand the breadth and absolutism of the unwillingness of trans activists, in particular, to engage in any discussion, especially when they are so willing to do whatever they did to Matt to prompt him to write this article, just for appearing on the podcast of someone who holds opinions they disagree with. (To be clear, I don't know what, exactly, Rogan said, so maybe his rhetoric was so over the top that I would be appalled by it too, my sense is that these things are usually over phrasing or vocabulary that seems benign and/or in good faith to me, vis-a-vis JK Rowling.)
Sure, but I don't think there's any conflict about people's right to bow out of discussions they don't want to participate in.
The conflict is over trans people and allies trying to exercise total control over the discourse. They want to have the power to decide what positions are allowed to be discussed and who is allowed to discuss them.
It sure seems to me like there is conflict. RC is positing that "open forums" and "discussions across ideological lines" are "obviously rational, reasonable and good things". I don't think that's true at all--I would say that engaging in a debate about whether gay sex is sinful, or trans people are mentally ill, can actually be bad, especially if it's not handled carefully (and the type of people who are most vociferous about loving discussions across ideological lines rarely handle it carefully). Matt's case for not shunning Joe Rogan is reasonable; RC's case for engaging in a debate with Ben Shapiro about trans rights is not.
While I understand that engaging in some topics involves real risk, my belief is that trying to push these conflicts under the carpet and pretend they don't exist creates even more risk.
I'm on the opposite side Ben Shapiro on nearly every issue. He's often a jerk and I routinely catch him misrepresenting people or ideas in a way that I feel represents bad faith. Still, I watch him on youtube often, especially when he has a guest I'm trying to understand better or is covering an issue where I can't wrap my head around the other side's view. It's usually a very frustrating experience, but I learn something important every time I do it.
The thing is, I'm just not willing to be told by other people what ideas I'm "allowed" to engage with and which people I'm "allowed" to try to learn things from.
Again, the key for me is that this particular aspect is entirely about groups of people trying to exercise control over the intimate intellectual activities of other people.
Not every single subject is a good topic for formal debate. E.g. imagine if Ben Shapiro came up to you and challenged you to a formal debate, in front of an audience, on the proposition "Jim hates his wife and only married her for her money" (I have no idea if you're married, roll with me here on this journey through the hypothetical). You wouldn't be all thrilled about the contest of ideas; you'd punch him in the mouth, because the mere existence of that debate is an insult to you. The debate about whether trans people are mentally ill is similar.
Sort of, but there are important differences between these two scenarios. Mainly, the topic of "Jim hates his wife" is an assertion only about me. There's nothing generalizable. OTOH, something like "your trans and all trans people are mentally ill" is both a personal attack and a general assertion.
If I were to steel-man your argument, I'd say a better scenario would be a situation where Shapiro challenges a trans activist to a debate after they call Abigail Shrier a transphobe for claiming that rapid onset gender dysphoria among teens is at least partly driven by social contagion, similar to anorexia or cutting.
Why is it bad though? I think engaging in these debates is helpful. What is wrong with having a mental illness? Do you not think dysphoria is mental illness?
Whether gay sex is sinful is dependent on the person’s morality. I don’t accept it is sinful based on my morals as an atheist. Another person would, based on their religion and morals. As long as your morals don’t interfere with mine, who cares? Many catholic won’t eat meat on Friday’s during lent, it is sinful for them. Do I care? No and I will continue to enjoy meat on Fridays.
I wish more people challenged Shapiro’s trans views. He talks suicide and then dunks on 18 year old college students. Yes, there are suicides, but they decrease with treatment (transition) and supports. So logically we would try to continue treatment and supports so we see more decreases. Transition is the treatment for gender dysphoria in adults based on medical consensus. Somehow Ben thinks his opinions trump the views of psychologist and psychiatrists with decades of clinical experience.
I wonder how much is an old-young divide (that's definitely a part of it) and how much is that the wide tent of the left was held together for four years by being in unified opposition to Trump. Now that he has lost reelection, suppressed fault lines on the left can start to crack.
"Republican Carnage" was a fantastic post-mortem of what happened to the Republican big tent over the decade leading up to Trump. It does make me wonder how much the wider left light be wrenched by factions. There are lots of reasons why the parties aren't symmetrical at all, but seeing different democrats take very different conclusions away from 2020's down-ballot results gave me pause.
Even for a show like Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro, the real value is not just to change one`s mind about the idea of one billion Americans but to change the statistical profile these viewers have of liberals or progressives in general. I think a good example is when Ezra Klein went on the Ben Shapiro Show, and came out looking very reasonable and smart! Its a form of respectability politics if one wants to be crass, but it works pretty well - especially since this does not cost you much or anything to go on a show! The conservative media ecosystem, with the Ben Shapiro Show in particular likes to say that liberals are not just wrong or dangerous but they can`t have a rational debate. So prove them wrong, go on the show!
There will always be a portion of people who will actively hate your guts on these shows, but there are a lot of passive haters and people who relied on other people`s opinions to form their opinion. Making a dent in these groups not only gets you them but also helps tip some people on the margins of those people.
Does anyone currently engaged in politics arguments like Jon Stewart, though? I think the common sentiment is the Rally to Restore Sanity was West Wing loving lib shit that’s destroyed the country.
There is something to be said for the point that Rogan has a conservative aesthetic but is high in openness like liberals, which rubs "twitter progressives" the wrong way but the left vs right dichotomy really doesn't apply when talking about people like Rogan, and doesn't explain why the left hates him.
I've been listening to him on and off for years and the sense I get is that he's a well-meaning guy who isn't all that well-informed about the world but is eager to learn with the caveat that he is antagonistic to placing trust in government and other institutions made up of over-educated elites who have failed time and time again. If he had Nassim Taleb on his show, they'd hit it off. It explains why in one podcast Rogan can talk about why we need universal healthcare but then in another podcast will say that he doesn't trust the government to implement it properly. It explains why Bernie appeals to him but Warren wouldn't. I don't blame him for having low trust in elites - as this pandemic has shown, left and right leaders have very little idea of what they're doing.
A lot of "twitter progressives" are the products of those very institutions. They either work there, their parents work there, or they have degrees from those places. Despite the repeated profound failings of these institutions, the left still has a lot of faith in the ability for these institutions to transform people's lives in a beneficial way. It's very difficult for these people to convince someone like Rogan that he and people like him should once again place their faith in these same institutions. (For the record, i don't think institutions today are that much worse run than institutions than in the past - our expectations are higher and we have 24/7 news telling us how bad they're failing).
And then there's the point of status. Having a fancy degree confers status to people and they feel threatened by people like Rogan who essentially disregard their status and in turn their power to wield the power of these institutions. It's the same story with Trump and Brexit.
"as this pandemic has shown, left and right leaders have very little idea of what they're doing."
The highly educated elites have produced a vaccine that is at this very moment being administered all across the country. A mere 9 months after this crisis first hit. They seem to have done a fine job.
“The highly educated elites have produced a vaccine that is at this very moment being administered all across the country.”
That was a subset of the elites: The ones not in government and working at a for-profit corporation. It’s unsurprising that they are the ones who succeeded.
Succeeded with oceans of government money. It's not like they worked for free.
Pfizer used private capital.
Cite
He means Pfizer didn’t join Operation Warp Speed. They did get some very large preorders from governments, who are now the ones administering the vaccine to health care workers, which is good.
I think they would’ve survived on their own capital though. mRNA vaccines take less than one day to develop.
When I refer to elites, I'm mostly talking about government officials and politicians. Scientists and technologists have clearly been able to deliver the goods over and over again, albeit sometimes creating such profound changes that government elites have been caught off guard and don't know to deal with them
"When I refer to elites, I'm mostly talking about government officials and politicians."
That's a stupid and needlessly inflammatory way to phrase things.
Do you have an argument? I don’t get what’s stupid and inflammatory about stating that government leaders are the elites of our society, and that a huge swathe of the population does not like or trust them
" I don’t get what’s stupid and inflammatory about stating that government leaders are the elites of our society, "
You're needlessly conflating them with all the other elites in our society. Someone with a Nobel Prize in medicine is also very much a member of the elite.
You're right - there's a difference and all sorts of gradations. But keep in mind plenty of elite scientists have also bungled public health messaging and certain doctors and scientists have said some bizzare things about covid.
I guess the point I'm sloppily trying to make is that for low-trust people like Rogan the "elites" can fall in one bucket, and they focus on the failings of one group of elite and then use that to make the case that all elites and their institutions are bad. It's sort of weird that Rogan will have on pretty distinguished smart scientists but then also rail against elites. Sometimes the difference exists and sometimes it doesn't. It's motivated by this anti-establishment feeling and it's why he'll have anti-establishment people like Bernie, Tulsi, Greenwald, or Crenshaw regardless of their politics. It seems to be motivating a lot of his world view.
There’s no need to call someone’s argument stupid and honestly that’s the kind of thing I come here to avoid. Please be more civil for the sake of our little nascent online community. We have all of Twitter in which to name-call.
On which. Typo.
I live in a liberal east coast bubble, both generally and personally, and it was illuminating when I slowly went public with my MMA fandom. Several others in my bubble quietly came out of the woodwork, even though the general atmosphere in our social circles is vocally against such base activities as mixed martial arts. There was a surprising number of people who just didn't want to be identified, I guess because of fear of mockery.
This comment is only tangential to the post, but Rogan is a case where I think most of the controversy is performative Twitter outrage. A lot of the anti-Rogan posturing is driven by online media figures that all went to the same 30 elite undergrad institutions, and operate in a scarcity culture where jealousy of professional success of the "non-deserving" like Rogan is normal behavior.
Good lord, there is nothing I can say here that hasn't been said 50 times. So just a couple quick points. First, I think Joe Rogan is pro trans rights and wants to support trans people as people. He has a specific view about sporting competitions that activate his human sense of unfairness. And he has a thing about letting kids, who are notorious dummies, make permanent life-altering decisions. Second, Joe knows that he is wrong about some things and he is open about it. I tend to think he is wrong about 30% of everything he says. Matt's post here talks about how important it is for people (who are wrong about 30% of everything) to engage with other people (who are wrong about 30% of everything) and I agree. But I think that misses an important point about Joe Rogan that he is a role model for good public discourse by admitting that he is often wrong, but wrong while still remaining curious and engaged.
I think many of us listen to JRE specifically because it is a space where you can be wrong.
I remember when runners complained about the unfair advantage Oscar Pistorius had because of his prosthetic legs. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Pistorius#:~:text=Updated%20on%2029%20August%202018,due%20to%20a%20congenital%20defect)
My view back then on them is the same I have with people complaining about trans athletes: fine, you can have the same advantage; just amputate your legs. You think these trans folks have unfair advantage? Fine, you adopt the trans life permanently, and we'll give you a head start in your races.
Mind you, I don't know Rogan's position here. I've never listened to him.
How exactly could a cis woman who is unhappy about having to compete with trans women become a trans woman to gain the same advantage?
You, sir, are responding to my point with logic and reason. This wounds me deeply. :-)
IOW, I haven't thought through the details (clearly!) But my point stands as in my comment above that I have limited sympathy for those who whine about the unfair advantage in athletic competitions gained by those who in the entirety of the rest of their lives are pretty screwed.
Nope, no motorcycle. Has to be human-powered.
Given how society is these days, I think people who find they are trans have to deal with obstacles most of us can't begin to contemplate. I don't have much sympathy for the athletes they compete against complaining about the "unfairness" they have to face against them as competitors.
I get the strong impression that most of Rogan's critics haven't actually listened to his show and assume his opinions are more regressive than they actually are, because he's a muscular white guy who likes hunting and fighting. You're arguing that Rogan should not be shunned but not really addressing the specifics of what he's even being shunned for, other than just "insufficient nuance" on trans issues. Whether he should be shunned or not is actually a meta-concern--I'd argue he isn't even right of center in the first place, except relative to the Twitter hive.
I don't think there's anything wrong with going on Joe Rogan's show. I was actually moderately surprised to see you go on Ben Shapiro's show. (I'm not sure it's wrong, I was just surprised by it).
I guess for me, the difference is that the point of Ben Shapiro's show is to spew right-wing hate, but Joe Rogan is just a talk show host who happens to have other offensive views.
The case for shunning Shapiro seems more coherent to me — his audience is not going to be like highly persuadable marginal voters. I personally found doing his show to be surprisingly pleasant, but I don’t think “eschew hard-core right wing podcasts” is a crazy idea in the way that shunning Rogan is.
You’re dressing up a normative concern in practical terms. It’s only less crazy in practical terms to shun Ben Shapiro because there’s less likelihood of persuasion; that’s fine, but as you said on JRE, it’s crazy for non-practical reasons to shun people this way. It’s both a bad practice for developing better ideas, and it’s not very nice thing to do to people who, whatever their faults and hypocrisies, honestly believe the things they say they do.
(I’d also argue that Ben Shapiro’s audience is much more persuadable than you’re claiming here but that’s not the main point.)
Agreed. No need to appeal to practicality here. But I do wonder where the line is.
Exactly! Conversely, is practicality always sufficient? I'm still not convinced that Nazis should be engaged even if they're a critical mass of people in the US. But I'm also not convinced they should be shunned!
I know this is not the spirit of the debate - but I do think it's relevant that politics aside, Ben Shapiro is kind of an asshole who makes a career shitting on people he perceives as dumber than him, and straw-manning folks on the left who don't like him.
Your post made me think about the ongoing debate on whether progressives/Democrats should go on Fox. I wonder if you think going on Hannity or Tucker Carlson is a useful means of making the progressive case. It seems to me the number of persuadable voters there is almost zero and the hosts will use you as a punching bag or misrepresent your views.
All this depends on the host and tenor of the show, right? There's a difference between a 30 minute polite back and forth with a conservative host and being the token democrat on a 5 person panel where everyone yells at you for 5 minutes then goes to commercial break.
Agreed. And that’s why I have no problem with a lefty going on Shapiro’s show. Say what you want about Ben’s views, many of which suck, but he’s a polite, fair, thoughtful conversation partner in that type of one-on-one setting. At a campus event? Not as much.
I think this is true. If I'm recalling directly, the original "Dems don't go on Fox" rule was sort-of an organic realization that if you showed-up on there it would be a set-up. A lot of rank-and-file politicians don't have the media skills to turn that.
I do think that there are probably a lot more persuadable voters watching Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity than listening to Ben Shapiro. You've really got to seek out any given podcast to listen to it, whereas in all sorts of places Fox News is just on all the time for anybody to watch
My understanding is that the Tucker/Hannity shows do a lot of editing so there’s less control over how your message is conveyed.
Glenn Greenwald goes on Tucker Carlson a lot, but not (AFAIK) to advance progressive views, just to agree with Tucker about Trump and the Democrats.
Greenwald cares most passionately about the national security apparatus. Historically, being opposed to that group, to things like domestic intelligence gathering and foreign adventurism, used to be pretty much a given among liberals. Ask yourself: did guys like Clapper and Brennan convert to liberalism, or did Trump drive them over there by kicking them out of the Republican tent? I have no love for Carlson, but some of my liberal friends have suddenly become a little too good at defending Forever War, "Intelligence sources say" and many of the journalistic habits of the same access "journalism" that gave us Iraq. Many of the same usual suspects, unfortunately.
So did Glenn go on Tucker to condemn Trump for vetoing a bill defunding the war in Yemen, or for stepping up the drone war, or getting into bed with dictators? Did he ever condemn Trump for punishing whistleblowers, Glenn's other purported passion? No; he went on to talk about Democrats losing their minds over Russia. The closest he ever came in four years to criticizing Trump's foreign policy was to say "well, Democrats do that too," the kind of both-sidesism he excoriated during the Obama years. The simple fact is that the national security apparatus hasn't been Glenn's chief concern for many years; his chief concern has been sticking it to the Democrats and MSNBC.
I think Clapper and Brennan and them were kicked out, not by Trump's opposition to war (which isn't a thing), but by his abandonment of our alliances. That was bad when Bush did it—remember "we'll go it alone" and the "coalition of the willing?"—and it was bad when Trump did it too, even if it was for the sake of his hotels rather than some dream of being a great liberator.
To be clear, I'd hate to find myself defending any of these things. But I'm also no great fan of "liberals" being grateful to have Bill Kristol on the show today.
If Matt goes on Tucker, he should go full Rutger Bergman. Matt might be too night though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&feature=youtu.be&v=6_nFI2Zb7qE
Seems easier to have your views represented by not stating them yourself, no? It's not like Hannity or Tucker are *only* going to misrepresent your views if you go on their show.
Good point. Whenever I talk to "conservatives" who disagree with me, I usually come away with the impression they have never met a real life (as opposed to a right wing caricature) Liberal.
My point was that my "typical" "conservatives" is well familiar with what I find to be a caricature of Liberal views, which are very different to MY views.
I'm familiar with the proposed "test" and doubt that many people on either side are skilled enough to convincingly mimic the other's rhetoric.
Well said! There are many people whom we can’t persuade, no matter how sound our arguments, but if they respect our ideas enough to debate them in earnest, as opposed to dismissing them as illegitimate (or worse), then we have made progress.
And there are many who are willing to be persuaded, once they see that the 'other side' is not some bigoted, hate-filled, authoritarian who attacks everyone who disagrees with them. When they see that there are actual reasons behind their position.
Matt has the potential to be the liberal version of Ross Douthat, I think
Not exactly. Ross is a Conservative that tries to explain "Conservatives" to Liberals. Matt is not trying to explain Liberals to "Conservatives," but Liberals to Progressives.
How does Ben spew right wing hate? Are there topics that he constantly brings up in hateful ways or is he automatically hateful, because he a conservative Republican?
One of the most interesting conversations was between Rogan and Shapiro discussing economics, poverty, and other issues. I believe Rogan had the upper hand in explaining generational poverty and how conservative approaches to resolve it likely wouldn’t help.
His daily “news” show sucks, but in his Sunday long form interviews he’s much better behaved.
I’d also note that if treating one half of the political spectrum as a “monolith” = spewing hate, then much of left Twitter, including many with blue check marks, is guilty, too.
I think there might be even more value in going on Shapiro. Is Shapiro's audience persuadable? Probably not in a big way. But if Matt can reliably tell that a Sunday show interview isn't going to be a partisan mess and can get in front of an audience that's _really_ different from his home crowd, that has value too.
One of my friends listens to Shapiro religiously. I'd like him to switch to getting current events news and current takes from someone who isn't going to cherry-pick facts and history to portray the left as bad-faithed anti-capitalist fascists who want to seize power to minimize American's freedom because we hate everyone on the right.
But realistically I'm not going to persuade him to change what he views - so if he sees Matt or Ezra or anyone else on the left, I think that's valuably depolarizing.
I’m not familiar with exactly what Joe Rogan said so I’ll avoid commenting on it specifically. I will say generally that I realized this fall that as a “woke” progressive, I’d lost the calibration of my moral compass. Anyone who challenged someone I deemed to be less privileged on anything related to their identity or privilege was The Bad Guy, full stop. It caused a mental breakdown when I realized these people had legitimate concerns and woke ideology left no route to raise them. They then resorted to yelling, screaming, and lashing out at being judged, which further justified my judgement. I’m working on it.
Was there some specific incident or learning that first allowed you to see this in yourself?
Actually listening to conservatives about the topic of racism and not assuming they were racist. This paper made a huge impact (Matt shared it post-election): https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/renos/files/carneyenos.pdf
I agree with Matt's case that shunning is counterproductive, but I want to illustrate how this dynamic works more explicitly. It's not just some random minority of progressives who think this way. This way of thinking is the mainstream in almost all institutions where college-educated people predominate.
The idea isn't to shun wrongthinkers because they can be effectively shunned like a vanishingly small minority can be (e.g. actual Nazis). The idea is to enforce these left-wing cultural values on the entire populace via these institutions. The thinking here is inherently elitist: We, the good people at the top who have the righteous opinions, need to make sure the ignorant peons at the bottom know the correct way to think. If anyone disagree, they have to keep quiet about it or they risk shunning. If everyone keeps quiet for long enough, we win!
This dynamic makes people who disagree (both elite and non-elite) understandably very angry. To them, they are being called bigoted for no reason. This leads some people to prefer alternative institutions: in Joe Rogan's case, a podcast. People in mainstream media are threatened by this new dynamic which leads them to double down on their tactic of shunning, which, in turn, leads more people to turn toward media like Rogan's podcast.
Again, the idea of cultural change here isn't bottom-up. It's top-down. The movement for gay marriage was a little bit of both, but I think it was mostly bottom-up, which is why its legacy endures.
Not to pick on Matt too much, but this dynamic is why we're all here and not on Vox.com's comment section.
I understand that that was the throat-clearing “I am not a transphobe and don’t agree with Rogan’s comments from 2013” section of the post, but isn’t it worth noting that that linked comment was from 2013? To the extent that we’re allowed to entertain the possibility that people change their minds (as opposed to permanently shunning them for decades) Rogan has changed his approach to a lot of things, especially politics, quite drastically since then. I’d be surprised if Rogan didn’t approach the discussion of Fallon Fox with quite a bit more sensitivity if it were happening now. In fact it’s not clear to me that it’s fair to describe Rogan as a transphobe in 2020 on the basis of those comments from 2013.
Matt emphatically didn’t call him a transphobe.
I wondered about this, too, since my own views on trans politics have changed since 2013. But if you make a public comment that you later disagree with, you should probably retract it publicly.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of people just find it easier to shun than try to persuade. Persuasion takes actual time and effort.
...and logical arguments that can withstand scrutiny...
Matthew appeals to progressives' self-interest. Shunning is wrong, he argues, because it will not be efficacious for progressives. He seems to be defending open dialogue and free speech only as a tactic not as a foundational concept of western liberalism and democracy.
I mean that's the thing with Matt. Some people who don't like the left like to read him because he sometimes criticizes the left, but at the end of the day he's "on the team" in a way that isn't true of, Sam Harris or Andrew Sullivan or a lot of the other folks with liberal policy views who spend a lot of time criticizing the left.
Maybe I brought my own thinking to the article - I read it more as "if shunning is going to be pragmatically counter-productive, we can skip having a zero-sum trade-off hand-wringing debate about whether shunning is morally right (in a "I did not provide some kind of moral cover to this other person who I am shunning who thinks immoral things") vs morally wrong (in a "free speech and open discourse have their own moral imperative") way. We can skip all that and go "it's doing more harm than good to the people you want to help so stop".
Writing it out that way, the impetus to shun (I'm not in that camp so I can only speculate) is perhaps motivated by non-pragmatic reasons, which might limit how persuasive Matt's article is.
I don't want to be overly cynical but it seems like self-interest manifests itself more as "improving my place in the online social pecking order" as opposed to "passing legislation I agree with."
This was something that I laughed onto in Ezra Klein’s discussion with Matt Bruenig a while back. They were discussing what improvements in health care policy Mr. Bruenig would accept, and he basically copped to not supporting any marginal improvement that fell short of M4A. He considered it (and I’m putting words in his mouth) pusillanimous, half-a-loaf counterrevolutionary liberalism, which was just a serious turn-off.
Democrats have a crummy brand right now, so I think there’s substantial virtue in enacting non-totalistic policies, implementing them well, and then touting the shit out of them. It builds faith in their ability to govern, and good will when they propose more sweeping reforms.
*latched
I would be interested in a follow up post extending this to the related controversy of the NY Times’ Tom Cotton oped. Specific issues with the factual content of the piece aside, it strikes me that readers’ and Times employees’ fury over its publishing was based in the same wrongheaded “if we shun this we will defeat it” logic you discuss here. It’s not the NY Times fault that Tom Cotton is a Senator or that he has bad ideas! I don’t think progressives are served well by demanding that widely-held ideas they (reasonably) disagree with are excluded from their view, vs being made to engage with them.
I agree. Another interesting aspect of Cotton’s piece was that Hispanics, when polled, supported Cotton’s position on deploying military to stop the riots. Hispanics supported 60% and Whites 52%. Would be interesting to see what the democratic autopsy reveals regarding these riots and drop in Hispanic support.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/52-americans-support-deploying-military-control-violent-protests/story?id=71097167
I live roughly a mile from where George Floyd died and a similar distance from where the majority of the riots happened. The most shocking thing about the coverage of the riots to me was the almost complete erasure of the Hispanic community in Minneapolis. You would never know it from the press, especially the national, but Hispanics may be a plurality in the neighborhood he died in and Hispanic owned business dominated Lake Street, the focal point of the riots. It's likely that no community in Minneapolis was hurt more by the riots than Hispanics, but those experiences were almost totally absent from mainstream coverage.
Cotton is a leading politician advocating violence against peaceful protesters, during a time of already fairly extensive physical attacks on protesters. Publishing that requires much more scrutiny than most forms of speech
Tom Cotton wasn't advocating any kind of action against peaceful protesters, but that's besides the point. Tom Cotton is, as you say, a leading politician who at the time was voicing an opinion that at the time had majority support. If the NYT is going to print op-eds from the Taliban and the CCP, they can print Tom Cotton.
If the Cotton op-ed bothered you more than the "Hong Kong is for China, Like it or Not" op-ed, then you only care about fighting a culture war, not actually fighting oppression or authoritarianism.
I think it’s debatable whether it had “majority support” but regardless the view was widely held enough that deciding to publish it should not be controversial. (The op-Ed itself can be controversial, that’s sort of the point.)
I think it grows from the broader misconception that how left-leaning publications talk about the right (or censor it) has important ramifications on public opinion. That if articles used a few more adverbs, people would see Trump is actually bad, etc.
Yes—while I definitely think someone like Trump who lies all the time poses some problems for journalism, I think the proliferation of qualifiers like "falsely," "without basis," etc. in Times and Post articles is regrettable, at least from a prose standpoint.
I disagreed with the idea but the argument was that clearly the local authorities did not have the capacity or legitimacy to ensure peace in the streets (indeed due to the various instances of attacks on protestors). I think Cotton was wrong in assuming how neutral the personnel themselves would actually be or whether the military deployed by a very unpopular president in the midst of a national crisis would play with protestors.
Isn’t that the opposite issue though? The NYT has a platform that Tom Cotton used. In this instance Joe Rogan had a platform that Matt used. Matt going onto Rogan’s podcast arguably lets him introduce new ideas to Rogan’s audience. But the NYT isn’t introducing conservatives to any liberal ideas by publishing a piece from Tom Cotton.
For those of us who believe this illiberal tendency on the left is a major hindrance to progress on almost any issue (trans rights being just one), and debating bad ideas is better than attacking people for having them, Yascha Mounk's excellent substack Persuasion is essential reading:
<a href="https://www.persuasion.community/?sort=top">link text</a>
Oh, man, I just can't. I appreciate how Yascha tries to approach issues, but I just find his tone and hobbyhorses insufferable. There's no accounting for taste, and I may be in the minority on that around here.
Oh God, same. I told myself if he - a democracy scholar! - was still Tweeting incessantly about cancel culture the week of the election, while Trump was actively trying to end our democracy, I was going to unfollow him for good. And yep, that’s what happened! I’m concerned about cancel culture too but he’s gone full Intellectual Dark Web/obsessed and I now find him just so one-note and insufferable. Which makes me sad, because I really enjoyed the first couple of episodes he did on the Ezra Klein show, and I so wanted more of the version of him that he presented there.
I've also struggled with "Persuasion". There have been some thought-provoking pieces, but (as with Quillette) suuuchh a low bar for the intellectual rigor of takes as long as they are critiquing a progressive position from the right. I'm thinking, for example, of Coleman X. Hughes's piece in Persuasion, which I thought was just pretty stupid, frankly.
Fair enough. Taste is taste. The vast majority of the content on Persuasion (excluding the podcast) is by a variety of authors other than Yascha however.