I really hope that hard left types pondering turning their energy back into attacking the Democratic nominee internalise that they're going to find it very hard to evade responsibility if they do this and Trump wins a close election. The "Harris honeymoon" has shown how dramatically easier it is for Democrats to campaign when they're not constantly under attack from the left.
I think omnicausing after 10/7 has caused much of the left to self immolate. People that once would share whatever narrative they are parroting have stopped. People who would be receptive left leaning messaging have now disengaged. It has turned into a market for lemons.
I scrolled passed a headline on a substack I don't read the other day that said something like 'progressive activists could make puppies and ice cream unpopular.' I believe it was in response to the conduct of anti-Netanyahu protesters in DC.
To me there is a lot of irony in what happened. We had a head of a foreign government coming here to snidely lecture us, while at the same time holding out a cup, like it's a privilege for us, the super power to support them. The whole spectacle was offensive on multiple levels. And yet instead of talking about that on the merits we're forced to a place where we have to talk about burning American flags and pro Hamas graffiti.
I think it's very plausible to say that a responsible US protest, aimed at a 2 state solution and the removal of Bibi from power, would've had a strong impact on public opinion and shaped leader behavior. Instead, they've setback peace efforts and undermined the safety of the people they claimed to be protecting.
I kind of think the opposite. Say what you want about the Gaza protesters, but they do a pretty decent job of honestly representing the goals and approved rhetoric of the Palestinian national movement!
The "irresponsible" thing to do, in this context, would be to protest based on political demands that have little to do with those of the people in question. Protests in Gaza and the West Bank are even less peaceful-looking, to put it lightly.
…we don’t elect him? Americans barely know anything about any foreign conflict, it’s not like you need some super complicated theory for this one in particular
It threads the needle perfectly as an issue. Most voters don't know or care much about it and the only time it comes up for air is due to alienating activist behavior.
“Of course, marriage equality advocates cared about legalizing marriage equality… I am not sure we can say the same for the Useful Idiots for Palestine. “
They have an amazing ability to take what is truly a great moral cause -- the intense suffering of Palestinian citizens in Gaza -- and sharply reduce how much people care about it.
The antiwar protests in 2002-2003 were also run by extremists—ANSWER (ANSWR?), another pro-jihad group—but as I recall we protesters managed to stay pretty sane.
Being anti-free speech has also tapered off a bit thanks to people on the left saying things that make the one person at the trucker convoy with a Nazi flag look relatively innocent. They’d rather not discuss speech at all. Finally.
>I really hope that hard left types pondering turning their energy back into attacking the Democratic nominee<
I could be proven wrong in the fullness of time (God I hope not), sure, but I don't see this as much of a threat this cycle. The main reason is: there's no disgruntled socialist candidate who almost got the nomination, and whose narrow loss would prompt several million ostensible Democrats to go third party.
The problem with the left in the 2016 cycle wasn’t that Bernie’s loss convinced people who would’ve voted Dem to stay home. It’s that the attack from the left prompted Clinton to move in that direction, resulting in 2016 general election exit polling revealing that voters saw Trump as the more moderate candidate.
That's part of it, but look at third party vote that year. It spiked. Why might that be? I don't claim that lots of disgruntled Bernie Bros stayed home. But I do think a fair number voted for Stein or Johnson or whomever. Third party voting was about 6% in 2016, vs 2% in both 2012 and 2020. The two party share fell by something like 5 million votes from the norm. It doesn't seem crazy that Clinton probably lost more votes than Trump as a result of this dynamic given Trump's easy wrap up of the GOP primaries, and the highly vituperative nature of the Clinton-Sanders battle that cycle.
I think it was the worst of both worlds. She both had to deal with a rebellion on the left while simultaneously operating in an environment where no one thought Trump could possibly win, thus making it feel harmless to cast a protest vote.
There was just a lack of positive energy around her campaign in the final stretch, and that probably depressed turnout generally, not just Sanders voters.
It's simple. The GOP nominated the very unpopular Donald Trump and Clinton chose to move to the left instead of the center. Most of that 6% went to candidates that were to the right of Clinton, such as Gary Johnson and McMullin. She would've won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin if she could've convinced one-third of Johnson's voters to vote for her instead in those states. In Michigan, she would've won with only about 10% of Johnson's voters. And in the alternate reality where she successfully moderates her image enough to win over some Johnson supporters, she probably wins over some of the eventual Obama-Trump voters who viewed Trump as the more moderate candidate.
Also, I don't know where this revisionist history comes from that the GOP was united behind Trump. The whole narrative during the summer and fall of 2016 was that Democrats were united behind Clinton and that the GOP was a psycho trailer park shitshow by comparison. That's why Johnson and McMullin got so much attention and did as well as they did compared to left-wing candidates like Jill Stein.
And also couldn't bring themselves to vote for Trump! Despite the objectively strong structural situation for the GOP that year, Clinton had a golden opportunity to make it three in a row for the Democrats given the problem on the GOP side with respect to candidate quality. A number of things, alas, went wrong for her. One of them was the lack of unity in her own backyard.
I’d add that the specifics of how Clinton’s allies tried to outflank Sanders were particularly bad. Once you start arguing that basic kitchen table class-focused social democratic politics is somehow racist or sexist, you wind up committing yourself to some pretty weird and unpopular ideas.
It was one of a long line of strategic errors. But Sanders-Trump voters are just not that important on the list of factors. I think the lesson is to not radicalize your campaign in style or substance if it’s not absolutely necessary: plenty of moderate Dem positions are popular and would improve a lot of peoples’ lives without alienating 50-year-old suburban Wisconsinites
The big threat is if she picks Shapiro as VP. All the articles in all the leftist sources are saying that this is their line in the sand, so I hope she doesn’t test it.
I don’t really care to litigate whether they are saying anything reasonable or meaningful about him. They seem to have offered a conditional olive branch, and the smart move is to take it by selecting anyone else.
1) According to the Bulwark, Shapiro the best candidate by far. He's a popular governor from what is forecast to be the pivotal state.
2) According to Matt on Politix, the people threatening Harris over this won't stop if Harris rejects Shapiro. They'll keep going with demands so far from her current position that she's not going to be able meet their demands. So rejecting him actually achieves very little.
I think the first point is not as strong as people think. Nate Silver and Matt Yglesias have both made compelling arguments that VP candidates don’t do as much for electoral outcomes as people think, especially in terms of home state advantage.
The second point is the relevant one if true. I don’t know Politicx so I don’t know what evidence that person has for the claim that the demands won’t stop here. Back in April I would have agreed. But over the past few weeks there has been a lot of signaling that they’re coming around, as long as she makes this one move they want.
Re-(1) ... Obviously Nate knows the stats and Matt should but it's just so silly to talk about "data analysis" in presidential elections. We have like maybe 7 modern presidential election samples to analyze just to start with. It doesn't matter what the historical "home state advantage" is if none of the prior elections represent this current one (e.g., what does Cheney's impact in WY tell me about Shapiro's potential impact in PA ... nothing!).
I like this. It used to be conventional wisdom that a senator couldn’t win the presidency in the modern age… and then Obama won and that little nugget was buried and never mentioned again!
The problem is that they aren’t credible. She’s already significantly distinguished her position on Palestine in a way that’s favorable to them, and the VP pick is much less relevant to the issue they say they’re fighting for. A strategically-minded group would realize they already got 99% of what they could have possibly hoped for and back off on this detail that is minor for them but incredibly important to everyone else. The fact that they’re not, combined with the observation that they’ve never backed off ever, makes it impossible to trust them imo.
Interesting - I would have thought that the question of which of these moderate white dudes is VP was minor to everyone else, but the online left is making their strong preference that it be anyone but Shapiro quite clear.
They’re not demanding a specific person, just anyone but him.
And they clearly *have* backed off since Harris became the nominee.
It's not a "conditional olive branch." It's a test of wills and of determining who has power. Their opposition to Shapiro is bullshit (his position on Israel will be whatever Harris says and he's no different than other candidates); they're just trying to show they have power by claiming a scalp.
As I said in another comment, time for a "Sister Shapiro" moment.
What benefit do you see in pushing this conflict to the forefront? I can see that it’s reasonable to think that people deserve to be punished for making unreasonable demands.
But I don’t care what anyone deserves. I care about what keeps the good vibes flowing and leads to a win. Do you think that pulling this conflict out in the open helps?
The benefit is that Shapiro is clearly the best candidate by any reasonable metric. It is not particularly close. Passing up on that in order to appease a bunch of feckless, untrustworthy coalition partners who, in Silver's words, are "always looking for a pretext to flex away from the pragmatic moderate side of the Democratic Party" anyway seems like the actual risk.
If you look for the easily quantifiable hope for a home state bump, then yes, he’s clearly best. But I think that this is actually a weaker case for a VP than any of the much harder to quantify things. Pete Buttigieg has a clear edge in terms of communication (look how much Fox News viewers love to watch him, and msnbc viewers manage to love the same appearances!) and Mark Kelly has a bunch of career history advantages. Tim Walz is the person who seems to have the communications style this moment needs (normal midwestern dad).
The bigger issue most of us know nothing about is how well Harris gets along with each of them personally.
I think going into September seeing our factional opponents as the enemy is the actual risk.
Take the party’s left at its word, give them this one, psych ourselves up for the general election. If some on the left decide to blow up the party over something else that’s sad, but it’s best to assume good faith on our own team right now
I keep hearing this Harris needs a Sister Soulja moment. Maybe. I could see her fumbling and waffling and after it would just feed the narrative she lacks conviction. It is not as easy to do authentically as some think. I am a person she would be doing it for and I’m skeptical before she even does it.
She needs to take a position and stick to it. Sell it. Be real.
Until the past two weeks, I had seen no clear examples of the online left intentionally lowering the temperature at all, but this seems to be a moment that they might be!
The fact that they've so immediately drawn a line in the sand, and they love drawing lines in the sand generally, I don't believe at all that this will be the last line in the sand.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think a lot of the usual suspects subconsciously don't want to vote for Harris and will find a reason not to, no matter what it is. Their whole thing is hating Democrats.
>the smart move is to take it by selecting anyone else.<
It's only the smart move if passing on Shapiro to placate those who don't like him gains you more than it costs you. I assume the Harris campaign has a sophisticated polling operation. If going with Shapiro is likely to cost her on net, hopefully they go with someone else. But Pennsylvania's electoral votes would be a nice consolation prize in exchange for lower margins of victory in NY and California.
(I'm more worried about the sexual harassment case than I am about Israel/Gaza).
For the record I'd advise her to go with Beshear. Gets you 99% of what Walz provides but can't really be accused of being a socialist the way Walz can.
I don’t think the fight with the online left just costs in New York and California. I think it raises the specter of what we were all worried about for months earlier this year - Chicago 2024 turns into Chicago 1968, with Palestine campouts and police intervention, and democrats looking weird and divided.
I mean ... that's happening no matter what. I now have two well informed friends that have been told by their CPD connections to leave the city during the convention. They expect it to be that bad.
I think leaving the city is a good idea. Even a 5% chance of it being that bad is plenty of reason to leave the city. Plenty of people leave the city during big events anyway just because of ordinary hassle.
Back in April or May I was sure it would be that bad. I suspect police are now reacting the way public health officials did at various points during COVID - they see the possibility of something very bad related to their specialty, so they are overly certain it will happen.
It might, and it’s good for all of us to prepare! But we shouldn’t be certain.
I think enough moderate voters would be convinced that she didn’t pick Shapiro due to anti-semitism. I hope they run the numbers on this v depressed progressive turnout.
I think the downside risk of Shapiro is not a fraction of progressives staying home in November - it’s leftists protesting by the convention in two weeks and projecting the idea that Democrats are the party of chaos, driving away swing voters in the fall.
They’re going to protest anyway because they’re paid by Iran and Russia who want a Trump presidency because he easily bought off with campaign donations.
There's a host of things they're dragging up. Some of them are statements he made about pro-Palestine activists some time in the past. Some are about not being appropriately sensitive or competent in handling an aide who had credible sexual harassment claims against them. Some are things about teacher's unions, or disloyalty to past mentors. You can see a lot of them if you check The Nation.
I don't know which of the particular claims are true, which are unique to Shapiro, which are about anything actually significant, but what's notable is that the online left seems to have worked themselves up into a state where they see a lot of problems with Shapiro. Even more notably, they haven't been doing this about any of the others. Four years ago, they did this about Pete Buttigieg, but they aren't doing it now.
That strongly suggests to me that it would be a bad idea for preserving party unity to pick Shapiro, and that basically any of the other candidates would be fine.
Hm, this is an odd interpretation of the dynamic I'm seeing:
- Leftists, locked out of the Dem coalition for many years, essentially held the party hostage, demanding concessions and threatening to turn against the party if their demands were not met--this has been their posture since like the Clinton administration
- Eventually in 2020 Biden made a bunch of concessions to the Left to keep them in the coalition
- The Left rewarded Biden with loyalty--both Bernie and AOC stood by Biden even after his disastrous debate, all the way until he dropped out of the race. This basically made no sense substantively but was a principled stance that was important for key Leftists to make to demonstrate that they could be reliable coalitional partners if given a seat at the table
- The Left's support will transfer to Harris conditional on her maintaining support for various Leftist positions/causes. Lina Kahn is a recent litmus of this, there will likely be others. (As Matt has argued recently, there might therefore be some wisdom in Harris maintaining strategic ambiguity and not being too specific about what personel changes a Harris administration would make!)
^ All that is basically just garden variety coalitional politics. It also explains a lot of what is happening in the GOP and why they've done things like kneecap their own House Speaker. And why there are certain positions within each party that are totally non-negotiable (guns for the GOP; abortion rights for the Dems)--because for each of those issues there's a significantly large and determined faction that will credibly walk from the coalition if their issue isn't supported.
I think two things make the left's behaviour distinctive
1) Very frequent, public, vicious attacks. e.g. labelling Democrats as genocidal, racist, corrupt
2) Making demands there is no realistic prospect of delivering, and that advocating for is only likely to help the GOP, such as decriminalising the border and free healthcare for undocumented migrants.
In a factional dispute, it’s easy to take the worst behavior among on the other side and attribute it to the whole. The leaders of the parties left-wing are not making the vicious attacks you mentioned
I think this piece gets a lot right, and that the Democrats are at their best when they're in their more laid back 'live and let live' version. I also think JD Vance is a great illustration at the way Americans chafe at having politicians and the state more generally pushing hard, value based judgment into people's private lives. It also shows that no matter how many notes you take from European family policies or new traditionalist online movements in America, women (and plenty of men) will not like you if you come off as a sexist or holder of highly retrograde attitudes about womens' place in society.
I would add though that Matt doesn't go far enough when it comes to 'just not doing' things. While I understand that we're awkwardly wandering our way to pretending a bunch of stuff just didn't happen in the teens though 2020 Democrats should remember this next time they think about aggressive ideas about identity or sex or activism in public schools or the work place. A lot of that is, and continues to be, just as weird and in some ways much weirder than anything Vance has said.
Doesn’t Vance show that “don’t be a busybody” is more important politically than “don’t be weird.”
Vance’s personal choices have been something between normal and high functioning. He escaped the working class, graduated from college, graduated from a top law school, made a lot of money, found cultural acclaim, married a beautiful sims. and had children. He’s in an interracial marriage so he’s not completely 1960s but his personal life scores at least an 8 on the normal scale.
Vance is unpopular because he’s taken hard edged stances on abortion and pushed “trad wife” tropes while married to a high earning career woman. People don’t like being told how to live unless they are already living that way.
If I were Vance I would deliberately misconstrue what Dems mean by “weird,” a la, “they think anyone who doesn’t grow up on the coasts and go to college out of state is weird.” Do some identity jiu jitsu!
Sincere question: are we sure he’s “unpopular”? Are his numbers significantly worse than Harris’, or Biden’s? Or is he currently-normal popular, with numbers somewhere between 40 and 50%?
They are a bit worse than Harris’, I think 26-44 against. However, he’s new enough on the national stage that they are quite fluid. The hard edged pro life and pro trad wife stuff doesn’t seem to be working, but Vance still might shift gears
If he does shift gears, no one will know it, because from now on the Trump campaign will have him attending grand openings of bowling alleys in Topeka KS.
My perception is that in the political realm the things tend to go hand in hand. But fair point, one of the great things about America is that we are a pretty tolerant people, particularly when left alone.
It’s interesting how a “normal” Republican like Kemp takes his stand against abortion and then avoids doing anything else to talk about women’s sexuality. Although, there is this, which I think is normal (or at least a normal paternal aspiration) in Georgia no matter what y’all think.
I was raised around guns. I was hunting big game before I could drive. My dad, and my grandfather, would never have done what Kemp does here, not even as a joke. "Never point a gun at something you aren't prepared to shoot" is a pretty basic rule.
Most pro gun Americans were not raised among guns or shoot big game, aren’t particularly knowledgeable about them, and so dad jokes about guns and teenage sex are pretty popular
Southern Republicans who hold statewide office are more moderate than Midwestern ones. In Georgia, white Republicans need ~72% of the white vote to win. That does not encourage hard edged conservatives stances.
Marjorie Taylor Green is what happens in an upcountry district where 54% of the white vote will get a Republican elected. Ohio is sort of in between Georgia and Taylor’s district.
Kemp has greatly impressed me by keeping me free during the pandemic and appointing friends and people I respect to the bench. I still voted for Abrams in ‘22, but it was close.
Being brought up what I’ll call “normal” Montana gun culture where most high school parking lots had pick ups with rifles in their rear window gun racks and gun safety started right along with potty training this ad talks directly to his voters with or without daughters. There should be no conflict between present urban gun control issues and this ad but the viewer has to have the insight to be aware of a the sportsman shooting/hunting life experience.
One of the things that makes politicians look “weird“ or “normal“ is how eager they are to talk about sex. Americans don’t like to hear politicians talk about sex.
I think the part that it gets the most right but will also go the most ignored is that Matt acknowledges Dems are already doing a pretty decent job of being normal, all things considered.
Market for lemons effect. Decent people down want to be assumed as weird by association, thus normies leave and associate with Democrats. This makes GOPpers weirder on average and Dems more normal.
I'm more alluding to the fact that so many of the people on this forum seem to suffer from a sort of Activist Derangement Syndrome. Some activist does something they don't like, and it triggers their own internal Pundit's Fallacy -- "See, THIS is why the Democrats are always fucking up and they should just do everything *I* want them to do".
A lot of this is genuine, legitimate feelings -- I certainly detest certain aspects about the Democratic Party myself -- but it's also genuinely difficult for those of us who try not to be triggered all the time to separate out the unmistakeable influence of right-wing propaganda on this Activist Derangement Syndrome mindset.
To wit, it seems like even for people who consider themselves "immune" to Fox News Brain and are otherwise reasonable centrists, they can't help but occasionally get triggered by the sheer scale and intensity of Fox News' massive nutpicking operation. And it's understandable! A gargantuan media megaphone constantly blasting the left's misdeeds 24/7 is bound to have SOME splash damage beyond its target demographic of brain-wormed boat-parading Boomers.
But it's still annoying AF when I'm just trying to keep my political zen up over here.
I've seen tons of Republicans responding to the weird thing in the last few weeks, and it seems like 98% of it is pictures the same two trans women over and over again saying "the real party of weird." I've never seen them before, but I keep thinking "who are these people, they are almost certainly not Democratic politicians, just a pair of randos."
Whereas the examples of Republicans being weird is actual Republican politicians, not just random people.
I think the contempt many online activist types show for Democrats undermines the associations that many Republicans try to project onto Democrats. This is why punching Left works for Democrats. It collapses that narrative.
The progressive world view is that however you want to live your life, whatever gender you claim, and whatever family situation you desire is entirely your own choice and is to be valued and cherished, but using a plastic straw condemns you to the inner circle of hell, you evil person.
I'd like to see more things move into the former camp, including use of said straws.
Martin Amis in the 90s had a good line about PC, something like, “it’s based on the admirable belief that no one should be ashamed of who he is. What he does, what he says, yes, but not who he is.”
I feel like I am taking crazy pills in this comment section. Drag queens are straightforwardly (ha!) weird! I have not against them other than finding drag shows very boring, but the whole thing is to be a little transgressive and weird by playing around with gender and sex.
Bible thumpers are also weird! Normal people don’t shout about religion in public, just like they don’t shout about sex!
Also, it’s not weird to not want your kid to be trans, and to worry about what influence school and peers at schools might have on them. The most normal parent behavior in the world to want to know what is up with your kids and what they are doing at school. Also the most normal parent behavior to be annoyed at the way schools are run and their many little power trips. Combine those two and you have parents go bananas, especially if the purported logic is “we need to protect your kids from YOU by keeping YOU in the dark”. Uh, no thanks!
I would also file “I want my washing machine to be better, not worse, than my old one” and “I’d like my straws to not dissolve in coffee” as normal preferences.
The nice thing about the plastic straws, gas stoves, and Dr. Seuss' attempted cancellation (remember that?) is that they're usually little progressive fads that everyone talks about for a month and go away a month after that. That fact is also something progressives should think about the next time some niche thing seems like AN CRISIS that needs addressing immediately until the next thing comes up.
I do think that at some point the Left is going to get a reckoning on its mistrust of parents. Parents vote and they want to know what their kid is doing. And Left wing "the state cares more about kids than parents do" philosophies have never worked above the village level.
I find this issue frustrating because I simultaneously believe that the left's mistrust of parents loses them elections, and that much that much of that mistrust is richly deserved.
But isn't the right's attempts to ban gender affirming care for minors a great example of not trusting parents. It is saying, "I don't care what you, your parents and doctor agree is best for your mental health and happiness, I am making this choice for you."
I think that's quite correct actually. The Right absolutely does not trust parents who make decisions they don't like.
But this is one of those unfairnesses like "conservatives are always viewed as better on security" or "liberals are always viewed as better on health care" that are built into politics. The Left is associated with the anti-parent position for any number of reasons. It's part of the brand. And thus the Right can get away with stuff like this (and BTW, the Right is wrong and we should absolutely not ban health care for trans kids that is recommended by doctors and approved by parents) because their brand is pro-parent and ours isn't
I guess maybe leave it up to the discretion of the teacher? Should the teacher report to the parents that little Johnny kissed little Mary? I'm not sure what the boundaries of this police state should be.
The California law does leave it to the discretion of the teacher. The teacher can tell the parents anything he/she wants to tell. The teacher can promise the student he/she will not tell. The teacher can tell the child not to tell him/her anything the child doesn't want the parents to know. The only thing the law forbids is school districts mandating that teachers must "out" gay or trans-curious kids or face disciplinary action if they don't.
If you heard a co-worker believed the world was flat, you'd question everything they ever told you.
You would certainly not say "David thinks the holocaust never happened, and I'm ready for him to do that brain surgery on me"
If Democrats want to build a large tent, they can't be seen promoting stupid ideas that huge majorities disagree with.
Which brings me to the trans issue....
In California, Gaven just signed a bill that allows schools to hide the kids sexual identity from parents.
This opens up the door for kids to get brainwashed by odd people at schools (even staff!), and administrators can hide this from parents.
This is absolutely crazy.
Suppose we were talking about religion. Would we allow a guidance counselor to talk your kids into switching religion, then hide it from the parents?
If we put this to a ballot, do we think this would get less than 80% against?
If you're not from California, you likely don't know the dynamic here: It's a liberal state, but the elected official are further left than the public, so we need to smack them down from time to time via ballot measure.
When California policies like these are described to swing voters, I assume they think "these liberals' brains are broken"
It's a problem. We need these woke fools to stop destroying the coalition.
Sex is a very ancient category of great functional significance. Those who seek to deny its importance value ideology over truth. Also, many of my liberal friends have shamed me and called me a bigot for not wanting gender dysphoric men to compete in women’s sports.
Their view is aesthetically wretched. When I watch the olympics, I want to watch highly trained female bodies striving for perfection. I do not want to watch a drag show or a struggle session. I’m normal on this one.
"Gender dysphoric men" is caring a lot of weight in this sentence. Is there any evidence Imane Khelif has undergone any medical treatment to become a man? You can say that she has high levels of testosterone and potentially DSD, we really really do not know. But she was born a women, grew up a women, and has identified always as a women.
The issue of trans women in sports is really tough, because you truly don't want to have a situation where every women's sport is just won by a recently transitioned athlete. But it's opponents too frequently engage in just legitimately hateful rhetoric. The issue demands thoughtfulness and nuance, but the extremes of both sides rarely give space for that.
This is probably the best overview of the situation with Khelif and Lin I've seen anywhere over the last week. Without speculating too much on things that are truly unknown, but taking into account what *is* known, and explaining why the Olympic committee's statements and policies generally, and for boxing specifically, are the rightful and just target of anger right now (as opposed to either of the boxers in question.)
I have no opinion about the Algerian boxer because I don’t know the facts. But I know the framework.
If she is XX with elevated testosterone, that’s a competitive advantage, and she is no different than a cyclist with naturally high hematocrit. As a trainer I respect said, “to win the tour de France, you must have high hematocrit.” To win an elite boxing competition, high testosterone is useful possibly essential.
If she is XXY or is taking hormones, her situation is not so different than doping.
Ok, so is there a specific example of an olympic athlete competing right now that you are upset about, or is ruining the competitive play of a certain event?
Asking because it's not like the olympics doesn't have rules about this. Lia Thomas was not allowed to compete.
Actually, as I understand it, the Olympics really doesn't have rules on gender qualification -- individual sport sanctioning bodies do. Boxing's governing body was booted from the Olympics for what seem to be unrelated reasons, so there's a bit of a vacuum there.
A few years ago, the top three competitors in a CT high school championship were gender dysphoric men. My understanding is most of the sanctioning bodies have made it difficult for gender dysphoric men to compete in womens’ sports. I’m basically happy with the status quo. The problem is many trans activists aren’t.
There is no condition--not even a disorder/difference of sexual development (DSD) that results in male-levels of testosterone in females.
There are several DSDs affecting XY individuals that result in them appearing at birth and before puberty to be female, when in fact they are male and go through a male-typical puberty.
I won't try to litigate what is normal or not but doing things like:
Calling sex a "very ancient category of great functional significance"
Caring deeply about women's sports.
Watching the Olympics(outside of the few exceptions)
Wanting to "...watch highly trained female bodies striving for perfection"
are all things that are probably "atypical" for the average voter.
Many people care about sports. Fewer care about specifically women's sports. Even fewer care about the niche women's sports in the Olympics. Even fewer care about the participation rules for women's sports in the Olympics.
I think what's nonpalatable, and shortsighted, is the idea that kids have some sort of inborn gender identity (a culturally contingent thing of there ever was one) that trumps their own biological body, to such a degree that it's better to do surgery or other permanent medical interventions on kids than work on building a society that lets everyone be comfortable and themselves in the body they were born with.
I agree with you. Although nonpalatable and shortsighted is smoothing the rough edges of the harms of trans indoctrination that's gonna result in many destroyed lives that even the more liberal societies of western Europe have now turned their backs on. If some PhD students and college professors want to examine gender theory on a Teams call in each other's assholes, that's fine. But teaching it as righteous settled science is impossibly immoral and/or stupid.
Agreed. It’s the “this is orthodox and you have to endure trainings about it and watch what you say” part is what enrages the normies, as well as stuff that actually impacts them, like sports, restrooms, schools etc. Doubt most people would care all that much if you were just allowed to say “eh, seems crazy to me man but whatever; you do you” like they are for any other weird beliefs, like Scientology.
Whether people would say the words that sex is a very ancient category of great functional significance or not (almost certainly not mostly) does not mean that this isn’t on of the most socially normie views ever.
They reason people didn’t say it is because it was so normie that you did have to….until now.
I absolutely agree “let’s watch these these women have beautiful bodies and showed grit and character in training perform amazing feats of athleticism” is not a majority view. However, it’s one that straight men who value female excellence can easily embrace and I think our society would be better if more people thought this way.
This attitude does not merely extend to elite sports. I can admire a 52 year old woman for being a 4.0 pickleball player. I certainly admire that choice more than getting fat and watching tv or grinding the corporate grind to buy fancy baubles.
I call bullshit on this supposed admiration for female excellence in sports by traditionalists. Ten years ago it was very common for the WNBA to be the butt of jokes by conservatives and bro types about how bad women's sports were to watch, and the only reason that changed is that it became a useful way to go after trans people.
I feel like straight men who want to look at women with "beautiful bodies" have a nearly endless supply available on TV or the internet and trans people playing sports or not doesn't even change that on the margins.
And I know pickleball is getting more popular what I definitely didn't know what a 4.0 pickleball player is. Sounds like that 52 year old woman is quite athletically gifted though.
There are about 200 legitimate 4.0 men and 20 legitimate 4.0 women in Georgia, though a good college tennis player who practiced for six months would be at least a 4.0.
For comparison, the 19 year old former quarterback of our local high school who plays D1 baseball has played pickleball for two months and is a weak 4.0.
I’ve played for 3 years and am a weak/mid grade 3.5. If I’m ever a 4.0, it will be in the 50+ category. I’m currently 47, my pickleball prime will start in 2027.
I like your comment up until the last sentence. However, many people who don’t give a shit about women’s sports are highly invested in participation rules for women’s sports. It’s a cultural idiosyncrasy of our time.
I don't care about almost all sports. But I care about justice and common sense, which override my indifference to women's sports. I don't ride public buses, but I care if seats are distributed based on immutable characteristics.
The weird part isn't the schools needing to do hormone and genital checks, its the males who make it necessary! It's like a store putting tags on things is weird because they are trying to stop shop lifting when it's the people shop lifting who are weird.
"It would seem strange if middle or high schools started imposing hormone or genital checks on students trying to play sports."
Not middle school or high school, but my college required preliminarily getting a complete physical (which included the infamous "turn your head and cough" and other intimate examinations) from a doctor to get a membership for the school athletic center, and that was about 30 years ago.
FWIW, when I was a middle schooler trying out for the high school fencing team in 1999, I had to have my doctor fill out a form that basically amounted to "Are you going through puberty yet?" but had some very specific anatomical questions about things like pubic hair. The goal was to make sure I'd developed enough to participate safely. (Not really an issue for fencing, but it would have been the same form if I'd been a football prodigy or something). So yes, it seems strange, but it's not totally out of the realm of things public schools in America actually have done in the fairly recent past.
This makes you weird, sorry. I have centrist views on this issue but above all I really don’t care very much. Also, it’s not ”the freedom to define categories in the way I want” that you seem to defend, but the world conforming to your particular ideas.
What difference does it make in your day to day life? Is it politics as sports and you’re like someone getting all worked up about the new Yankees coach and generally obsessing over something that has absolutely nothing to do with them?
I live in the one of the most liberal places in the country and I’ve never heard of such a thing. Screeching about things you’ve only heard about on the internet is deeply weird. Touch grass, as they say.
Jumping off of this is all the Olympic “controversies” regarding the opening ceremony and the Algerian boxer. Beyond anything else my reaction is “none of this involved anything American. Why is this part of a Presidential race?”
She lost at least nine boxing bouts (all to other women, of course). This seems like a total non-story. Conservatives can't resist the urge to butt in.,
Yea, while I think there is plenty of stupidity to go around on this general topic the conservatives are currently winning the gold for (apparently) fact free meltdown in women's olympic boxing.
Maybe to square the circle a bit. Yes I think David is underselling how popular the Olympics is generally. Trust me its a topic of discussion in our office as well. In fact we have fun joking about every two years, we end up becoming "experts" in an event we only watch every four years. Having said that, unless we're talking about American football, there is no event (sporting or otherwise) that is actually going to capture the imagination and attention of more than 25% of Americans with perhaps the notable exception of Taylor Swift and the Barbie movie last year. Almost by definition in today's media environment anything you are super into, is going to be "weird" in the sense the overwhelming majority of Americans are not going to care.
The second part of David's point I couldn't agree with more. I was looking at all the faux outrage over the opening ceremonies and my reaction besides "why do you care" was "Wait, the French have some dare I say weird parts of their culture including particular weird art? You don't say, it's almost as though their French".
There are very few things that get lots of Americans invested in, so when 1/3 of them are, its a big deal. Game of Thrones was a social phenomena and had only a fraction of the audience of the Olympics.
As for outrage about the opening show - wasn't that the point of it? You don't do *that* presentation for people to walk away with "oh that was nice" reactions. It was a Dali piece, not a Rockwell.
There’s something about it that really just seems to break a lot of people’s brains. It becomes, seemingly, the core of their political and personal identity. When people bring it up unprompted, I worry that they need psychiatric help.
It's a way to test whether the person is of sound mind or a political zealot willing to argue anything they're told from their masters.
"I worry that they need psychiatric help."
Says the guy who was told 5 minutes ago - and went along with it - that toddlers can choose their gender, but gender is too difficult a topic for a Supreme Court Justice to comment on. The comedy is rich. RICH!
Except the topic I brought up IS related and not brought up from nothing. As I wrote above, the subject of "weird" is current political branding. Celebrating trans-ing the world is fucking weird. Beyond weird to almost everyone, including half of Democrats. And thus, it's directly related to the topic.
Sure and, technically, the lady who told me about how a DJ was sending out radio waves to lock her bones from the US Bank Tower wasn’t *technically* coming from totally out of left field. I had, after all, said I was waiting for the bus and she’d missed it once on account of her locked bones.
I think the pro-trans argument isn't that toddlers can choose their gender, it's that everyone has an intrinsic gender, regardless of their age, which is not a choice. A toddler saying "I'm a boy" or "I'm a girl" is not making a choice, they are reporting a fact about themselves. Saying "I'm a girl" is no different than saying "I have a nose."
This is why all the anti-trans arguments that kids are too young to choose their gender don't make any sense. The fact that people keep making them indicates to me that they are extraordinarily bad at cognitive empathy. They believe that being trans is a choice, and they literally cannot imagine that anyone believes otherwise. Since they are not able to accurately imagine what their opponents believe, they naturally assume that their opponents don't really hold those beliefs and are just pretending to hold them due to obedience or conformity.
I think it's true that a lot of gender skeptics, or whatever you want to call them, are lacking in empathy. There's a lot of people going out of their way to be mean, call people by the gender they don't prefer, refer to them as crazy, etc.
However, I think you, like a lot of people taking a fairly maximalist position in favor of youth gender care, may have an epistemological problem of your own, which is a distorted idea of how strong the evidence is for your position and how convincing others should find your position. For instance, when you say "everyone has an intrinsic gender, regardless of their age, which is not a choice," it gives me two questions. One is how you know this? If by "regardless of their age" you mean that this gender doesn't change throughout a person's life, I think there are actually a lot of cases of people who experienced gender dysphoria but then later didn't, as well as people who were given gender-affirming care despite not reporting signs of gender dysphoria from a young age. So it seems to me you are painting kind of a glib picture here.
In another comment you say that the vast majority of children transitioning have not come under any influence in doing so but are responding to their authentic feelings. Again I would have to ask how we can be sure of this. The number of people (particularly young people) transitioning has grown far too quickly for this question to be studied effectively. You talk about people making convenient assumptions; it certainly seems to me like you're making some of your own. The issue of youth gender care would definitely go much more smoothly if we all shared your premises, but I don't think there's sufficient evidence to do that as yet.
On the subject of empathy, I found this piece, though it's just one person's experience, to be a really important perspective on how this is sometimes experienced by kids on the ground, and how it's not always a matter of simply affirming an innate truth about themselves that's always been clear. https://lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name
I referred to what I said as "the pro-trans argument" for a reason. It is not 100% what I believe, my own views are a bit less maximalist. I was attempting to help people get into the headspace of the opposite view, rather than state what I think.
As it happens, I do not think all humans have a strong, innate, and sense of gender. I think one likely reason why some people have difficulty empathizing with trans people is that some people have a weak or indifferent internal sense of gender. There are anecdotal reports of some cis people who are highly satisfied and strongly identify with their gender, sort of the opposite of gender dysphoria, which indicates that a felt sense of gender is not unique to trans people. This is a hard topic to study because it must rely on introspection and self report. Scott Alexander's writing on the topic great influenced my thoughts on it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/
It isn't totally implausible to me that at least some of the recent upswing in gender dysphoria among young people might be false positives generated by social conformity. However, instances of it, like the ones in the link you cited, seem to be examples of people developing gender dysphoria in order to fit into a peer group. The scenario I was responding to, where malicious adult authority figures secretly indoctrinate kids, is paranoid hogwash. It also demonstrates a gross lack of understanding of child and adolescent psychology, young people tend to absorb beliefs from their peers, not from instruction by adults.
It’s always surprising when otherwise sane people believe it’s NOT insane to think a person can deny science and force others and society to do so.
There are two sexes, no genders, and a hell of a lot of mental disorders worth treating, not celebrating. You’re fucked in the head if you think otherwise and worthy of no intellectual respect.
Weird is not close to an accurate and strong enough descriptor.
Writing like 20 posts about how everyone who doesn't agree with your views on gender and sexuality is "fucked in the head" in the comment section of a Substack post that had nothing to do with transgenderism in the first place is definitely totally normal and not weird at all
It speaks to your penchant to self-delude and/or accept anything as truth. …and then call others weird, which supposedly was cool. (Someone tell Austin.)
Accepting the delusion of the mentally ill isn’t “my view” any more than “water is wet” is my view. It just is. So, not only believing 1+1 is whatever you want, but politicizing and censuring those who strongly believe 1+1=2, IS fucked in the head.
a centrist and you sound like a foaming at the mouth radical who is not open to rational arguments and science. You are clearly very emotional about this issue.
1) How am I "not open to rational arguments and science"?
2) I feel calm, but even if I was emotional, that does not invalidate a statement.
3) If a centrist is now a person who calls another a "foaming at the mouth radical" for stating there are 2 sexes and 0 genders, then guilty as charged.
You certainly can. It would depend on the circumstances. But thinking you're some made up gender and believing in God are very different things.
Believing in God can be a lot of things and generally impossible to disprove. (Likewise, being an atheist is ironic because it's sort of its own religion. Afterall, what kind of egomaniac thinks they've got the universe figured out. Agnosticism is rational. But I digress.) While if I'm a man or woman and I decide I'm the opposite, what the hell does that even mean? You're still physically you and even if you hack yourself, you're just you but after market. Same DNA.
You can call yourself all the gender names and attempt to change language to suit yourself, but you're still what you were. And if you're spending that much time hacking yourself and changing language, you're mentally ill. And we, as a society, need to help people accept themselves, not cater to their untruths possibly for the greed of certain individuals. And we need to be careful not let kids - who are just humans slowly integrating into adulthood - mistake the difficult transition to adulthood to being in the wrong body.
I agree. And my words are born from frustration with the state of society and those in power clearly wanting people to be mindless tribalists.
I appreciate your comment. And I ask this earnestly, do you think they're winnable? If you're capable of being duped into either believing there's 6,969 genders or just ignoring the insanity of it, do you think you're capable changing your mind when that would mean agreeing with people you condescend to and vilify? Pride is a powerful feeling.
My experience is that the vast majority of people just haven't thought about it very much and are inclined to believe those they see as calling for tolerance. I can sometimes bring up the controversies with people who trust me, but it's still a slow process. I'm encouraged by what's been happening in Europe, so I think things can get better though.
Agreed. The only shot is someone trusts intentions. And even then, it's a difficult sell. You gotta plant the seed in hopefully fertile soil and let um be.
The difficulty is, one part due to siding with your team/tribalism; one part cause du jour/being "a smart progressive"; one part wrapping yourself in self-righteous tolerance; and last but most powerfully, if you're not for it, you're against it and THEN you are a baddy and will be excommunicated. Throw in the fact that changing your mind on this means admitting how insane - and in some cases immoral - the whole thing is. To many, they'd rather keep riding it out than knee cap their pride. And the longer you go supporting nonsense the more difficult it is to change.
You clearly have not looked into the issue in a rational way at all. There are two sexes plus intersex individuals (extremely few) and there is a thing called gender dysphoria - it’s universal and seen across time and place - but we don’t know exactly how common it is or it works. This is the current scientific standpoint. It says nothing about bathrooms, sports etc. You standpoint is an unexamined conservative gut feeling.
1) "You clearly have not looked into the issue in a rational way at all."
We'll agree to disagree, but it's ironic the person summing up a biology textbook is being told he not thinking in a "rational way at all"
2) "There are two sexes plus intersex individuals (extremely few)"
Intersex... Hermaphrodites... whatever you want to call them... are very rare. This is obvious. It's also obvious that they are anomalies in the same way having 12 fingers is an anomaly. (Shout out Antonio Alfonseca!) But people still say "humans have 10 fingers" and we understand what they're talking about. So when you disagree the way you did, you seem to be making a bad faith argument. Also, being born with the physical appearance of both sets of genitals technically isn't a 3rd sex. It's the combination of the two. But we're not arguing that. The point is, GENERALLY 99+% of humans are clearly 1 of 2 sexes.
3) "there is a thing called gender dysphoria - it’s universal and seen across time and place - but we don’t know exactly how common it is or it works."
I'm not sure what you're really saying here. Kinda sounds like the beginning of a Star Trek episode. But yes, mental illnesses exist. Treat them. Don't celebrate them. Are you throwing confetti at Anorexics? Speaking of throwing, how would a Bulimic Pride Parade go? You people are walking troves of comedy.
4) "It says nothing about bathrooms, sports etc. You standpoint is an unexamined conservative gut feeling."
It's not a gut feeling any more than 1+1=2 is a gut feeling. You haven't explained gender at all. But you have been pompously condescending. Although I appreciate your politeness.
To be maximally charitable to Brad, I think he’s trying to say that “gender “ is meaningless apart from sex/we should talk about people’s sex, not gender.
I'm not saying I *agree* with Brad, I'm trying to interpret what he said in a way that makes some sense.
I'm ... skeptical as to how much historical accounts of gender dysphoria apply to our modern society, which has very non-traditional gender norms.
Story time!
There was a young woman named Nawojka who lived in medieval Poland, back when only men were allowed to be university students. Nawojka was passionate about learning, so she dressed up as a man and enrolled at the Jagiellonian University (Poland's oldest and still most renowned university, kind of the Polish Harvard). She quickly came to be known as a brilliant student. But then, one day, she fell sick, and one of her concerned professors visited her at home and found out that she was a woman. Such outrage! She was flogged and expelled from the university (this was actually a sign of leniency; some of the authorities talked about the death penalty for her, but there was an outcry from her fellow students.) She ended up becoming a nun.
So here's my question: was Nawojka gender dysphoric, or was she rebelling against the limitations of her time, in which only men were allowed to study at the university? Had Nawojka been able to study at the university *as a woman*, would she have tried to pass herself off as a man?
I think you will find that the point of what I am saying is that the definition of gender isn't a thing that I or most people care too much about on an abstract level.
It doesn't matter in our day to day lives that much.
Look, I don't care about the definition of gender as it relates to my ability to exist. Maybe we agree there.
Similarly, I don't care about cricket matches or new technology in calf implants. But in all cases, if objectively false statements or weak theories are being taught and celebrated throughout society causing exponential increases in cases of children claiming to be trans, I care. And if you follow the $cience to find standard medical practice in many areas is not to question “affirming” care for significant financial gain, then I care even more. I wanna get to the heart of the issue. And to do that, you gotta wake people up.
So sure, don't care about something that's abstract ...until it worth caring about. And now it is. Most people don't have the stones or the mental fortitude to call it what it is because it's your team that aligned with the illogic and greed. Fuck teams, David. We're all people. My team is my family, community, and any well-meaning like-minded person trying build a better more sustainable world. (And I don't just mean sorting recyclable plastics #'s 1-7.)
All public school guidance around gender identity education, pronouns, sport inclusion, and bathrooms have been significantly altered to accommodate trans students;
Title IX is currently being amended to include gender identity (itself not defined in any meaningful way) alongside sex, with little regard to the inherent tension between those two concepts;
While many red states are banning medical transition for minors, blue states are reacting thermostatically and becoming sanctuary cities, including and up to CA allowing runaway minors to get gender affirming medical care from the state and barring any state actors from coordinating or communicating with disapproving parents;
Misgendering--literally the correct sexing of a person who identifies as a sex other than what they are--is illegal in many settings, and punishable by jail time in Canada and parts of the UK;
Sex-segregated areas like prisons, bathrooms, gym changing rooms, spas, and rape centers are, in many states like CA, by definition no longer sex-segregated, and anyone who identifies as a woman may use them regardless of any medical transition;
Who are you thinking of when you imagine the average person?
Half the population is female--that means females don't have sex-segregated sporting opportunities, refuges, safe spaces anymore.
A huge number of kids in public schools alone are being educated on gender identity starting in elementary school. If you can explain to me how it's possible to tell an 8 year old about gender identity in a way that isn't enormously confusing and potentially damaging, I'm all ears.
So that's women especially, and kids--along with every kid's parents. It's not 100% of people, but does that not scoop up a majority of "average"?
While our free speech laws in the US remain fairly robust compared to Canada or the UK, social norms have, at break-neck speed, made it risky and even professionally suicidal to mention anything around this topic, in universities, in careers, in government.
In order to actually get a sex change, you need parental consent. This law just seems to me like a way to ensure that kids have an adult to talk to if they're questioning their sexuality/gender and don't feel comfortable coming out to their parents yet.
California is a sanctuary state. If a 15 year old runs away from parents in TX, they can get gender affirming care in CA from the state, and no state-affiliated adult can release information to the parents in TX about it.
That’s a reasonable intention but there are a lot of ways that can go off the rails. The question should be whether the law promotes nuance and safeguards.
Do you have any real evidence that "woke fools" are actually brainwashing kids? No, of course not, because it's not freaking happening.
This is why the wierdness critique appeals to normies: Because people like you get so damned obsessed with seeing a fucking conspiracy behind everything you don't like, when the truth is that Hanlon's Razor almost always points us in the right direction towards well-intentioned-but-misguided people doing things that trigger our biases.
I don't know about "brainwashing" but it's pretty well established that the dubious concept of an innate, essential "gender identity" is being taught in public schools as an established scientific fact. That's what we're debating about, right?
>>it's pretty well established that the dubious concept of an innate, essential "gender identity" is being taught in public schools as an established scientific fact
No. No. No.
This is a series of overgeneralizations, not "pretty well established".
Which public schools are you referring to? I'm pretty sure that East Podunk High barely has a sex ed program, let alone one where any form of ideology about gender is being taught. Perhaps some handful of schools in ultra-liberal enclaves might have a modern gender studies elective or have some sort of gender-ideology-inflected segment of their sex-ed/health classes, but this is a laughably tiny minority relative to the proportion of schools that offer, say, Mandarin. It does not remotely constitute an organized attempt to "teach" an "established scientific fact" "in public schools".
Outside of those extremes, most mainstream schools teach some form of sex ed that tries to avoid condemning nor endorsing any particular sexuality or sexual activity, and teach some form of pluralistic tolerance for sexual and gender minorities, and have spent the last generation trying to stamp out bullying of ANY kind. Where efforts exist to be encouraging towards sexual and gender minorities, those are focused not on "brainwashing" or "indoctrinating" or teaching any specific formulation "as an established scientific fact", but rather on encouraging students to explore their self-knowledge.
I'm pretty confident in declaring that there is not a single public school in this entire nation where students are being graded on whether they are willing to affirm an "innate, essential 'gender identity' as an established scientific fact". There is no unified curriculum for teaching this, not even a "loosely-unified-but-hotly-contested" curriculum like one might expect for economics or philosophy electives.
Across the board, what we see is confirmation after confirmation of Hanlon's Razor: Mostly good people making mostly good choices, some accidentally going a little too far.
I believe MY has pointed out that public schools in the US are very decentralized, there are lots of different things happening in different places, and it's hard to say with any confidence how widespread any of these things are. And that's all true.
"Resources and lesson plans for those who want to teach about gender identity are becoming much more common. Seven states now require that curriculums include LGBTQ topics. The National Sex Education Standards, developed by experts and advocacy groups, name gender identity as one of seven essential topics, alongside puberty, consent, sexual orientation and other subjects. And the federal government recommends that schools include gender identity in their sex education programs."
When you say it's just a matter of "encouraging students to explore their self-knowledge" you're kind of illustrating the problem here. Gender is a cultural construct; that's what the word means; that's what differentiates it from "sex". The difference here is subtle enough that many college-educated adults mix them up on a regular basis. There's no way young children are going to be able to parse the nuance here. Yet you take it as given they have "self knowledge" on this subject that they need to be encouraged to "explore"?
Teach kids that everyone is different, the "rules" of gender are arbitrary and sometimes repressive, and everyone should be accepted as they are as long as they're not hurting anyone -- fine, great. But all this secular gnosticism just seems like a recipe for confusing the fuck out of gender non-conforming young people, and the medicalization of these differences definitely raises the stakes. It's definitely weird, and people are right to be upset.
You forget about Obama's dear colleague letter at the end of his presidency, largely centering around Gavin Grimm, a trans kid in a public school requesting to use male bathrooms.
Gov't guidance to public schools made it clear that a failure to accommodate trans kids--and I'll come back to what that means--would place them under scrutiny for future funding.
Who provided the education around accommodations? Activist groups like GLAAD and the HRC, whose recommendations have so often become unofficial school policy for many public schools.
Guidelines weren't the question at hand. The OP contended that "it's pretty well established that the dubious concept of an innate, essential "gender identity" is being taught in public schools as an established scientific fact".
That's a direct quote. It has nothing to do with bathroom guidelines, it has to do with curricula and alleged indoctrination.
Guidelines about accommodating trans students opened the door for advocacy groups to go into schools and provide a host of new interventions, including, yes, instruction on gender identity in classrooms that could be fairly described as "indoctrination" if one takes at face value that kids under 14 are going to have a hard time understanding the concept of gender identity in a way that doesn't make a 7 year old boy who likes Disney princesses wonder if he's really a girl.
I think this post is a very good example for the limits of the "weird" rhetoric, because in a lot of cases, you can spin it both ways. This law covers a complex debate involving gender roles, biology, data privacy, child-parent relations and duty of care. The probability that they nailed all those dimensions with their law is pretty low. It's also perfectly possible that this law actually improves the lives of the children affected.
I also think though, as you said, that putting this topic into the center of debate is probably no help electorally, because at first glance, it looks VERY weird. You need to look into the underlying debate to really understand what this law is trying to address, which obviously nobody does. And you might still find it weird afterwards!
On the other hand, I also think it's very weird to yell "SCHOOL STAFF WILL BRAINWASH CHILDREN" at each and every opportunity because of this law. This is one of those cases where you can paint proponents and vocal opponents equally as "weird".
I think most people think things like "Drag Queens are a bit weird" and also "Talking about Drag Queens all the time is a bit weird".
Caring about things in politics is "weird" and anything you are trying to convince people that an issue they don't care about is very important you risk sound like a "weirdo".
These are false equivalencies. Drag queens have been around and were barely topics of any conversation. Drag queens dragging with little kids - “it won’t suck itself” - is new. And if it’s not new it’s new to most people. Either way, it should not exist anywhere in a functioning health society that rightfully criminalizes pedophilia and the encouraged sexualizing of kids. The moment people stop talking about this, society has officially given up.
Technically all education is brainwashing. Or at least brain wiring. The concern is wiring in a harmful, illogical, impractical way filled with falsehoods instead of societally and personally positive beneficial facts that can build skills and self-reliance.
I would suggest the "less weird" framing on this issue is not to argue about the purported risk of "brainwashing," but instead to point out that in many instances literally the EXACT same people who claim that being trans drastically increases the likelihood of a minor attempting suicide are also supporting legislation to facilitate school officials concealing students' said same psychiatric condition from their parents.
My understanding is that at least some states have protections for parent access into teenage physical/mental health records already. For example, if a student tells a teacher that they're self-harming or depressed, that's not necessarily going to get back to the parent (from experience).
I suspect a lot of this is because a lot of issues with depression/mental health can stem from the home environment, and letting the parent in can make things worse. If the school knows then oftentimes it is because the student has made the choice to confide in a trusted adult there; that they haven't talked to their parents says something.
It also really doesn't seem like the schools place to "out" a kid to their parents. I suspect in the 80s and 90s gay kids had much more suicidal ideation, I'm not sure schools being forced to tell parents that their kid was gay would have improved the situation much.
If we're talking about elementary/early middle school age, then parents should probably be let know that their child is questioning their gender. Once we get to late middle/high school though, this change seems more like a realignment to existing practice.
I'd tentatively say that we should tie disclosure to the age of minor sexual consent -- the age at which minors are allowed to consent to other minors.
Most states have "Romeo and Juliet" laws on the books so that they don't have to go charging 15- and 16-year olds with pederasty just because they roll in the hay like countless generations have over the ages. If that age of consent is 15, then great, that's the age where kids should be protected from parents trying to control their personal lives.
Teen pregnancy is at an historic low. Whatever the kids are doing behind closed doors, it's fucking WORKING at not getting them pregnant. It's time to recognize that and back off the parental rights bullshit, which was always a shibboleth for stopping teen pregnancy.
Also, I'd prefer to add a "likely abuse" exception to these disclosure laws. If the child is likely to get abused, then the school doesn't have to disclose. If it can't be proved that the child is likely to get abused, then the school MUST disclose. Any kid that comes out in school must automatically be assessed for likelihood of abuse -- and this doesn't need to be an inquisition, it just needs to be a few sessions of, "Hey, how do you feel about your home life? Are you good?". On the flip side, I think that until the whole culture war subsides, we should have one of those 10-year laws on the books that automatically assigns social workers to the houses of any kids that come out. Despite cultural stereotypes, social workers aren't stupid, and they can pick up on abuse or likely abuse pretty easily. They should serve as an early warning system so that kids don't get trapped in shitty situations.
It seems to me that if a school has reason to believe a child is being or likely to be abused for any reason then the proper course is not so much to keep it a secret as it is to refer the matter to CPS and/or law enforcement. I would hope it is uncontroversial that there should be a protocol for things like that.
But I also think we need to be clear about what 'abuse' means. Beating or starving a child is abuse, and the state needs to intervene. However what it sounds like we're really talking about in this context is something closer to 'child's family has values different than those of the school administration.' That's not a good road for an institution that is supposed to serve the broader public to go down. I also think the public sector is kidding itself if it thinks it will win those sorts of battles over the long term.
I would include verbal abuse and overly harsh punishment. Locking a child in their room without beating them isn't necessarily violent, but it's clearly crossing a moral line that we should not tolerate in our social contract.
I can concede that at a certain point the line gets fuzzy and reasonable people can disagree about where and when it has been crossed. As unsatisfying as it may be we have to rely on the courts to work things like that out.
To use your own examples though, are we really going to treat anyone who has yelled at their child and/or sent them to their room for disciplinary reasons as a potential abuser? At minimum I am not sure there is a mandate for that and I am very skeptical that trying via the public schools would make the world a better place.
Abuse, in some states, now includes refusing to allow a child to transition socially or medically. Again, CA has laws about this, and court cases I can refer you to, of parents having their kids taken away because they were not sufficiently supportive of transition.
I wish more of the laws currently being enacted followed this, though. There is an assumption--most notably in the new CA law--that parents will by default abuse their children upon finding out the kids are gay or trans, with zero caveats about needing good reason to think so.
Many kids have strict or abusive or borderline abusive home environments. I think we all went to school with a kid who got a violent response to bad grades. Do schools stop sending out report cards to the parents of kids who get bad grades because they assume the parents will abuse the kids? No. They must wait until there's evidence of abuse, and then they are mandatory reporters.
I always thought the principles 'don't lie to parents about psychological conditions manifesting in their children and don't base instruction in ideas with little scientific basis' were both not weird and put me firmly left of center, especially the second part. But now we have this debate.
This comment section shows me that "don't lie to parents about psychological conditions manifesting in their children and don't base instruction in ideas with little scientific basis" now may put you right of center.
Oh I have one or two views that are way more heretical than this but even then my net alignment still seems about right. Few people are in complete lock step with the party they vote for on everything.
I don't know about "few", only because many people are either too ignorant/fat 'n happy to know what they would or wouldn't align with or are just followers. Ironically, I've found the people who often make outward claims about their individuality are the biggest sheep desperately in need of group validation. Sure they'll try to stand out by pretending to take bold stances or just calling their stance bold, but it's generally the safe stance pre-chosen and designed to be the safe radical stance.
Doesn't the argument for psychiatric confidentiality in general apply here? If it becomes known that the person you are confiding in will spill the beans to other people, especially other people with authority over you, you'd have to be a fool to confide in them in the first place. If school officials are required to report a student's condition to their parents, any student with half a brain will make sure school officials never find out about it. The end result will be that students keep anything wrong with them to themselves and never confide in anyone about it. Instead of just being concealed from their parents, their condition is now concealed from everybody. This seems obviously worse.
Conversely, at least before college, students normally spend much more time outside of school in situations where either their families can directly monitor them or where their families are the ones with the capability to warn someone else to monitor them for self-harm.
To put it another way, I would guess without hesitation that minors make vastly more suicide attempts *outside* of school than on school grounds and during school hours. It seems "obviously worse" to me for the people who only have responsibility for supervising the minor for 6 to 8 hours a day, five days a week, in a very limited geographic area (and generally have little to no sense of personal connection with the student or knowledge of their baseline behavior) to hide information from the people who have responsibility for supervising the student the entire rest of the day, weekends/holidays, over the entire rest of the planet and who (in most, admittedly not all, situations) have deep personal motivations to keep the student safe and can more easily watch for and detect concerning changes in behavior.
What you're saying seems like an argument about mandatory reporting in general. Teachers are required to report suspected abuse, but some kids don't want to get their parents in trouble. So one could apply your argument: "Now instead of opening up about what's happening, kids will keep their abuse to themselves, which seems obviously worse." The idea behind mandatory reporting is that there may be people who can help the kids with what they're going through, people who have the kids' best interests at heart.
It isn't a fully general argument against mandatory reporting. Mandatory reporters are supposed to report things they notice about kids, not just things kids intentionally confide in them. They are also supposed to report to child welfare agencies, not parents. The issue here seems to be that some people think reporting on kid's LGBT identities to their parents will allow their parents to "help" them, while others think it will put them in danger.
To complicate things further, I just looked up the history of mandatory reporting laws, and it isn't clear how effective they are at protecting kids. Some studies have found they have no effect, while others have found they generate a lot of false positives.
I don't totally see the relevance about reporting what one notices about kids. The point I was making is that professionals in many fields—school, but also psychiatry which you mentioned—are required to disclose things that are told to them, even though this may make someone reluctant to unburden themselves. (The point about false positives is an interesting one from a policy perspective; I'm not sure if it affects the point I was making about principle.)
I think you've correctly identified the crux of the issue, and your scare quotes around "help" suggest (pardon me if I'm reading you wrong) that you're highly skeptical of the idea that parents have their kids' best interests in mind. (You also seemed to suggest that reporting to child welfare would be more acceptable than reporting to a child's parents, but again, sorry if I'm misreading you.) Whereas I think most people think that almost all parents have their kids' best interests in mind, and I think most people are correct about that. We give parents tremendous leeway in kids' lives, and we expect the state to keep parents very well informed about their kids. I'm sure you can think of examples without me having to supply any, but I thought this post by SB commenter Dilan Esper covered a lot of good ground: https://dilanesper.substack.com/p/a-lot-of-people-on-the-left-dont
Regarding the trans issue specifically, I definitely think many parents will have a lot of concerned questions about the prospect of their child transitioning, but I think that's appropriate—it's a big step (or a series of big steps) with potentially serious and even irreversible effects! Sometimes it's the right step to take, but the idea that parents wouldn't be made aware that the step was even being considered strikes me as willfully ignoring the part parents play in kids' lives.
I wouldn't say I'm skeptical of the idea that parents have their kids' best interests in mind. I think that is true of nearly all parents. What I am skeptical of is that parents always hold accurate beliefs about what is in their kids' best interest. I think parents who support their child's transition, and those who vehemently oppose it, both think what they are doing will benefit their child. The difference is that one of them is correct and one isn't.
Taking examples unrelated to trans issues, I am sure parents who punish their children for changing religions think they are doing what is best for their child. Parents who don't vaccinate their kids think they are doing so as well. So do parents who send unruly teens to those abusive troubled teen camps that don't work. I'm sure all those parents had the best intentions for their kids, but we all know what good intentions are used to pave...
I don’t understand your point about religion. The school already isn’t required to notify the parents of students changing their religion, right?
I don’t care much about the secret trans issue because I think it probably only affects like 100 people in the country, but it seems to me that the correct policy is to not require the school to notify the parents of sexual identity if the kid wants to keep it secret.
I’d probably just leave it up to the schools. If a kid says “please don’t tell my dad because he’ll disown me and kick me out of the house” I don’t think we should have a law that removes teacher/administrator discretion.
The school won't notify the parents about the students' religion because the school isn't involved in their religions at all. That is, teachers and counselors won't suggest to students that they may be happier in a different religion, organize religious ceremonies, or supply students with religious clothing or other articles. They will do equivalent things related to gender transition.
A lot of this boils down to the basic discomfort of the public school system requiring us to put our kids in the care of a teacher - someone we don’t know, don’t have leverage over, and don’t have particular reasons to think will exercise good judgment. If you were hiring a governess, and the governess told you “look sometimes your kid tells me things in confidence, and in order to maintain their trust, among other reasons, it’s important for me to keep their confidentiality”, it’s at least possible you’ll be fine with that - because you know the governess and specifically hired her to take care of your kids. Totally different dynamic when it’s a faceless employee of the state (ie the institution that can’t fix the pothole at the end of your street in fewer than 3 years) with an M.Ed degree.
They aren't identical because only one invites a lifetime of medicalization.
But I will say, being normal means not obsessing about the issue. Although I see some of the same absurdities David calls out, I also get your point that it's ultimately affecting a very small number of people.
Well, that depends on the extent of the anti-gay feelings of the parents. Outing a gay student could conceivably result in physical abuse, or being forced into one of those conversion therapy operations. I think if the anti-trans contingent did not keep upping the stakes, everyone else could probably have a more reasoned response/strategy for the small number of kids who might eventually transition.
> Outing a gay student could conceivably result in physical abuse, or being forced into one of those conversion therapy operations.
Is that still a thing even? That super weird guy in the Biden administration (the one stealing women's luggage) had to invent stories about conversion therapy to gain clout.
> I think if the anti-trans contingent did not keep upping the stakes,
To be fair, I'm pretty sure it's the other side that's constantly pushing the boundaries.
If a kid comes out as gay, there is nothing that the school is supposed to do about it.
If a kid comes out as trans, there are a host of interventions that the school is urged or required to do--things that will make it clear to all other students and teachers that the kid is trans.
The only people left out of this are the parents. It's not a secret in the school that the kid is trans, whereas it may well be or stay a secret that the kid is gay.
What's more, as James C says below, there is a *medical pathway* that is *recommended treatment* (don't get me started) for kids who come out as trans. There is no such medical pathway for gay kids.
Parents don't expect to learn anything about their kids' romantic lives from their teachers. But I think a situation in which the teacher is addressing the kid as Bri but telling the parents "Brian is doing very well" has some real ethical problems to it.
The willingness to allow parents to inflict unbelievable levels of psychological distress in their children is insane though. Like apostate, trans children deserve a safe space to talk about it.
As a current parent I can say that my kids' teachers tell us about how the kids are getting along socially, how happy they seem, how their behavior is.
A lot of the responses are twisting themselves in knots to discredit you as a monomaniacal anti-trans crusader, but the issue is really about the relationship between parents, their children, and the government, and that relationship is the all-time "political third rail" gold medalist.
No one should gaslight themselves into thinking that's a neutral topic or that the Democratic party can change the status quo around it without major backlash. It might be worth it anyway, to proponents, but no one should lie to themselves about the risks.
This is a pretty strange argument. It implies that holocaust denial and flat-earth arguments should be avoided because they are "unpopular", not because they are untrue. The implication being that it would be ok to support those ideas if they were "popular"? Then it tries to graft this weird position onto a claim about parental notification and religion, while implying that "odd people" and "guidance counselors" are corrupting and/or proselytizing children at California schools. Right-wing moral panic much?
The law in question does not prohibit anybody from telling parents anything. It prohibits school district from adopting rules mandating that school personnel to inform parents if a child asks to use a different pronoun, or expresses a non-standard gender preference, or a non-standard sexual orientation. It also prohibits retaliation against personnel who choose not share this information with parents. Why was such a law considered necessary? Because the anti-gay, anti-trans right wing has been campaigning to require schools to adopt "mandatory outing" policies. Does the law change some ancient obligation of school personnel to tell parents everything that their children do and say at school? No - no such obligation has ever existed. The law was passed in response to anti-gay, anti-trans mandatory outing policies enacted by a handful of California school districts in ... 2023. These are the same districts trying to ban books that mention Harvey Milk.
If you have such a bad relationship with your kids that they don't want to tell you how they are feeling about themselves for fear of your reaction, then work on that relationship. You are not entitled to turn everybody at school into the Stasi just because sex and / or gay and trans issues creep you out. Speak to your kids. If you can't, then try speaking to their teachers, who are in no way prohibited from talking to you about it under this law. And if you are not obtaining the necessary level of surveillance voluntarily, you can always homeschool those poor children.
Re: unpopular views, I'm saying if you meet someone with one strange view, it's common to doubt their judgement across everything else.
For example, if you heard how RFK Jr handles bear carcasses, you wouldn't say "I won't trust him to handle the next dead bear he meets, but I'll still trust him to lead the country and handle our nukes."
The bill Newsom signed seems obviously correct, if you think about it for more than a second. Just imagine it from the perspective of a kid instead of a parent. Imagine you are questioning your gender, religion, or anything else about your identity, and are scared that your parents might reject or punish you for it. Wouldn't you like to be able to talk to someone about it without worrying that it will get back to your parents? Oftentimes school officials are some of the only other adults that kids and teens meet and interact regularly with, it makes sense that they would be the best people to go to.
Your entire argument is based on a faulty assumption, which is that kids and teens never question their gender identity of their own volition, they only do so when they are bamboozled into doing so by malicious adults. This assumption serves an important rhetorical purpose, it allows anti-trans folks to portray themselves as concerned parents trying to protect kids and teens, instead of as cruel tyrants trying to hurt and control them. However, it is not well-founded in reality. The overwhelming majority of kids and teens who question their gender identity do not do so at the prompting of adult authority figures.
Let's take your religion hypothetical and imagine it again, without your assumption that kids never do anything without an adult instigating it. Imagine a kid or teen has spent some time on their own studying different religions, and is considering changing their religion. However, they are afraid that if they do so, their parents might hurt them. It seems to me that it's obviously a good thing if they are able to discuss their worries with some adult at school, without it getting back to their parents.
"You would certainly not say "David thinks the holocaust never happened, and I'm ready for him to do that brain surgery on me""
Really? Does not seem obvious to me at all. Like, I would not be friends with them, wouldn't invite them to my house, etc, but what is wrong with them operating?
As a Jew it would make me concerned. Maybe he kind of wishes I was dead.
As a non-Jew I wouldn't be very concerned. If a racist was doing brain surgery on me, that's a shame that he's racist but I wouldn't worry about my operation.
Does Bernie ever wonder if his decades long political project was a waste of time?
Americans who aren’t extremely unlucky and who haven’t made extremely bad life choices are just plain much better off than a similar European with similar demographics. He has been reduced to printing bullshit stats to imply Americans are broke and only socialism can save them.
Enough, old man. Time to join Joe Biden off the political centre stage.
It’s a valid point - a Slowborer class German or Frenchman might be budgeting $10k more for vacations than an equivalent America. From an American perspective that would pay for a lot of square footage.
It's also easier for Europeans to take an "international" vacation, not just because of more time off, but because other countries are right nearby, conveniently connected by road and train, and have open borders. Maybe the real comparison is "intercontinental" vacations, but there's something to be said for being able to take a week to practice your Dutch without much trouble.
>> Americans who aren’t extremely unlucky and who haven’t made extremely bad life choices are just plain much better off than a similar European with similar demographics.
Better in what way? Richer? Sure, in most cases. But are they happier? I believe the answer is no, again, in most cases. Also they live shorter lives… The US doesn’t have many advantages compared to Western Europe at least and hence not much immigration from there for many generations now.
It also depends who you are. If you're working poor, your life may be materially worse in the US -- it's my understanding that low pay, just-below-full-time employment, short-notice call-ups etc. a la Walmart don't happen in Western Europe even at the low end of the employment ladder, because their labor laws are stricter and their unions have more power. If you have recurring medical needs, treating them will cost you much more in the US than anywhere else. The quality of the food easily available and affordable to the poor is low. Having a car is more of a necessity, because relatively few places have everything you need in walking distance, or have good transit (and many places don't even have consistent sidewalks). Low-income neighborhoods in the US are more dangerous than their counterparts in Europe, both with more street crime and more motor vehicle-related fatalities. Lower quality of life, not even compensated by higher incomes if you work a low-end job.
High-end opportunities, on the other hand, are better in the US. The top US universities have bigger budgets and more research output than the top European universities, even including the UK in Europe. The biggest movie stars are in Hollywood. Tech founders have a much better chance of making it big if they move to the US, and tech employees are paid far more in the US than elsewhere. Even for less conspicuous things -- doctors, engineers, business consultants etc. are paid more in the US than in other countries I've tried to compare to. You can compensate for America's disadvantages if you have a lot of money, or if your employer provides excellent perks (as some tech companies do), and enjoy all the advantages of being a wealthy and conspicuously successful person in a developed country.
There's also a matter of taste. If you like being surrounded by fields of grass, fields of concrete, and huge numbers of cars, and spending much of your time in one of those cars, you may like the American built environment. People who like dense, walkable cities, or good bike infrastructure, or buildings made to last for centuries, or lots of heavily ornamented structures from before ornamentation went out of fashion, will prefer the built environment of Europe. (Urbanists like the YouTuber Not Just Bikes have publicly "given up" on the United States and Canada and moved to places more to their taste, such as the Netherlands.) And people will generally be fond of whatever "home" is, and will want to live near people they know, speaking their native language and navigating familiar institutions, unless the improvement from leaving is drastic and undeniable.
I would not say that in general Americans are "just plain much better off" than comparable Europeans -- only some Americans are. Americans are more unequal, and American society and cities are configured to certain tastes.
I don't have stats to back this up, but anecdotally it seems like the immigrants to the US from other developed countries disproportionately work in high-end jobs where they have a shot at stardom, which is improved (at least in their case) by coming to the States. My own parents came from Israel, and know some recent immigrants from France, Germany, and the UK -- countries where the working class would have no reason to wish to become working class in the US, but medical researchers might find a pay raise and improved opportunity to work on the most exciting projects.
"- it's my understanding that low pay, just-below-full-time employment, short-notice call-ups etc. a la Walmart don't happen in Western Europe even at the low end of the employment ladder,"
As many of them would remain unemployed on the dole because Europeans are masters of not hiring people full time so firms aren't locked into a can't fire them situation. The only reason European countries, even Scandinavian ones, are less unequal than the US is because of government transfers. If you look at the Gini coefficients prior to transfers, things do not look that different.
If we assume my experience working for a massive German conglomerate is pretty representative of corporate-Europe then I think the middle-end opportunities are better in the States too. Because of the strict labor laws, there's just *WAY* less middle career job changing and that creates a very stifling labor market. Middle-manager labor has way more power in the US and corporations here have to compete more forcefully for talent.
I think the best rebuttal to that is the one that many neolibs make to people saying life was better in the 50s-70s in the US where people could live on one income. Which is that many/most people in the US could have that lifestyle also if they wanted to sacrifice by having a smaller house, only having one car, not paying for their kids to go to university, etc. But people don't because they like all those things.
Similarly, its very possible that people in the US could have much of the "European lifestyle," they would just need to accept being much poorer (like the Europeans are) to compensate.
This seems roughly correct and is the reason many people move here (myself included!). I still think it misses some cultural things though. European countries differ a lot , but in many cases I think us size and individualistic culture means people are more likely to be lonely, see family less often and have more superficial friendships. Also, even if the middle and upper middle class can the better end of the stick, most of them are still in danger of losing it all and falling into poverty. Prolonged unemployment means losing your healthcare etc. less safety net isn’t just bad for the poor. It makes the better off more worried for themselves and their kids.
>Americans who aren’t extremely unlucky and who haven’t made extremely bad life choices are just plain much better off than a similar European with similar demographics<
This seems a very broad statement. What level of income? What part of Europe? I'd rather be part of a top quartile DINK PMC couple who doesn't overvalue leisure in just about any part of the US than even the richest parts of Europe.
I'd rather be a child in a household at the 60th income percentile in Denmark than the United States. And the preference for Denmark would be extremely strong if we move from 60th percentile to 35th percentile. Not only "extremely" unlucky Americans finds themselves at the 35th percentile. Some are born that way.
“ I'd rather be part of a top quartile DINK PMC couple who doesn't overvalue leisure in just about any part of the US than even the richest parts of Europe.”
Overvalue is doing a lot of the work there. A US where the default is that people with professional office jobs don’t work in August is a very different world. Leisure is a lot more valuable if the default is that essentially everyone you know also gets the same time off.
All I meant was, if you really don't care much for time off, the European lifestyle isn't as much of a consolation for the radically lower pay we see at upper level jobs. I've been kicking the tires on a move to the EU. I don't think I'll be able to do it without a US employer who lets me work remote. European salaries are, uh, dismal.
My brother works at a US company in Germany and gets the best of both worlds, in the form of US type salary and social benefits by virtue of being a legal resident. He loves the lifestyle but always emphasizes that it is not a panacea, and that it would be a much harder call if his tax and salary situation was that of a German citizen.
I don’t know what country you’re thinking of but many of these upper level private sectors jobs come with what we’d call tenure. That can count for a lot as well. If you get RIFd at 48 and can’t find a new job that counts for a lot as well.
Americans may make more than similarly situated Europeans, but it’s not clear we are doing better. If you have a corporate job in America, you have less time off and less security than a similar person in Germany or France. If you are in the bottom 40%, you are likely materially worse off than your peer in Germany or France.
More like bottom 15%. Tons of people living excellent lives on modest pay in the flyover states. Lots of Europeans who are long term unemployed and having a tough go of it.
Median American income actually isn’t much higher iirc. You can look it up; the OECD has these #s.
Then account for life expectancy, health, vacation, family support, inequality, opportunity (actually quite poor in US for the disadvantaged), violence…
I’d maaaaybe take being top 20% in US. Not much less. Euros who move to the US do so for lucrative or prestigious opportunities. They’re not drawn from the middle of the distribution.
lol, “middle of the distribution” euros have been moving here in droves for decades. Tons of white ethnic/expat communities of polish/ukranian/greek/italian/spanish/portugese folks all over the country filled with working and middle class immigrants. Europe has poor employment prospects for the bottom 40% of young folks, youth unemployment very high.
Concur. Don't love Freddie's general mod style, but 'if the piece doesn't bring up trans stuff, directly, don't bring it up in the comments' is not a bad rule.
When he had multiple posts saying "please don't make everything in the comments about trans stuff" I was like "what is going *on* in those comments?" (I'm not a paid subscriber there). And now I know.
I completely agree. Trans people are a very small number of people who are mainly just living their lives. Why they live rent free in everyone’s head makes no sense.
I think the success of the "weird" critique actually lies in high-school dynamics, which each and every American instinctively gets. Cool people tend to look down on people who seem humorless and aggressively obsessed with niche topics, and they especially look down on people who have very detailed critiques of your lifestyle without knowing you. A lot of Trump Republicans (starting with Trump himself!) also just look and dress weird. Calling them "weird" tells Americans that these people are exactly like those uncool, frustrated loners that you tried to avoid at all cost in high-school. Which is much more effective than calling Trump the second coming of Hitler or something.
Still, I wonder if there is risk attached to that kind of framing. Homosexuals have been branded as "weird" for decades because of the narrative that they are closeted pedophiles. It's also very easy to mark trans people as weird men who just like to get into women's bathrooms. That line of attack is incorrect, of course. But bringing "weird" back into the mainstream could also make it more effective. You do set a more stringent set of norms for "normalcy", after all.
The most head-scratching line in Matt's piece was, IMO, "The politics of 'they are weirdos, we are normal' certainly supports classic progressive values of tolerance and humane instincts..."
I mean, no? That's exactly the opposite of the way the taunt "they are weirdos" works and has always worked? As you say, has Matt *been* in a high school?
(I think in context Matt seems to be suggesting that tolerance is a default value and that Trumpian departures from it are perceived as weird or deviant, but it's a bit tough to parse and on its own the statement leapt out at me as a very strange claim to make. I'll note that the rest of the piece was easy enough to follow and it's really just this one parenthetical that stood out.)
Tolerance is a default value. The Left overrates how much of an electoral drag Vance is, but he certainly has a bunch of "the government should try to stop people from living differently than I do" beliefs.
Ideologues underrate the popularity of tolerance. When abortion and marijuana got on the ballot they both did well.
Yeah, a selling point of Trump to a certain chunk of people was the "do what you want, I don't care and I'll stop the libs from bossing you around" vibes he gave off. Vance is a step back toward the '80s-'00s Republican "I have opinions about the way you people live and I will be sharing them with you often" approach.
This depends overwhelmingly on what people decide to put under the rubric of "tolerance" or not. One can categorize both abortion and marijuana as other-affecting rather than self-affecting, in which case they don't warrant the "tolerance" rubric any more than, say, murder or littering or playing loud music on public transit fall under "tolerance." People may genuinely not care about or support a given issue, but there seems like a wealth of evidence that (a) often they do care about the way other people live their lives -- which is why, e.g., Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell were court cases instead of...not court cases, and why gun control advocates don't think that personal ownership choices are more important than other considerations (or, often, not important at all) -- and (b) One man's behavior warranting Benthamite/Mill-style tolerance is another man's criminal offense against others, or else warrants correction through self-evidently benevolent paternalism like trying to get people not to abuse opiates.
That overthinks things immensely. Gay rights is another issue where the public turned out to be more tolerant than politicians were.
It isn't that the public is fully libertarian, but there's a lot of ordering people around the political class enjoys doing that the public sees as weird.
And BTW seeing abortion as primarily a fetal rights issue is massively weird- a lesson Republicans are learning over and over again.
>> Homosexuals have been branded as "weird" for decades because of the narrative that they are closeted pedophiles.
No. The “weird” reaction is simply a matter of it being counterintuitive to straight people, unless they’ve had close relationships and consistent interactions with out gay people, something that used to be quite rare… harmful stereotypes and fundamental misunderstandings of course made things worse, but did so precisely by taking the reactions to far darker places than the initial “weird” reaction…
I think that this is precisely why Republicans focus so hard on the trans stuff even though it has virtually no impact on our lives. Even for live and let live types, transgenderism is weird. Republicans already play that game, Dems are just starting to use the same tactics. So no, I don't think it will backfire, unless Democrats allow the next election to be framed around trans issues instead of economic ones.
The right is responding to a forceful and somewhat coercive mainstreaming of trans stuff. The fact that overnight it became verboten to ask what a women is is extremely frustrating, and then the response is "why do you care so much?"
Which is confusing given that the left cares so much that they are making huge efforts to put trans people into every conceivable setting.
And it does impact our lives. I mentioned in another thread today (and have mentioned in the past here as well) that my wife was confronted with a fully grown naked man in the woman's locker room at her (former) gym. This was extremely distressing to her, especially because she holds very progressive political views. But the idea of an adult man walking in on her while she was alone and very vulnerable was shocking and is one of the reasons I'm vocal about the trans issue (such as it is).
Upending sex segregation is a serious social issue, and it's being handwaved away by people who can't understand why other people care, and who can't be bothered to make a coherent argument for it besides 'it makes trans people feel better'.
It’s frustrating enough to experience all of these changes in policy and norms without also having people snidely ask, Why do you care so much? The implication being that I must be a terrible bigot for caring at all about something that “doesn’t affect [me] at all” which again, is just a factually untrue statement.
Thank you. It's exhausting to continually have these arguments against people who pretend to not understand what is being said and why. I appreciate you saying this.
I must be from a different time, because "Republican types" dominated in high school and "Democratic types" dominated college, where the latter was much less stifling and people could explore their weird side. I find this whole thing baffling because Republicans as "conservative" were always a bit more "normal" but the secret is that everyone is a bit weird.
“The case for the Biden electric car rule is that it will reduce pollution externalities. So why not reduce pollution externalities with a gasoline tax?
This kind of throwaway is what frustrates me about the product here. It is totally wrong and one simple trickish:
Former long time gas tax lobbyist. The motor fuels tax is very unpopular at the federal level and despite 5 surface transportation authorizations spanning decades, congress will not raise the tax. Yes it’s an elegant and clear tax (decreasing in value) but neither parties leadership would green light it. It was last raised as a minor tweak to a large bipartisan deficit deal in ‘93. The idea that is likely, simpler, or politically smarter than a green economy mandates is wrong. Which is why Democrats like their Republican friends before them abandoned it.
I think you miss the thrust of his point. Matt agrees that a n increased gas tax, like a carbon tax, is politically toxic. His point is “well let’s try to scheme our way to the same result that people all hate, but worse, and hope the people don’t notice” is not wise politics.
The tailpipe rule is a promulgated rulemaking. Meaning, for the time being it is totally doable. Whereas passing an increase to the motor fuels taxes has proven literally impossible, as the tax has not budged in 20 years despite numerous attempts.
So putting chevron aside, while both might “annoy you,” they are not qualitatively alike
That point is not in dispute. “Hey we can achieve a crappy version of the gas tax for now by imposing regs nobody will like” is a path towards regulators being neutered, which is maybe not the best thing in the world if you actually care about environmental protection. So you have to be careful about this stuff!
I understand his point but it’s not very good. Because they want to achieve climate reductions. Which is not a weirdo conviction. It’s politics. Sure it’s not a great cost benefit analysis. That’s politics. I dunno what to say but the idea that policymaking is just elegant tax policy is not how it works. So yeah, I dismiss the point.
The ACA was very unpopular (and inefficient!!) and lost the Dems 50 seats and probably a lot more longterm legislatively. But Obama wanted to get something done.
Matt’s politics have morphed from do things smart to effectively don’t do things.
I think you are missing his point significantly. The question in politics is always is it worth the cost. Is this specific policy really important or is it just "doing *something*" because so much of climate politics is often the latter. That's critical question because this policy has a fairly high political cost so it better be accomplishing something significant on something important.
I dispute it has a high political cost. The rule was changed with a much longer phase in and the target for U.S. electric vehicle adoption was slashed from 67% by 2032 to as little as 35%.
So, no, I don’t think it’s high salience politics. And I don’t think people who stand outside the political orbit appreciate how difficult this stuff is. What’s the counterfactual then? How do you plan to do emissions reduction with the next 3 cycles of tough senate maps?
He isn't convinced that the politics of backdoor gas taxes are very smart. He thinks you may get it through in the first place but when people realize what you are doing they hate it. That's the opposite of Obamacare.
It's NOT this simple. Obama naively adhered to a campaign promise that spent down a generation's worth of political capital to push through a reform package that ultimately had half of its core planks fail to make any difference... when he could have instead husbanded SOME of that political capital to get a more modest set of reforms passed and then pivoted to address the actual economic crisis facing him.
I was working in congress at the time. Of course it was not that simple but the powers that be chose to move forward, primarily pelosi, not out of protecting campaign promises but with a sincere belief that this was the right thing to do.
I do agree that Obama did not think about or care about the importance of governing and that it requires control of legislative branches. He certainly buried Dems in a hole and didn’t really respond to the crisis at hand.
Despite Matt and others rosy Obama view, Biden did wiser policy and accordingly retained much of the legislative branch on a relative basis. Biden is multi-decade senator steeped in party politics and Obama was sort of naive about his own self importance relative to that of the party.
Yeah, the idea that the introduction of a new tax on gasoline would be politically LESS toxic is extremely weird to me. You could probably do it like the European Union and fold it into a emissions trading system and hope nobody will notice. But good luck sneaking that past Fox News and the WSJ editorial board
We tried for years. The major concern was right wing tax backlash but also democrats not wanting to raise taxes on middle income Americans. A lot of hard work went into that and it failed, repeatedly.
I always scoff at how Democrats keep redefining the income threshold for middling income Americans upwards. There is this delusion that we can increase government spending for services and somehow tax an increasingly smaller portion of the population for it. So many narratives are stuck in 2009.
I mean, yeah, I agree that the constant upward redefinition is bad... but also the Cost Disease is real, and we should take seriously the fact that it directly implies that this sort of upward redefinition would naturally happen ANYWAYS even if Dems were somehow wrong to be DOING the redefinition. Blind squirrel finding a nut and all.
Either way, once this election's over and if we aren't too busy defending democracy from some coup attempt or another, we should spend the next few cycles just Cost-Disease-pilling the entire fucking country. Baumol's name should get the same reverent treatment as Keynes, and we should remake our public economics understanding with the Cost Disease at the center of it.
I doubt much more than Europeans. But Europeans don't have the opportunity to punish their lawmakers every 24 months. Midterms are a powerful and extremely under-the-radar veto point in our Madisonian system.
Beat me to it while I was still asleep. I agree with Matt that a busybody attitude is weird, and Pigouvian taxes are very much a subset of that. Bloomberg's soda pop tax was seen as weird, and unpopular.
Democratic politicians are less "weird" than their Republican counterparts, relatively speaking. But I think this misses an important aspect of Dems' branding problems.
The issue is that Democrats' brand is shaped in large part by people who are very weird. Prominent people at mainstream cultural institutions (writers, scientists, actors, etc.)
1. Have cultural values that are very left-wing relative to the average American, and
2. Spend all of their time saying "WE LOVE DEMOCRATS AND ARE ACTIVELY TRYING TO HELP THEM WIN."
Democratic politicians aren't nearly as left-wing as this group, but they've effectively outsourced their branding because they don't really spend any time *forcefully arguing* that these people don't speak for the party. This is why, despite the fact that very few Democratic candidates wanted to defund the police, the party was tarred with that slogan anyway.
Republicans, you could argue, have a similar issue. But their politicians are much closer to sharing the preferences of people in right-wing media. So they actually don't *want* to draw any distinction.
How much of this perception issue is also downstream of the fact that the average person pays more attention to entertainers than politicians or technocrats? Even a relatively obscure figure like the rapper BOB got a lot of media attention when he started publicly supporting flat Earth theories. "Entertainer says something" gets clicks. "House Backbencher does something good" gets fewer clicks.
Yeah 100%. Democrats' branding has been hijacked by the people who are in front of cameras and writing headlines. Very hard to fight back against that.
It applies to everyone nowadays but since media is so decentralized it's almost impossible to run a comms strategy other than trying to post and hope it's a hit. More accurately, it's almost impossible to get supporters to shut up.
If Democratic politicians aren't nearly as left wing as that group, then why *don't* they forcefully argue that those people don't speak for the party?
Good point, but usually it's better to try to achieve unity than to have internal squabbles very publicly. I agree with you that they need to punch left at times, but it's a tricky balance. You don't want to piss off the people most likely to vote for you.
I think the key to beating the Weird rap while still pursuing interests that could be classified as Weird is to appear normal on the salient things and quietly pursue the weird stuff. Honestly Republicans had this strategy down pat from Reagan until Bush jr. What they did was focus on appearing as the party that made life easier via tax cuts, deregulation, and libertarian vibes, while in the background doing things like quietly stacking the judiciary to pursue really weird stuff like rolling back Roe and making radical interpretations of the 2nd amendment law.
Trump has opened the field such that Democrats have a shot at claiming the mantle of Normal. I am kind of pessimistic they'll be able to achieve or hold the mantle for long - our larger coalition necessarily includes those society seems Weird, and the right still has good reflexes and media tactics to tie us to our Weirdo allies in the eyes of the median voter. Keeping the mantle of Normal will eventually require us to call some of our allies Weird and I don't think we have the stomach for it.
Yes, and for this reason the "weird" meme will probably have a pretty short half-life before it too becomes stale and rote, simply a marker of tribal identity, and the Trump campaign figures out an effective counter to it. Ideas tend not to stay contained to the context they originated in, and I predict the Harris campaign will pretty quickly lose control of this one
I'm not too happy with the "weird" insult. I AM WEIRD! My friends, if you're commenting on Slow Boring, you ARE weird too. Non-weird people don't do that.
I'm just not jazzed about this idea that weird is bad. Do we want mediocrity and conformism, everyone drinking the same brands of soda and beer and consuming the same media and gossiping about their coworkers and spending tons of time on social media? Who gets to decide what's "weird"? It's like "cool," a meaningless word I utterly rejected all the way back when I was a teenager. Other kids: "Such-and-such thing is not cool!" Me: "So? I don't care. I like Thing. So what if it's not *cool*?"
Now, of course, there is a bad side of weird - there's weird-as-in-creepy or weird-as-in-extremist - but then I'd much rather call Vance creepy than weird. Why taint a good word by association?
CREEPY. That's a more accurate word for the problem of Trump, Vance, and their most active supporters. "Weird" is true but doesn't reflect their full deviation from conventional values. Creepy creeps, all of them.
I like you're point that ideas should be "weird" but political parties should try to avoid being too weird. I think about something like gay marriage. On the one hand when Andrew Sullivan wrote his now famous TNR article it was a very "weird" thing to advocate from all directions. Obviously Christian conservatives hated anything that gave gay people rights. But as he points out ad nauseum, he was attacked by the gay left for pushing a supposedly "straight" institution on gay couples. The "genius" of his essay and later writings on the topic was framing gay marriage as a fundamentally conservative proposal. It was about bringing a mainstream and traditional social institution and expanding it to include everyone. Social conservatives talked ad nauseum about how gay marriage (and still talk ad nauseum) was actually destroying marriage but it was the exact opposite. It was about expanding very traditional social norms. It was an extension in a way of the argument that southern Civil Rights leaders tried to make. Protecting and upholding the rights of black Americans was actually keeping with the Founder's vision of universal rights; it was segregating and Jim Crow that contravened the constitution and Declaration of Independence.
As someone who would like some more center left and and left wing views to come to fruition policy wise, I think this is why "Abundance Agenda" has a real chance to be a winning Democratic message going forward. Because it's advocating change but advocating for change by adhering to very American traditions and ideas about the world; growth, invention and entrepreneurial spirit. "Go West young man" is a famous saying and in "Abundance Agenda" that cry is more achievable in a world where California actually builds enough housing for all the people who want to come. Investing in green tech isn't just saving the planet from climate change (although it is that), but it's about fostering the very American spirit of invention and entrepreneurial spirit that can lead to scientific breakthroughs and growing our society.
Just sort of a reminder to me that framing your message as "normal" in the American sense is not just realizing that people have status quo bias. It's that Americans have a sense of unique purpose and tapping into that "tradition" is counterintuitively the best way to get the change you want to see happen.
Unfortunately, the online footprints of any young person who has explored interesting ideas online will probably make them unsuitable for high-profile electoral politics. Imagine how any of the best 2010s bloggers would be skewered for some strange idea once explored in a post (let alone guilt-by-association of what ends up in the comments section).
We are enabling a neo-puritan thought police to de facto eliminate anyone from (public-facing) influential positions in politics. This version of morality does not value discovering, accomplishing or creating anything, it’s about studiously avoiding stating anything that could possibly offend anyone.
That's true for now, like it used to be true that getting tattooed while young could hold you back later in life. But when enough people with tattoos and an online history get to middle age, well, you can't disqualify everyone. Society might just have to start being a little more tolerant and honest about how people actually are
I’m a bit surprised that still so few senators have tattoos. I guess they’re mostly a couple decades older than me still. But the people younger than me that have run in presidential races (Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Buttigieg, JD Vance) don’t seem to either.
Might be another few decades. Just like electing people with non-English/Dutch ancestry to the presidency needed to wait nearly a century after German and Irish became common ancestries.
How do we know? The wise get tattoos that they can cover with regular clothing. (One interesting thing - on the Peace Corps subreddit a common question is whether someone can serve with tattoos. Usually the answer is, if you can cover them.)
Even if something is considered “normal” it could still limit choices.)
Well, if you follow the Senate dress code, you’ll mostly have pretty full body coverage, at least if you’re male. Campaigning also tends to people dressing up in a conservative manner. So maybe many more senators have them than we know.
The types of people that want to win, and also can win, statewide elected office seems to have pretty small overlap with the types of people who want tattoos
Yes, hopefully this is temporary. However, this dynamic wrt online footprints reminds me of the recent Astral Codex Ten post about Nietzchean vs. slave morality. There is a (universal?) tension between lionizing those who achieve/create and preferring those who, while mediocre, simply do not cause offense or make others feel bad.
Regarding calling Democrats "busybodies" - am I the only person to notice that there are TONS of regulations that we're all 100% fine with and a very small subset that get shouted about as "Democrats trying to tell you what to do!!!". No one is out here arguing about letting consumers decide between leaded vs unleaded gasoline or letting Honda sell a car without seatbelts for $2K less. There are DOZENS of things that are regulated about what McDonald's can sell or how they have to prepare what they sell, but "no plastic straws" is qualitatively different? I'm not saying that you can't argue against an idea or that some regulations aren't bad ideas, but don't act like the regulation that you don't like is some novel thing and that free markets reign everywhere. It's all shades of the same color and it's foolish to act as if we all had 100% freedom until we started using paper straws.
Spoken like someone who has no idea what it was like when seatbelts were introduced. Go back and watch a news report from the time when seatbelts were mandated. People were PISSED. According to them, it was the end of all personal freedoms. That's what you don't seem to understand; something is only normal because you've experienced it your whole life.
Yes, I know. I was around when they were made mandatory *and* have family members who hated it at the time. *However* you said "letting Honda sell a car without seatbelts". I'm definitely not old enough to remember cars without seatbelts at all.
I really hope that hard left types pondering turning their energy back into attacking the Democratic nominee internalise that they're going to find it very hard to evade responsibility if they do this and Trump wins a close election. The "Harris honeymoon" has shown how dramatically easier it is for Democrats to campaign when they're not constantly under attack from the left.
I think omnicausing after 10/7 has caused much of the left to self immolate. People that once would share whatever narrative they are parroting have stopped. People who would be receptive left leaning messaging have now disengaged. It has turned into a market for lemons.
I scrolled passed a headline on a substack I don't read the other day that said something like 'progressive activists could make puppies and ice cream unpopular.' I believe it was in response to the conduct of anti-Netanyahu protesters in DC.
Had a very long convo with a friend of mine who was at the dc protest and normally very much on the far left of the debate. Very productive!
To me there is a lot of irony in what happened. We had a head of a foreign government coming here to snidely lecture us, while at the same time holding out a cup, like it's a privilege for us, the super power to support them. The whole spectacle was offensive on multiple levels. And yet instead of talking about that on the merits we're forced to a place where we have to talk about burning American flags and pro Hamas graffiti.
I think it's very plausible to say that a responsible US protest, aimed at a 2 state solution and the removal of Bibi from power, would've had a strong impact on public opinion and shaped leader behavior. Instead, they've setback peace efforts and undermined the safety of the people they claimed to be protecting.
I kind of think the opposite. Say what you want about the Gaza protesters, but they do a pretty decent job of honestly representing the goals and approved rhetoric of the Palestinian national movement!
The "irresponsible" thing to do, in this context, would be to protest based on political demands that have little to do with those of the people in question. Protests in Gaza and the West Bank are even less peaceful-looking, to put it lightly.
I think removing Bibi is fine as long as Hamas is removed from the other side.
There will never be a two state solution if Hamas governs the other state imo.
Everyone thinks this is a question of tactics when really the insane goals they’re protesting for are in fact their goals.
This is along the lines of “I wish this party to this conflict had different, more reasonable fundamental views” that is unfortunately just a dead end
It truly mystifies me that Bibi's opponents in the US don't ever seem to ask themselves "how are we losing to this asshole?"
…we don’t elect him? Americans barely know anything about any foreign conflict, it’s not like you need some super complicated theory for this one in particular
Because materially improving the world is not their objective.
It threads the needle perfectly as an issue. Most voters don't know or care much about it and the only time it comes up for air is due to alienating activist behavior.
So have many of us. It was the subtitle of "Bibi's Useful Idiots" by Nick Rafter ( https://nickrafter.substack.com/p/bibis-useful-idiots ), linked by Matt on Friday's "Bye Bye UBI?" ( https://www.slowboring.com/p/bye-bye-ubi )
In general, a politics of open hostility to America is not a good way to get the median American on your side.
Love this bit:
“Of course, marriage equality advocates cared about legalizing marriage equality… I am not sure we can say the same for the Useful Idiots for Palestine. “
America is awesome. We just need to beat those doping commies in Gold Medals!
They have an amazing ability to take what is truly a great moral cause -- the intense suffering of Palestinian citizens in Gaza -- and sharply reduce how much people care about it.
The antiwar protests in 2002-2003 were also run by extremists—ANSWER (ANSWR?), another pro-jihad group—but as I recall we protesters managed to stay pretty sane.
They did create a mess at Union Station. NPS clean most of the damage the day after.
Being anti-free speech has also tapered off a bit thanks to people on the left saying things that make the one person at the trucker convoy with a Nazi flag look relatively innocent. They’d rather not discuss speech at all. Finally.
Hard to be all “words are violence” when you’re literally putting on pro-Hamas rallies at the Barclay’s Center.
This is what the market for lemons causes. They pushed out people who realize the contradiction.
>I really hope that hard left types pondering turning their energy back into attacking the Democratic nominee<
I could be proven wrong in the fullness of time (God I hope not), sure, but I don't see this as much of a threat this cycle. The main reason is: there's no disgruntled socialist candidate who almost got the nomination, and whose narrow loss would prompt several million ostensible Democrats to go third party.
The problem with the left in the 2016 cycle wasn’t that Bernie’s loss convinced people who would’ve voted Dem to stay home. It’s that the attack from the left prompted Clinton to move in that direction, resulting in 2016 general election exit polling revealing that voters saw Trump as the more moderate candidate.
That's part of it, but look at third party vote that year. It spiked. Why might that be? I don't claim that lots of disgruntled Bernie Bros stayed home. But I do think a fair number voted for Stein or Johnson or whomever. Third party voting was about 6% in 2016, vs 2% in both 2012 and 2020. The two party share fell by something like 5 million votes from the norm. It doesn't seem crazy that Clinton probably lost more votes than Trump as a result of this dynamic given Trump's easy wrap up of the GOP primaries, and the highly vituperative nature of the Clinton-Sanders battle that cycle.
I think it was the worst of both worlds. She both had to deal with a rebellion on the left while simultaneously operating in an environment where no one thought Trump could possibly win, thus making it feel harmless to cast a protest vote.
Absolutely.
In fairness, she also did not think Trump could possibly win, and campaigned accordingly
Yes, it’s weird to me people don’t see this more clearly. You had anti-Clinton chants at the convention; how is that not gonna depress Dem turnout?
There was just a lack of positive energy around her campaign in the final stretch, and that probably depressed turnout generally, not just Sanders voters.
"Why might that be?"
It's simple. The GOP nominated the very unpopular Donald Trump and Clinton chose to move to the left instead of the center. Most of that 6% went to candidates that were to the right of Clinton, such as Gary Johnson and McMullin. She would've won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin if she could've convinced one-third of Johnson's voters to vote for her instead in those states. In Michigan, she would've won with only about 10% of Johnson's voters. And in the alternate reality where she successfully moderates her image enough to win over some Johnson supporters, she probably wins over some of the eventual Obama-Trump voters who viewed Trump as the more moderate candidate.
Also, I don't know where this revisionist history comes from that the GOP was united behind Trump. The whole narrative during the summer and fall of 2016 was that Democrats were united behind Clinton and that the GOP was a psycho trailer park shitshow by comparison. That's why Johnson and McMullin got so much attention and did as well as they did compared to left-wing candidates like Jill Stein.
I understand that a majority of Johnson voters were disaffected Republicans who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Clinton.
And also couldn't bring themselves to vote for Trump! Despite the objectively strong structural situation for the GOP that year, Clinton had a golden opportunity to make it three in a row for the Democrats given the problem on the GOP side with respect to candidate quality. A number of things, alas, went wrong for her. One of them was the lack of unity in her own backyard.
I’d add that the specifics of how Clinton’s allies tried to outflank Sanders were particularly bad. Once you start arguing that basic kitchen table class-focused social democratic politics is somehow racist or sexist, you wind up committing yourself to some pretty weird and unpopular ideas.
It was one of a long line of strategic errors. But Sanders-Trump voters are just not that important on the list of factors. I think the lesson is to not radicalize your campaign in style or substance if it’s not absolutely necessary: plenty of moderate Dem positions are popular and would improve a lot of peoples’ lives without alienating 50-year-old suburban Wisconsinites
I think they can both be problems.
The big threat is if she picks Shapiro as VP. All the articles in all the leftist sources are saying that this is their line in the sand, so I hope she doesn’t test it.
I don’t really care to litigate whether they are saying anything reasonable or meaningful about him. They seem to have offered a conditional olive branch, and the smart move is to take it by selecting anyone else.
OT, but it's a weird idiom. Lines in the sand are super easy to erase or move.
Right, a line in wet concrete would be more compelling
Here's the counter-argument:
1) According to the Bulwark, Shapiro the best candidate by far. He's a popular governor from what is forecast to be the pivotal state.
2) According to Matt on Politix, the people threatening Harris over this won't stop if Harris rejects Shapiro. They'll keep going with demands so far from her current position that she's not going to be able meet their demands. So rejecting him actually achieves very little.
I think the first point is not as strong as people think. Nate Silver and Matt Yglesias have both made compelling arguments that VP candidates don’t do as much for electoral outcomes as people think, especially in terms of home state advantage.
The second point is the relevant one if true. I don’t know Politicx so I don’t know what evidence that person has for the claim that the demands won’t stop here. Back in April I would have agreed. But over the past few weeks there has been a lot of signaling that they’re coming around, as long as she makes this one move they want.
The question is whether that is true.
Re-(1) ... Obviously Nate knows the stats and Matt should but it's just so silly to talk about "data analysis" in presidential elections. We have like maybe 7 modern presidential election samples to analyze just to start with. It doesn't matter what the historical "home state advantage" is if none of the prior elections represent this current one (e.g., what does Cheney's impact in WY tell me about Shapiro's potential impact in PA ... nothing!).
I like this. It used to be conventional wisdom that a senator couldn’t win the presidency in the modern age… and then Obama won and that little nugget was buried and never mentioned again!
The problem is that they aren’t credible. She’s already significantly distinguished her position on Palestine in a way that’s favorable to them, and the VP pick is much less relevant to the issue they say they’re fighting for. A strategically-minded group would realize they already got 99% of what they could have possibly hoped for and back off on this detail that is minor for them but incredibly important to everyone else. The fact that they’re not, combined with the observation that they’ve never backed off ever, makes it impossible to trust them imo.
Interesting - I would have thought that the question of which of these moderate white dudes is VP was minor to everyone else, but the online left is making their strong preference that it be anyone but Shapiro quite clear.
They’re not demanding a specific person, just anyone but him.
And they clearly *have* backed off since Harris became the nominee.
I misspelled Politix...it's Matt (Yglesias)'s podcast with Brian Beutler
Oh, I really hope she does test it.
It's not a "conditional olive branch." It's a test of wills and of determining who has power. Their opposition to Shapiro is bullshit (his position on Israel will be whatever Harris says and he's no different than other candidates); they're just trying to show they have power by claiming a scalp.
As I said in another comment, time for a "Sister Shapiro" moment.
What benefit do you see in pushing this conflict to the forefront? I can see that it’s reasonable to think that people deserve to be punished for making unreasonable demands.
But I don’t care what anyone deserves. I care about what keeps the good vibes flowing and leads to a win. Do you think that pulling this conflict out in the open helps?
The benefit is that Shapiro is clearly the best candidate by any reasonable metric. It is not particularly close. Passing up on that in order to appease a bunch of feckless, untrustworthy coalition partners who, in Silver's words, are "always looking for a pretext to flex away from the pragmatic moderate side of the Democratic Party" anyway seems like the actual risk.
If you look for the easily quantifiable hope for a home state bump, then yes, he’s clearly best. But I think that this is actually a weaker case for a VP than any of the much harder to quantify things. Pete Buttigieg has a clear edge in terms of communication (look how much Fox News viewers love to watch him, and msnbc viewers manage to love the same appearances!) and Mark Kelly has a bunch of career history advantages. Tim Walz is the person who seems to have the communications style this moment needs (normal midwestern dad).
The bigger issue most of us know nothing about is how well Harris gets along with each of them personally.
I think going into September seeing our factional opponents as the enemy is the actual risk.
Take the party’s left at its word, give them this one, psych ourselves up for the general election. If some on the left decide to blow up the party over something else that’s sad, but it’s best to assume good faith on our own team right now
She didn't put it out front: they did. She has to finish it.
The way to finish it is to let it die. No need to re-trigger the groups so that you can finally vanquish them in open battle. That won’t succeed.
I keep hearing this Harris needs a Sister Soulja moment. Maybe. I could see her fumbling and waffling and after it would just feed the narrative she lacks conviction. It is not as easy to do authentically as some think. I am a person she would be doing it for and I’m skeptical before she even does it.
She needs to take a position and stick to it. Sell it. Be real.
“The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it made.”
― George Burns
I’ve yet to see clear examples of the online left actually holding up their end of the bargain when these concessions are made.
Until the past two weeks, I had seen no clear examples of the online left intentionally lowering the temperature at all, but this seems to be a moment that they might be!
The fact that they've so immediately drawn a line in the sand, and they love drawing lines in the sand generally, I don't believe at all that this will be the last line in the sand.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think a lot of the usual suspects subconsciously don't want to vote for Harris and will find a reason not to, no matter what it is. Their whole thing is hating Democrats.
>the smart move is to take it by selecting anyone else.<
It's only the smart move if passing on Shapiro to placate those who don't like him gains you more than it costs you. I assume the Harris campaign has a sophisticated polling operation. If going with Shapiro is likely to cost her on net, hopefully they go with someone else. But Pennsylvania's electoral votes would be a nice consolation prize in exchange for lower margins of victory in NY and California.
(I'm more worried about the sexual harassment case than I am about Israel/Gaza).
For the record I'd advise her to go with Beshear. Gets you 99% of what Walz provides but can't really be accused of being a socialist the way Walz can.
I don’t think the fight with the online left just costs in New York and California. I think it raises the specter of what we were all worried about for months earlier this year - Chicago 2024 turns into Chicago 1968, with Palestine campouts and police intervention, and democrats looking weird and divided.
I mean ... that's happening no matter what. I now have two well informed friends that have been told by their CPD connections to leave the city during the convention. They expect it to be that bad.
I think leaving the city is a good idea. Even a 5% chance of it being that bad is plenty of reason to leave the city. Plenty of people leave the city during big events anyway just because of ordinary hassle.
Back in April or May I was sure it would be that bad. I suspect police are now reacting the way public health officials did at various points during COVID - they see the possibility of something very bad related to their specialty, so they are overly certain it will happen.
It might, and it’s good for all of us to prepare! But we shouldn’t be certain.
I think enough moderate voters would be convinced that she didn’t pick Shapiro due to anti-semitism. I hope they run the numbers on this v depressed progressive turnout.
I think the downside risk of Shapiro is not a fraction of progressives staying home in November - it’s leftists protesting by the convention in two weeks and projecting the idea that Democrats are the party of chaos, driving away swing voters in the fall.
Walz lets republicans be the weird ones.
They’re going to protest anyway because they’re paid by Iran and Russia who want a Trump presidency because he easily bought off with campaign donations.
The fact that journalism has so many downwardly mobile folks ready to goose step for Trump is scary.
What are they saying about Shapiro?
There's a host of things they're dragging up. Some of them are statements he made about pro-Palestine activists some time in the past. Some are about not being appropriately sensitive or competent in handling an aide who had credible sexual harassment claims against them. Some are things about teacher's unions, or disloyalty to past mentors. You can see a lot of them if you check The Nation.
I don't know which of the particular claims are true, which are unique to Shapiro, which are about anything actually significant, but what's notable is that the online left seems to have worked themselves up into a state where they see a lot of problems with Shapiro. Even more notably, they haven't been doing this about any of the others. Four years ago, they did this about Pete Buttigieg, but they aren't doing it now.
That strongly suggests to me that it would be a bad idea for preserving party unity to pick Shapiro, and that basically any of the other candidates would be fine.
Hm, this is an odd interpretation of the dynamic I'm seeing:
- Leftists, locked out of the Dem coalition for many years, essentially held the party hostage, demanding concessions and threatening to turn against the party if their demands were not met--this has been their posture since like the Clinton administration
- Eventually in 2020 Biden made a bunch of concessions to the Left to keep them in the coalition
- The Left rewarded Biden with loyalty--both Bernie and AOC stood by Biden even after his disastrous debate, all the way until he dropped out of the race. This basically made no sense substantively but was a principled stance that was important for key Leftists to make to demonstrate that they could be reliable coalitional partners if given a seat at the table
- The Left's support will transfer to Harris conditional on her maintaining support for various Leftist positions/causes. Lina Kahn is a recent litmus of this, there will likely be others. (As Matt has argued recently, there might therefore be some wisdom in Harris maintaining strategic ambiguity and not being too specific about what personel changes a Harris administration would make!)
^ All that is basically just garden variety coalitional politics. It also explains a lot of what is happening in the GOP and why they've done things like kneecap their own House Speaker. And why there are certain positions within each party that are totally non-negotiable (guns for the GOP; abortion rights for the Dems)--because for each of those issues there's a significantly large and determined faction that will credibly walk from the coalition if their issue isn't supported.
I think two things make the left's behaviour distinctive
1) Very frequent, public, vicious attacks. e.g. labelling Democrats as genocidal, racist, corrupt
2) Making demands there is no realistic prospect of delivering, and that advocating for is only likely to help the GOP, such as decriminalising the border and free healthcare for undocumented migrants.
I'd argue that (1) and (2) in fact happen very frequently on the right!
right of what? If you mean the GOP, yeah, those guys suck. But I don't see anyone else in the Dem coalition behaving like that.
In a factional dispute, it’s easy to take the worst behavior among on the other side and attribute it to the whole. The leaders of the parties left-wing are not making the vicious attacks you mentioned
Radicals love not being in power. It gives them the freedom to whine and complain without the burden of governing.
I guess maybe it's time for Harris to perform a "Sister Shapiro" moment.
I think this piece gets a lot right, and that the Democrats are at their best when they're in their more laid back 'live and let live' version. I also think JD Vance is a great illustration at the way Americans chafe at having politicians and the state more generally pushing hard, value based judgment into people's private lives. It also shows that no matter how many notes you take from European family policies or new traditionalist online movements in America, women (and plenty of men) will not like you if you come off as a sexist or holder of highly retrograde attitudes about womens' place in society.
I would add though that Matt doesn't go far enough when it comes to 'just not doing' things. While I understand that we're awkwardly wandering our way to pretending a bunch of stuff just didn't happen in the teens though 2020 Democrats should remember this next time they think about aggressive ideas about identity or sex or activism in public schools or the work place. A lot of that is, and continues to be, just as weird and in some ways much weirder than anything Vance has said.
Doesn’t Vance show that “don’t be a busybody” is more important politically than “don’t be weird.”
Vance’s personal choices have been something between normal and high functioning. He escaped the working class, graduated from college, graduated from a top law school, made a lot of money, found cultural acclaim, married a beautiful sims. and had children. He’s in an interracial marriage so he’s not completely 1960s but his personal life scores at least an 8 on the normal scale.
Vance is unpopular because he’s taken hard edged stances on abortion and pushed “trad wife” tropes while married to a high earning career woman. People don’t like being told how to live unless they are already living that way.
If I were Vance I would deliberately misconstrue what Dems mean by “weird,” a la, “they think anyone who doesn’t grow up on the coasts and go to college out of state is weird.” Do some identity jiu jitsu!
They're already trying that but they are genuinely bigoted so the actual messaging is "isn't it weird to associate with gay people at all"
You're docking one point each for dolphins and couches, right?
Sincere question: are we sure he’s “unpopular”? Are his numbers significantly worse than Harris’, or Biden’s? Or is he currently-normal popular, with numbers somewhere between 40 and 50%?
They are a bit worse than Harris’, I think 26-44 against. However, he’s new enough on the national stage that they are quite fluid. The hard edged pro life and pro trad wife stuff doesn’t seem to be working, but Vance still might shift gears
"Vance still might shift gears"
Isn't his political transmission worn out by now from all his earlier gear-shifting?
No, cf. Harris and Trump.
If he does shift gears, no one will know it, because from now on the Trump campaign will have him attending grand openings of bowling alleys in Topeka KS.
Usha seems like a pretty good defense against claims of trad-wifery?
My perception is that in the political realm the things tend to go hand in hand. But fair point, one of the great things about America is that we are a pretty tolerant people, particularly when left alone.
It’s interesting how a “normal” Republican like Kemp takes his stand against abortion and then avoids doing anything else to talk about women’s sexuality. Although, there is this, which I think is normal (or at least a normal paternal aspiration) in Georgia no matter what y’all think.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/05/02/brian-kemp-pointing-gun-teen-daughters.hln
I was raised around guns. I was hunting big game before I could drive. My dad, and my grandfather, would never have done what Kemp does here, not even as a joke. "Never point a gun at something you aren't prepared to shoot" is a pretty basic rule.
Maybe he was prepared?
Most pro gun Americans were not raised among guns or shoot big game, aren’t particularly knowledgeable about them, and so dad jokes about guns and teenage sex are pretty popular
If I were a Republican, I'd be very impressed by Kemp. As a Democrat, I'm silently impressed by Kemp but don't tell anyone.
Southern Republicans who hold statewide office are more moderate than Midwestern ones. In Georgia, white Republicans need ~72% of the white vote to win. That does not encourage hard edged conservatives stances.
Marjorie Taylor Green is what happens in an upcountry district where 54% of the white vote will get a Republican elected. Ohio is sort of in between Georgia and Taylor’s district.
Kemp has greatly impressed me by keeping me free during the pandemic and appointing friends and people I respect to the bench. I still voted for Abrams in ‘22, but it was close.
That's just an old timey dad joke.
Being an old timey joke (still used frequently) is not the same a putting it as a visual in a campaign ad.
it horrified some of my liberal friends
Being brought up what I’ll call “normal” Montana gun culture where most high school parking lots had pick ups with rifles in their rear window gun racks and gun safety started right along with potty training this ad talks directly to his voters with or without daughters. There should be no conflict between present urban gun control issues and this ad but the viewer has to have the insight to be aware of a the sportsman shooting/hunting life experience.
One of the things that makes politicians look “weird“ or “normal“ is how eager they are to talk about sex. Americans don’t like to hear politicians talk about sex.
Really Vance's political success remains TBD. He's doing quite well so far!
I think the part that it gets the most right but will also go the most ignored is that Matt acknowledges Dems are already doing a pretty decent job of being normal, all things considered.
Market for lemons effect. Decent people down want to be assumed as weird by association, thus normies leave and associate with Democrats. This makes GOPpers weirder on average and Dems more normal.
I'm more alluding to the fact that so many of the people on this forum seem to suffer from a sort of Activist Derangement Syndrome. Some activist does something they don't like, and it triggers their own internal Pundit's Fallacy -- "See, THIS is why the Democrats are always fucking up and they should just do everything *I* want them to do".
A lot of this is genuine, legitimate feelings -- I certainly detest certain aspects about the Democratic Party myself -- but it's also genuinely difficult for those of us who try not to be triggered all the time to separate out the unmistakeable influence of right-wing propaganda on this Activist Derangement Syndrome mindset.
To wit, it seems like even for people who consider themselves "immune" to Fox News Brain and are otherwise reasonable centrists, they can't help but occasionally get triggered by the sheer scale and intensity of Fox News' massive nutpicking operation. And it's understandable! A gargantuan media megaphone constantly blasting the left's misdeeds 24/7 is bound to have SOME splash damage beyond its target demographic of brain-wormed boat-parading Boomers.
But it's still annoying AF when I'm just trying to keep my political zen up over here.
I've seen tons of Republicans responding to the weird thing in the last few weeks, and it seems like 98% of it is pictures the same two trans women over and over again saying "the real party of weird." I've never seen them before, but I keep thinking "who are these people, they are almost certainly not Democratic politicians, just a pair of randos."
Whereas the examples of Republicans being weird is actual Republican politicians, not just random people.
I think the contempt many online activist types show for Democrats undermines the associations that many Republicans try to project onto Democrats. This is why punching Left works for Democrats. It collapses that narrative.
Or at least would work, if any of them ever tried it this century.
This is an important point
Fair enough, and for the record I think he is right about that too.
The progressive world view is that however you want to live your life, whatever gender you claim, and whatever family situation you desire is entirely your own choice and is to be valued and cherished, but using a plastic straw condemns you to the inner circle of hell, you evil person.
I'd like to see more things move into the former camp, including use of said straws.
Martin Amis in the 90s had a good line about PC, something like, “it’s based on the admirable belief that no one should be ashamed of who he is. What he does, what he says, yes, but not who he is.”
I feel like I am taking crazy pills in this comment section. Drag queens are straightforwardly (ha!) weird! I have not against them other than finding drag shows very boring, but the whole thing is to be a little transgressive and weird by playing around with gender and sex.
Bible thumpers are also weird! Normal people don’t shout about religion in public, just like they don’t shout about sex!
Also, it’s not weird to not want your kid to be trans, and to worry about what influence school and peers at schools might have on them. The most normal parent behavior in the world to want to know what is up with your kids and what they are doing at school. Also the most normal parent behavior to be annoyed at the way schools are run and their many little power trips. Combine those two and you have parents go bananas, especially if the purported logic is “we need to protect your kids from YOU by keeping YOU in the dark”. Uh, no thanks!
I would also file “I want my washing machine to be better, not worse, than my old one” and “I’d like my straws to not dissolve in coffee” as normal preferences.
Putting straws in coffee is weird!
I meant iced!
The nice thing about the plastic straws, gas stoves, and Dr. Seuss' attempted cancellation (remember that?) is that they're usually little progressive fads that everyone talks about for a month and go away a month after that. That fact is also something progressives should think about the next time some niche thing seems like AN CRISIS that needs addressing immediately until the next thing comes up.
"On Beyond Zebra" is still out of print, and I'm still angry about it.
As a parent of young kids I finally threw in the towel and started bringing our own straws to restaurants.
I do think that at some point the Left is going to get a reckoning on its mistrust of parents. Parents vote and they want to know what their kid is doing. And Left wing "the state cares more about kids than parents do" philosophies have never worked above the village level.
I find this issue frustrating because I simultaneously believe that the left's mistrust of parents loses them elections, and that much that much of that mistrust is richly deserved.
This already happened in Virginia when Glenn Youngkin was elected governor.
But isn't the right's attempts to ban gender affirming care for minors a great example of not trusting parents. It is saying, "I don't care what you, your parents and doctor agree is best for your mental health and happiness, I am making this choice for you."
I think that's quite correct actually. The Right absolutely does not trust parents who make decisions they don't like.
But this is one of those unfairnesses like "conservatives are always viewed as better on security" or "liberals are always viewed as better on health care" that are built into politics. The Left is associated with the anti-parent position for any number of reasons. It's part of the brand. And thus the Right can get away with stuff like this (and BTW, the Right is wrong and we should absolutely not ban health care for trans kids that is recommended by doctors and approved by parents) because their brand is pro-parent and ours isn't
I guess maybe leave it up to the discretion of the teacher? Should the teacher report to the parents that little Johnny kissed little Mary? I'm not sure what the boundaries of this police state should be.
The California law does leave it to the discretion of the teacher. The teacher can tell the parents anything he/she wants to tell. The teacher can promise the student he/she will not tell. The teacher can tell the child not to tell him/her anything the child doesn't want the parents to know. The only thing the law forbids is school districts mandating that teachers must "out" gay or trans-curious kids or face disciplinary action if they don't.
Sounds like a good law to me!
If you heard a co-worker believed the world was flat, you'd question everything they ever told you.
You would certainly not say "David thinks the holocaust never happened, and I'm ready for him to do that brain surgery on me"
If Democrats want to build a large tent, they can't be seen promoting stupid ideas that huge majorities disagree with.
Which brings me to the trans issue....
In California, Gaven just signed a bill that allows schools to hide the kids sexual identity from parents.
This opens up the door for kids to get brainwashed by odd people at schools (even staff!), and administrators can hide this from parents.
This is absolutely crazy.
Suppose we were talking about religion. Would we allow a guidance counselor to talk your kids into switching religion, then hide it from the parents?
If we put this to a ballot, do we think this would get less than 80% against?
If you're not from California, you likely don't know the dynamic here: It's a liberal state, but the elected official are further left than the public, so we need to smack them down from time to time via ballot measure.
When California policies like these are described to swing voters, I assume they think "these liberals' brains are broken"
It's a problem. We need these woke fools to stop destroying the coalition.
It is always sort of surprising the number of people for which "Trans stuff" is their omni-issue.
Sex is a very ancient category of great functional significance. Those who seek to deny its importance value ideology over truth. Also, many of my liberal friends have shamed me and called me a bigot for not wanting gender dysphoric men to compete in women’s sports.
Their view is aesthetically wretched. When I watch the olympics, I want to watch highly trained female bodies striving for perfection. I do not want to watch a drag show or a struggle session. I’m normal on this one.
"Gender dysphoric men" is caring a lot of weight in this sentence. Is there any evidence Imane Khelif has undergone any medical treatment to become a man? You can say that she has high levels of testosterone and potentially DSD, we really really do not know. But she was born a women, grew up a women, and has identified always as a women.
The issue of trans women in sports is really tough, because you truly don't want to have a situation where every women's sport is just won by a recently transitioned athlete. But it's opponents too frequently engage in just legitimately hateful rhetoric. The issue demands thoughtfulness and nuance, but the extremes of both sides rarely give space for that.
https://quillette.com/2024/08/03/xy-athletes-in-womens-olympic-boxing-paris-2024-controversy-explained-khelif-yu-ting/
This is probably the best overview of the situation with Khelif and Lin I've seen anywhere over the last week. Without speculating too much on things that are truly unknown, but taking into account what *is* known, and explaining why the Olympic committee's statements and policies generally, and for boxing specifically, are the rightful and just target of anger right now (as opposed to either of the boxers in question.)
I have no opinion about the Algerian boxer because I don’t know the facts. But I know the framework.
If she is XX with elevated testosterone, that’s a competitive advantage, and she is no different than a cyclist with naturally high hematocrit. As a trainer I respect said, “to win the tour de France, you must have high hematocrit.” To win an elite boxing competition, high testosterone is useful possibly essential.
If she is XXY or is taking hormones, her situation is not so different than doping.
Ok, so is there a specific example of an olympic athlete competing right now that you are upset about, or is ruining the competitive play of a certain event?
Asking because it's not like the olympics doesn't have rules about this. Lia Thomas was not allowed to compete.
Actually, as I understand it, the Olympics really doesn't have rules on gender qualification -- individual sport sanctioning bodies do. Boxing's governing body was booted from the Olympics for what seem to be unrelated reasons, so there's a bit of a vacuum there.
A few years ago, the top three competitors in a CT high school championship were gender dysphoric men. My understanding is most of the sanctioning bodies have made it difficult for gender dysphoric men to compete in womens’ sports. I’m basically happy with the status quo. The problem is many trans activists aren’t.
There is no condition--not even a disorder/difference of sexual development (DSD) that results in male-levels of testosterone in females.
There are several DSDs affecting XY individuals that result in them appearing at birth and before puberty to be female, when in fact they are male and go through a male-typical puberty.
I won't try to litigate what is normal or not but doing things like:
Calling sex a "very ancient category of great functional significance"
Caring deeply about women's sports.
Watching the Olympics(outside of the few exceptions)
Wanting to "...watch highly trained female bodies striving for perfection"
are all things that are probably "atypical" for the average voter.
Many people care about sports. Fewer care about specifically women's sports. Even fewer care about the niche women's sports in the Olympics. Even fewer care about the participation rules for women's sports in the Olympics.
The average person cares about sanity. Calling men women is insane. Simple.
I think what's nonpalatable, and shortsighted, is the idea that kids have some sort of inborn gender identity (a culturally contingent thing of there ever was one) that trumps their own biological body, to such a degree that it's better to do surgery or other permanent medical interventions on kids than work on building a society that lets everyone be comfortable and themselves in the body they were born with.
I agree with you. Although nonpalatable and shortsighted is smoothing the rough edges of the harms of trans indoctrination that's gonna result in many destroyed lives that even the more liberal societies of western Europe have now turned their backs on. If some PhD students and college professors want to examine gender theory on a Teams call in each other's assholes, that's fine. But teaching it as righteous settled science is impossibly immoral and/or stupid.
Caring deeply about the gender or sex or gender identity or genitals or whatever of a stranger seems beyond what the average person cares about.
If you force people to have an opinion they might agree with you but the act of trying to force them to is going to make you seem a bit "weird".
Agreed. It’s the “this is orthodox and you have to endure trainings about it and watch what you say” part is what enrages the normies, as well as stuff that actually impacts them, like sports, restrooms, schools etc. Doubt most people would care all that much if you were just allowed to say “eh, seems crazy to me man but whatever; you do you” like they are for any other weird beliefs, like Scientology.
Whether people would say the words that sex is a very ancient category of great functional significance or not (almost certainly not mostly) does not mean that this isn’t on of the most socially normie views ever.
They reason people didn’t say it is because it was so normie that you did have to….until now.
I absolutely agree “let’s watch these these women have beautiful bodies and showed grit and character in training perform amazing feats of athleticism” is not a majority view. However, it’s one that straight men who value female excellence can easily embrace and I think our society would be better if more people thought this way.
This attitude does not merely extend to elite sports. I can admire a 52 year old woman for being a 4.0 pickleball player. I certainly admire that choice more than getting fat and watching tv or grinding the corporate grind to buy fancy baubles.
I call bullshit on this supposed admiration for female excellence in sports by traditionalists. Ten years ago it was very common for the WNBA to be the butt of jokes by conservatives and bro types about how bad women's sports were to watch, and the only reason that changed is that it became a useful way to go after trans people.
“ or grinding the corporate grind to buy fancy baubles.”
You sure put a lot of effort into defending your choices. It comes across like you have a lot of questions about the road not taken.
Is that not intellectually honest?
I feel like straight men who want to look at women with "beautiful bodies" have a nearly endless supply available on TV or the internet and trans people playing sports or not doesn't even change that on the margins.
And I know pickleball is getting more popular what I definitely didn't know what a 4.0 pickleball player is. Sounds like that 52 year old woman is quite athletically gifted though.
There are about 200 legitimate 4.0 men and 20 legitimate 4.0 women in Georgia, though a good college tennis player who practiced for six months would be at least a 4.0.
For comparison, the 19 year old former quarterback of our local high school who plays D1 baseball has played pickleball for two months and is a weak 4.0.
I’ve played for 3 years and am a weak/mid grade 3.5. If I’m ever a 4.0, it will be in the 50+ category. I’m currently 47, my pickleball prime will start in 2027.
I like your comment up until the last sentence. However, many people who don’t give a shit about women’s sports are highly invested in participation rules for women’s sports. It’s a cultural idiosyncrasy of our time.
I don't care about almost all sports. But I care about justice and common sense, which override my indifference to women's sports. I don't ride public buses, but I care if seats are distributed based on immutable characteristics.
In Airbud there was no rule saying a dog couldn't play basketball.
It would seem strange if middle or high schools started imposing hormone or genital checks on students trying to play sports.
The weird part isn't the schools needing to do hormone and genital checks, its the males who make it necessary! It's like a store putting tags on things is weird because they are trying to stop shop lifting when it's the people shop lifting who are weird.
"It would seem strange if middle or high schools started imposing hormone or genital checks on students trying to play sports."
Not middle school or high school, but my college required preliminarily getting a complete physical (which included the infamous "turn your head and cough" and other intimate examinations) from a doctor to get a membership for the school athletic center, and that was about 30 years ago.
FWIW, when I was a middle schooler trying out for the high school fencing team in 1999, I had to have my doctor fill out a form that basically amounted to "Are you going through puberty yet?" but had some very specific anatomical questions about things like pubic hair. The goal was to make sure I'd developed enough to participate safely. (Not really an issue for fencing, but it would have been the same form if I'd been a football prodigy or something). So yes, it seems strange, but it's not totally out of the realm of things public schools in America actually have done in the fairly recent past.
I want to be very clear I am not accusing anybody here of thinking too much.
Why do you care? It’s such a tiny issue. I honestly can’t think of an issue that involves so few people that also gets people so worked up.
I care about having the freedom to define categories in a way I find coherent.
This makes you weird, sorry. I have centrist views on this issue but above all I really don’t care very much. Also, it’s not ”the freedom to define categories in the way I want” that you seem to defend, but the world conforming to your particular ideas.
What difference does it make in your day to day life? Is it politics as sports and you’re like someone getting all worked up about the new Yankees coach and generally obsessing over something that has absolutely nothing to do with them?
It's about a grown man walking around naked in the women's locker room where my wife goes to change.
I live in the one of the most liberal places in the country and I’ve never heard of such a thing. Screeching about things you’ve only heard about on the internet is deeply weird. Touch grass, as they say.
Jumping off of this is all the Olympic “controversies” regarding the opening ceremony and the Algerian boxer. Beyond anything else my reaction is “none of this involved anything American. Why is this part of a Presidential race?”
She lost at least nine boxing bouts (all to other women, of course). This seems like a total non-story. Conservatives can't resist the urge to butt in.,
Yea, while I think there is plenty of stupidity to go around on this general topic the conservatives are currently winning the gold for (apparently) fact free meltdown in women's olympic boxing.
Caring about the Olympics beyond basketball, Simone Biles and maybe Katie Ledecky already makes you a bit "weird".
Getting angry about things the French do is going to drive you mad if you let it.
Wait, what? I'm not that into the Olympics, but since when has caring about that made somebody weird!?!
My normie (not really political) co workers talk about the Olympics all the time...
Maybe to square the circle a bit. Yes I think David is underselling how popular the Olympics is generally. Trust me its a topic of discussion in our office as well. In fact we have fun joking about every two years, we end up becoming "experts" in an event we only watch every four years. Having said that, unless we're talking about American football, there is no event (sporting or otherwise) that is actually going to capture the imagination and attention of more than 25% of Americans with perhaps the notable exception of Taylor Swift and the Barbie movie last year. Almost by definition in today's media environment anything you are super into, is going to be "weird" in the sense the overwhelming majority of Americans are not going to care.
The second part of David's point I couldn't agree with more. I was looking at all the faux outrage over the opening ceremonies and my reaction besides "why do you care" was "Wait, the French have some dare I say weird parts of their culture including particular weird art? You don't say, it's almost as though their French".
There are very few things that get lots of Americans invested in, so when 1/3 of them are, its a big deal. Game of Thrones was a social phenomena and had only a fraction of the audience of the Olympics.
As for outrage about the opening show - wasn't that the point of it? You don't do *that* presentation for people to walk away with "oh that was nice" reactions. It was a Dali piece, not a Rockwell.
They’re intellectual and fairness Rorschach tests. It speaks to the sanity of intent of a person. Nationality does not matter.
Right?
There’s something about it that really just seems to break a lot of people’s brains. It becomes, seemingly, the core of their political and personal identity. When people bring it up unprompted, I worry that they need psychiatric help.
It's a way to test whether the person is of sound mind or a political zealot willing to argue anything they're told from their masters.
"I worry that they need psychiatric help."
Says the guy who was told 5 minutes ago - and went along with it - that toddlers can choose their gender, but gender is too difficult a topic for a Supreme Court Justice to comment on. The comedy is rich. RICH!
It’s not their opinions which are concerning, it’s the fact they bring it up unbidden and express earnestly almost exclusively in hyperbole.
It reminds me of the paranoid schizophrenics I used to know in LA.
Except the topic I brought up IS related and not brought up from nothing. As I wrote above, the subject of "weird" is current political branding. Celebrating trans-ing the world is fucking weird. Beyond weird to almost everyone, including half of Democrats. And thus, it's directly related to the topic.
Sure and, technically, the lady who told me about how a DJ was sending out radio waves to lock her bones from the US Bank Tower wasn’t *technically* coming from totally out of left field. I had, after all, said I was waiting for the bus and she’d missed it once on account of her locked bones.
But, seriously, come on.
I think the pro-trans argument isn't that toddlers can choose their gender, it's that everyone has an intrinsic gender, regardless of their age, which is not a choice. A toddler saying "I'm a boy" or "I'm a girl" is not making a choice, they are reporting a fact about themselves. Saying "I'm a girl" is no different than saying "I have a nose."
This is why all the anti-trans arguments that kids are too young to choose their gender don't make any sense. The fact that people keep making them indicates to me that they are extraordinarily bad at cognitive empathy. They believe that being trans is a choice, and they literally cannot imagine that anyone believes otherwise. Since they are not able to accurately imagine what their opponents believe, they naturally assume that their opponents don't really hold those beliefs and are just pretending to hold them due to obedience or conformity.
I think it's true that a lot of gender skeptics, or whatever you want to call them, are lacking in empathy. There's a lot of people going out of their way to be mean, call people by the gender they don't prefer, refer to them as crazy, etc.
However, I think you, like a lot of people taking a fairly maximalist position in favor of youth gender care, may have an epistemological problem of your own, which is a distorted idea of how strong the evidence is for your position and how convincing others should find your position. For instance, when you say "everyone has an intrinsic gender, regardless of their age, which is not a choice," it gives me two questions. One is how you know this? If by "regardless of their age" you mean that this gender doesn't change throughout a person's life, I think there are actually a lot of cases of people who experienced gender dysphoria but then later didn't, as well as people who were given gender-affirming care despite not reporting signs of gender dysphoria from a young age. So it seems to me you are painting kind of a glib picture here.
In another comment you say that the vast majority of children transitioning have not come under any influence in doing so but are responding to their authentic feelings. Again I would have to ask how we can be sure of this. The number of people (particularly young people) transitioning has grown far too quickly for this question to be studied effectively. You talk about people making convenient assumptions; it certainly seems to me like you're making some of your own. The issue of youth gender care would definitely go much more smoothly if we all shared your premises, but I don't think there's sufficient evidence to do that as yet.
On the subject of empathy, I found this piece, though it's just one person's experience, to be a really important perspective on how this is sometimes experienced by kids on the ground, and how it's not always a matter of simply affirming an innate truth about themselves that's always been clear. https://lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name
I referred to what I said as "the pro-trans argument" for a reason. It is not 100% what I believe, my own views are a bit less maximalist. I was attempting to help people get into the headspace of the opposite view, rather than state what I think.
As it happens, I do not think all humans have a strong, innate, and sense of gender. I think one likely reason why some people have difficulty empathizing with trans people is that some people have a weak or indifferent internal sense of gender. There are anecdotal reports of some cis people who are highly satisfied and strongly identify with their gender, sort of the opposite of gender dysphoria, which indicates that a felt sense of gender is not unique to trans people. This is a hard topic to study because it must rely on introspection and self report. Scott Alexander's writing on the topic great influenced my thoughts on it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/
It isn't totally implausible to me that at least some of the recent upswing in gender dysphoria among young people might be false positives generated by social conformity. However, instances of it, like the ones in the link you cited, seem to be examples of people developing gender dysphoria in order to fit into a peer group. The scenario I was responding to, where malicious adult authority figures secretly indoctrinate kids, is paranoid hogwash. It also demonstrates a gross lack of understanding of child and adolescent psychology, young people tend to absorb beliefs from their peers, not from instruction by adults.
A toddler can't even define boy or girl (outside of superficial stereotypes at least).
A toddler probably also doesn't know the scientific definition of "nose." Should we disbelieve a toddler who says they have a nose?
It’s always surprising when otherwise sane people believe it’s NOT insane to think a person can deny science and force others and society to do so.
There are two sexes, no genders, and a hell of a lot of mental disorders worth treating, not celebrating. You’re fucked in the head if you think otherwise and worthy of no intellectual respect.
Weird is not close to an accurate and strong enough descriptor.
Writing like 20 posts about how everyone who doesn't agree with your views on gender and sexuality is "fucked in the head" in the comment section of a Substack post that had nothing to do with transgenderism in the first place is definitely totally normal and not weird at all
If you do a search on Matt's post the only time "trans" comes up is as part of the word "transportation".
Somehow that led to 1/2 the comments being about Trans athletes.
It speaks to your penchant to self-delude and/or accept anything as truth. …and then call others weird, which supposedly was cool. (Someone tell Austin.)
I think you bringing up unrelated topics speaks more about you than it does about me.
Accepting the delusion of the mentally ill isn’t “my view” any more than “water is wet” is my view. It just is. So, not only believing 1+1 is whatever you want, but politicizing and censuring those who strongly believe 1+1=2, IS fucked in the head.
Do you realize how you come across? I’m
a centrist and you sound like a foaming at the mouth radical who is not open to rational arguments and science. You are clearly very emotional about this issue.
He *is* rather weird, isn't he?
You're using words ... but not well.
1) How am I "not open to rational arguments and science"?
2) I feel calm, but even if I was emotional, that does not invalidate a statement.
3) If a centrist is now a person who calls another a "foaming at the mouth radical" for stating there are 2 sexes and 0 genders, then guilty as charged.
Should I call everyone who believes in God "mentally ill people living a delusion"?
You certainly can. It would depend on the circumstances. But thinking you're some made up gender and believing in God are very different things.
Believing in God can be a lot of things and generally impossible to disprove. (Likewise, being an atheist is ironic because it's sort of its own religion. Afterall, what kind of egomaniac thinks they've got the universe figured out. Agnosticism is rational. But I digress.) While if I'm a man or woman and I decide I'm the opposite, what the hell does that even mean? You're still physically you and even if you hack yourself, you're just you but after market. Same DNA.
You can call yourself all the gender names and attempt to change language to suit yourself, but you're still what you were. And if you're spending that much time hacking yourself and changing language, you're mentally ill. And we, as a society, need to help people accept themselves, not cater to their untruths possibly for the greed of certain individuals. And we need to be careful not let kids - who are just humans slowly integrating into adulthood - mistake the difficult transition to adulthood to being in the wrong body.
So you don’t understand biology AND you can’t count. Checks out.
As someone who probably agrees with you for the most part, I'll just say you're not winning anyone over with this approach.
I agree. And my words are born from frustration with the state of society and those in power clearly wanting people to be mindless tribalists.
I appreciate your comment. And I ask this earnestly, do you think they're winnable? If you're capable of being duped into either believing there's 6,969 genders or just ignoring the insanity of it, do you think you're capable changing your mind when that would mean agreeing with people you condescend to and vilify? Pride is a powerful feeling.
My experience is that the vast majority of people just haven't thought about it very much and are inclined to believe those they see as calling for tolerance. I can sometimes bring up the controversies with people who trust me, but it's still a slow process. I'm encouraged by what's been happening in Europe, so I think things can get better though.
Agreed. The only shot is someone trusts intentions. And even then, it's a difficult sell. You gotta plant the seed in hopefully fertile soil and let um be.
The difficulty is, one part due to siding with your team/tribalism; one part cause du jour/being "a smart progressive"; one part wrapping yourself in self-righteous tolerance; and last but most powerfully, if you're not for it, you're against it and THEN you are a baddy and will be excommunicated. Throw in the fact that changing your mind on this means admitting how insane - and in some cases immoral - the whole thing is. To many, they'd rather keep riding it out than knee cap their pride. And the longer you go supporting nonsense the more difficult it is to change.
You clearly have not looked into the issue in a rational way at all. There are two sexes plus intersex individuals (extremely few) and there is a thing called gender dysphoria - it’s universal and seen across time and place - but we don’t know exactly how common it is or it works. This is the current scientific standpoint. It says nothing about bathrooms, sports etc. You standpoint is an unexamined conservative gut feeling.
I'll take this in parts.
1) "You clearly have not looked into the issue in a rational way at all."
We'll agree to disagree, but it's ironic the person summing up a biology textbook is being told he not thinking in a "rational way at all"
2) "There are two sexes plus intersex individuals (extremely few)"
Intersex... Hermaphrodites... whatever you want to call them... are very rare. This is obvious. It's also obvious that they are anomalies in the same way having 12 fingers is an anomaly. (Shout out Antonio Alfonseca!) But people still say "humans have 10 fingers" and we understand what they're talking about. So when you disagree the way you did, you seem to be making a bad faith argument. Also, being born with the physical appearance of both sets of genitals technically isn't a 3rd sex. It's the combination of the two. But we're not arguing that. The point is, GENERALLY 99+% of humans are clearly 1 of 2 sexes.
3) "there is a thing called gender dysphoria - it’s universal and seen across time and place - but we don’t know exactly how common it is or it works."
I'm not sure what you're really saying here. Kinda sounds like the beginning of a Star Trek episode. But yes, mental illnesses exist. Treat them. Don't celebrate them. Are you throwing confetti at Anorexics? Speaking of throwing, how would a Bulimic Pride Parade go? You people are walking troves of comedy.
4) "It says nothing about bathrooms, sports etc. You standpoint is an unexamined conservative gut feeling."
It's not a gut feeling any more than 1+1=2 is a gut feeling. You haven't explained gender at all. But you have been pompously condescending. Although I appreciate your politeness.
Is "no genders" really the number people have landed on?
To be maximally charitable to Brad, I think he’s trying to say that “gender “ is meaningless apart from sex/we should talk about people’s sex, not gender.
Which means denying that gender dysphoria is a real thing. How funny then that it has been recorded in hundreds of cultures across space and time.
I'm not saying I *agree* with Brad, I'm trying to interpret what he said in a way that makes some sense.
I'm ... skeptical as to how much historical accounts of gender dysphoria apply to our modern society, which has very non-traditional gender norms.
Story time!
There was a young woman named Nawojka who lived in medieval Poland, back when only men were allowed to be university students. Nawojka was passionate about learning, so she dressed up as a man and enrolled at the Jagiellonian University (Poland's oldest and still most renowned university, kind of the Polish Harvard). She quickly came to be known as a brilliant student. But then, one day, she fell sick, and one of her concerned professors visited her at home and found out that she was a woman. Such outrage! She was flogged and expelled from the university (this was actually a sign of leniency; some of the authorities talked about the death penalty for her, but there was an outcry from her fellow students.) She ended up becoming a nun.
So here's my question: was Nawojka gender dysphoric, or was she rebelling against the limitations of her time, in which only men were allowed to study at the university? Had Nawojka been able to study at the university *as a woman*, would she have tried to pass herself off as a man?
Quote me where I denied "gender dysphoria" is a real thing. I'll save you the time. Gender dysphoria is a REAL mental illness.
Define gender. (This will be interesting.)
I think you will find that the point of what I am saying is that the definition of gender isn't a thing that I or most people care too much about on an abstract level.
It doesn't matter in our day to day lives that much.
I didn't find the point of what you're saying.
Look, I don't care about the definition of gender as it relates to my ability to exist. Maybe we agree there.
Similarly, I don't care about cricket matches or new technology in calf implants. But in all cases, if objectively false statements or weak theories are being taught and celebrated throughout society causing exponential increases in cases of children claiming to be trans, I care. And if you follow the $cience to find standard medical practice in many areas is not to question “affirming” care for significant financial gain, then I care even more. I wanna get to the heart of the issue. And to do that, you gotta wake people up.
So sure, don't care about something that's abstract ...until it worth caring about. And now it is. Most people don't have the stones or the mental fortitude to call it what it is because it's your team that aligned with the illogic and greed. Fuck teams, David. We're all people. My team is my family, community, and any well-meaning like-minded person trying build a better more sustainable world. (And I don't just mean sorting recyclable plastics #'s 1-7.)
I mean if you are trans of course it will be your omni-issue...
I love the "Which brings me to the trans issue.... " segue. That phrase should be a meme at this point.
"Trans stuff" *is* an omni-issue.
There are few areas of life or politics that "trans stuff" does not meaningfully alter or change.
I do not understand how so many people--liberals especially--continue to act like this is a niche issue affecting a small portion of the population.
What area's of politics and life do you feel like are meaningfully altered by "trans stuff"? And how?
All public school guidance around gender identity education, pronouns, sport inclusion, and bathrooms have been significantly altered to accommodate trans students;
Title IX is currently being amended to include gender identity (itself not defined in any meaningful way) alongside sex, with little regard to the inherent tension between those two concepts;
While many red states are banning medical transition for minors, blue states are reacting thermostatically and becoming sanctuary cities, including and up to CA allowing runaway minors to get gender affirming medical care from the state and barring any state actors from coordinating or communicating with disapproving parents;
Misgendering--literally the correct sexing of a person who identifies as a sex other than what they are--is illegal in many settings, and punishable by jail time in Canada and parts of the UK;
Sex-segregated areas like prisons, bathrooms, gym changing rooms, spas, and rape centers are, in many states like CA, by definition no longer sex-segregated, and anyone who identifies as a woman may use them regardless of any medical transition;
I can go on.
But like how does that affect the average person?
Just that bathroom are not sex-segregated?
Free speech laws in Canada or the UK don't affect us very much.
Who are you thinking of when you imagine the average person?
Half the population is female--that means females don't have sex-segregated sporting opportunities, refuges, safe spaces anymore.
A huge number of kids in public schools alone are being educated on gender identity starting in elementary school. If you can explain to me how it's possible to tell an 8 year old about gender identity in a way that isn't enormously confusing and potentially damaging, I'm all ears.
So that's women especially, and kids--along with every kid's parents. It's not 100% of people, but does that not scoop up a majority of "average"?
While our free speech laws in the US remain fairly robust compared to Canada or the UK, social norms have, at break-neck speed, made it risky and even professionally suicidal to mention anything around this topic, in universities, in careers, in government.
I don't see what the impact of "trans stuff" is on the economy, which is what people usually mean by "kitchen-table issues."
In order to actually get a sex change, you need parental consent. This law just seems to me like a way to ensure that kids have an adult to talk to if they're questioning their sexuality/gender and don't feel comfortable coming out to their parents yet.
California is a sanctuary state. If a 15 year old runs away from parents in TX, they can get gender affirming care in CA from the state, and no state-affiliated adult can release information to the parents in TX about it.
That’s a reasonable intention but there are a lot of ways that can go off the rails. The question should be whether the law promotes nuance and safeguards.
This is ridiculous.
Do you have any real evidence that "woke fools" are actually brainwashing kids? No, of course not, because it's not freaking happening.
This is why the wierdness critique appeals to normies: Because people like you get so damned obsessed with seeing a fucking conspiracy behind everything you don't like, when the truth is that Hanlon's Razor almost always points us in the right direction towards well-intentioned-but-misguided people doing things that trigger our biases.
I don't know about "brainwashing" but it's pretty well established that the dubious concept of an innate, essential "gender identity" is being taught in public schools as an established scientific fact. That's what we're debating about, right?
>>it's pretty well established that the dubious concept of an innate, essential "gender identity" is being taught in public schools as an established scientific fact
No. No. No.
This is a series of overgeneralizations, not "pretty well established".
Which public schools are you referring to? I'm pretty sure that East Podunk High barely has a sex ed program, let alone one where any form of ideology about gender is being taught. Perhaps some handful of schools in ultra-liberal enclaves might have a modern gender studies elective or have some sort of gender-ideology-inflected segment of their sex-ed/health classes, but this is a laughably tiny minority relative to the proportion of schools that offer, say, Mandarin. It does not remotely constitute an organized attempt to "teach" an "established scientific fact" "in public schools".
Outside of those extremes, most mainstream schools teach some form of sex ed that tries to avoid condemning nor endorsing any particular sexuality or sexual activity, and teach some form of pluralistic tolerance for sexual and gender minorities, and have spent the last generation trying to stamp out bullying of ANY kind. Where efforts exist to be encouraging towards sexual and gender minorities, those are focused not on "brainwashing" or "indoctrinating" or teaching any specific formulation "as an established scientific fact", but rather on encouraging students to explore their self-knowledge.
I'm pretty confident in declaring that there is not a single public school in this entire nation where students are being graded on whether they are willing to affirm an "innate, essential 'gender identity' as an established scientific fact". There is no unified curriculum for teaching this, not even a "loosely-unified-but-hotly-contested" curriculum like one might expect for economics or philosophy electives.
Across the board, what we see is confirmation after confirmation of Hanlon's Razor: Mostly good people making mostly good choices, some accidentally going a little too far.
I believe MY has pointed out that public schools in the US are very decentralized, there are lots of different things happening in different places, and it's hard to say with any confidence how widespread any of these things are. And that's all true.
But anyone saying "this is a laughably tiny minority" or that it's not organized has to contend with reporting like this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/03/schools-gender-identity-transgender-lessons/
"Resources and lesson plans for those who want to teach about gender identity are becoming much more common. Seven states now require that curriculums include LGBTQ topics. The National Sex Education Standards, developed by experts and advocacy groups, name gender identity as one of seven essential topics, alongside puberty, consent, sexual orientation and other subjects. And the federal government recommends that schools include gender identity in their sex education programs."
When you say it's just a matter of "encouraging students to explore their self-knowledge" you're kind of illustrating the problem here. Gender is a cultural construct; that's what the word means; that's what differentiates it from "sex". The difference here is subtle enough that many college-educated adults mix them up on a regular basis. There's no way young children are going to be able to parse the nuance here. Yet you take it as given they have "self knowledge" on this subject that they need to be encouraged to "explore"?
Teach kids that everyone is different, the "rules" of gender are arbitrary and sometimes repressive, and everyone should be accepted as they are as long as they're not hurting anyone -- fine, great. But all this secular gnosticism just seems like a recipe for confusing the fuck out of gender non-conforming young people, and the medicalization of these differences definitely raises the stakes. It's definitely weird, and people are right to be upset.
You forget about Obama's dear colleague letter at the end of his presidency, largely centering around Gavin Grimm, a trans kid in a public school requesting to use male bathrooms.
Gov't guidance to public schools made it clear that a failure to accommodate trans kids--and I'll come back to what that means--would place them under scrutiny for future funding.
Who provided the education around accommodations? Activist groups like GLAAD and the HRC, whose recommendations have so often become unofficial school policy for many public schools.
Guidelines weren't the question at hand. The OP contended that "it's pretty well established that the dubious concept of an innate, essential "gender identity" is being taught in public schools as an established scientific fact".
That's a direct quote. It has nothing to do with bathroom guidelines, it has to do with curricula and alleged indoctrination.
Guidelines about accommodating trans students opened the door for advocacy groups to go into schools and provide a host of new interventions, including, yes, instruction on gender identity in classrooms that could be fairly described as "indoctrination" if one takes at face value that kids under 14 are going to have a hard time understanding the concept of gender identity in a way that doesn't make a 7 year old boy who likes Disney princesses wonder if he's really a girl.
I think this post is a very good example for the limits of the "weird" rhetoric, because in a lot of cases, you can spin it both ways. This law covers a complex debate involving gender roles, biology, data privacy, child-parent relations and duty of care. The probability that they nailed all those dimensions with their law is pretty low. It's also perfectly possible that this law actually improves the lives of the children affected.
I also think though, as you said, that putting this topic into the center of debate is probably no help electorally, because at first glance, it looks VERY weird. You need to look into the underlying debate to really understand what this law is trying to address, which obviously nobody does. And you might still find it weird afterwards!
On the other hand, I also think it's very weird to yell "SCHOOL STAFF WILL BRAINWASH CHILDREN" at each and every opportunity because of this law. This is one of those cases where you can paint proponents and vocal opponents equally as "weird".
I think most people think things like "Drag Queens are a bit weird" and also "Talking about Drag Queens all the time is a bit weird".
Caring about things in politics is "weird" and anything you are trying to convince people that an issue they don't care about is very important you risk sound like a "weirdo".
These are false equivalencies. Drag queens have been around and were barely topics of any conversation. Drag queens dragging with little kids - “it won’t suck itself” - is new. And if it’s not new it’s new to most people. Either way, it should not exist anywhere in a functioning health society that rightfully criminalizes pedophilia and the encouraged sexualizing of kids. The moment people stop talking about this, society has officially given up.
If you say that Drag Queens are kind of a weird mix for library story hour I think most people will agree with you.
If you try to convince people that Drag Queens are a threat to our children everywhere I think most people will think you are "weird".
Yes, but it is _politicians_ that are talking about Darg Queens.
a) Democrats should not give ammunition to
b) Unjustified attacks from Fox News
Right. They know pushing people's buttons benefits them politically. And vast numbers of Americans willingly supply said buttons.
Technically all education is brainwashing. Or at least brain wiring. The concern is wiring in a harmful, illogical, impractical way filled with falsehoods instead of societally and personally positive beneficial facts that can build skills and self-reliance.
I would suggest the "less weird" framing on this issue is not to argue about the purported risk of "brainwashing," but instead to point out that in many instances literally the EXACT same people who claim that being trans drastically increases the likelihood of a minor attempting suicide are also supporting legislation to facilitate school officials concealing students' said same psychiatric condition from their parents.
My understanding is that at least some states have protections for parent access into teenage physical/mental health records already. For example, if a student tells a teacher that they're self-harming or depressed, that's not necessarily going to get back to the parent (from experience).
I suspect a lot of this is because a lot of issues with depression/mental health can stem from the home environment, and letting the parent in can make things worse. If the school knows then oftentimes it is because the student has made the choice to confide in a trusted adult there; that they haven't talked to their parents says something.
It also really doesn't seem like the schools place to "out" a kid to their parents. I suspect in the 80s and 90s gay kids had much more suicidal ideation, I'm not sure schools being forced to tell parents that their kid was gay would have improved the situation much.
If we're talking about elementary/early middle school age, then parents should probably be let know that their child is questioning their gender. Once we get to late middle/high school though, this change seems more like a realignment to existing practice.
I'd tentatively say that we should tie disclosure to the age of minor sexual consent -- the age at which minors are allowed to consent to other minors.
Most states have "Romeo and Juliet" laws on the books so that they don't have to go charging 15- and 16-year olds with pederasty just because they roll in the hay like countless generations have over the ages. If that age of consent is 15, then great, that's the age where kids should be protected from parents trying to control their personal lives.
Teen pregnancy is at an historic low. Whatever the kids are doing behind closed doors, it's fucking WORKING at not getting them pregnant. It's time to recognize that and back off the parental rights bullshit, which was always a shibboleth for stopping teen pregnancy.
Also, I'd prefer to add a "likely abuse" exception to these disclosure laws. If the child is likely to get abused, then the school doesn't have to disclose. If it can't be proved that the child is likely to get abused, then the school MUST disclose. Any kid that comes out in school must automatically be assessed for likelihood of abuse -- and this doesn't need to be an inquisition, it just needs to be a few sessions of, "Hey, how do you feel about your home life? Are you good?". On the flip side, I think that until the whole culture war subsides, we should have one of those 10-year laws on the books that automatically assigns social workers to the houses of any kids that come out. Despite cultural stereotypes, social workers aren't stupid, and they can pick up on abuse or likely abuse pretty easily. They should serve as an early warning system so that kids don't get trapped in shitty situations.
It seems to me that if a school has reason to believe a child is being or likely to be abused for any reason then the proper course is not so much to keep it a secret as it is to refer the matter to CPS and/or law enforcement. I would hope it is uncontroversial that there should be a protocol for things like that.
But I also think we need to be clear about what 'abuse' means. Beating or starving a child is abuse, and the state needs to intervene. However what it sounds like we're really talking about in this context is something closer to 'child's family has values different than those of the school administration.' That's not a good road for an institution that is supposed to serve the broader public to go down. I also think the public sector is kidding itself if it thinks it will win those sorts of battles over the long term.
I would include verbal abuse and overly harsh punishment. Locking a child in their room without beating them isn't necessarily violent, but it's clearly crossing a moral line that we should not tolerate in our social contract.
I can concede that at a certain point the line gets fuzzy and reasonable people can disagree about where and when it has been crossed. As unsatisfying as it may be we have to rely on the courts to work things like that out.
To use your own examples though, are we really going to treat anyone who has yelled at their child and/or sent them to their room for disciplinary reasons as a potential abuser? At minimum I am not sure there is a mandate for that and I am very skeptical that trying via the public schools would make the world a better place.
Abuse, in some states, now includes refusing to allow a child to transition socially or medically. Again, CA has laws about this, and court cases I can refer you to, of parents having their kids taken away because they were not sufficiently supportive of transition.
I appreciate your "likely abuse" exception.
I wish more of the laws currently being enacted followed this, though. There is an assumption--most notably in the new CA law--that parents will by default abuse their children upon finding out the kids are gay or trans, with zero caveats about needing good reason to think so.
Many kids have strict or abusive or borderline abusive home environments. I think we all went to school with a kid who got a violent response to bad grades. Do schools stop sending out report cards to the parents of kids who get bad grades because they assume the parents will abuse the kids? No. They must wait until there's evidence of abuse, and then they are mandatory reporters.
I always thought the principles 'don't lie to parents about psychological conditions manifesting in their children and don't base instruction in ideas with little scientific basis' were both not weird and put me firmly left of center, especially the second part. But now we have this debate.
This comment section shows me that "don't lie to parents about psychological conditions manifesting in their children and don't base instruction in ideas with little scientific basis" now may put you right of center.
Oh I have one or two views that are way more heretical than this but even then my net alignment still seems about right. Few people are in complete lock step with the party they vote for on everything.
I don't know about "few", only because many people are either too ignorant/fat 'n happy to know what they would or wouldn't align with or are just followers. Ironically, I've found the people who often make outward claims about their individuality are the biggest sheep desperately in need of group validation. Sure they'll try to stand out by pretending to take bold stances or just calling their stance bold, but it's generally the safe stance pre-chosen and designed to be the safe radical stance.
Doesn't the argument for psychiatric confidentiality in general apply here? If it becomes known that the person you are confiding in will spill the beans to other people, especially other people with authority over you, you'd have to be a fool to confide in them in the first place. If school officials are required to report a student's condition to their parents, any student with half a brain will make sure school officials never find out about it. The end result will be that students keep anything wrong with them to themselves and never confide in anyone about it. Instead of just being concealed from their parents, their condition is now concealed from everybody. This seems obviously worse.
Do parents have rights and responsibilities or not?
Conversely, at least before college, students normally spend much more time outside of school in situations where either their families can directly monitor them or where their families are the ones with the capability to warn someone else to monitor them for self-harm.
To put it another way, I would guess without hesitation that minors make vastly more suicide attempts *outside* of school than on school grounds and during school hours. It seems "obviously worse" to me for the people who only have responsibility for supervising the minor for 6 to 8 hours a day, five days a week, in a very limited geographic area (and generally have little to no sense of personal connection with the student or knowledge of their baseline behavior) to hide information from the people who have responsibility for supervising the student the entire rest of the day, weekends/holidays, over the entire rest of the planet and who (in most, admittedly not all, situations) have deep personal motivations to keep the student safe and can more easily watch for and detect concerning changes in behavior.
But schools are not doctors or psychiatrists.
What you're saying seems like an argument about mandatory reporting in general. Teachers are required to report suspected abuse, but some kids don't want to get their parents in trouble. So one could apply your argument: "Now instead of opening up about what's happening, kids will keep their abuse to themselves, which seems obviously worse." The idea behind mandatory reporting is that there may be people who can help the kids with what they're going through, people who have the kids' best interests at heart.
It isn't a fully general argument against mandatory reporting. Mandatory reporters are supposed to report things they notice about kids, not just things kids intentionally confide in them. They are also supposed to report to child welfare agencies, not parents. The issue here seems to be that some people think reporting on kid's LGBT identities to their parents will allow their parents to "help" them, while others think it will put them in danger.
To complicate things further, I just looked up the history of mandatory reporting laws, and it isn't clear how effective they are at protecting kids. Some studies have found they have no effect, while others have found they generate a lot of false positives.
I don't totally see the relevance about reporting what one notices about kids. The point I was making is that professionals in many fields—school, but also psychiatry which you mentioned—are required to disclose things that are told to them, even though this may make someone reluctant to unburden themselves. (The point about false positives is an interesting one from a policy perspective; I'm not sure if it affects the point I was making about principle.)
I think you've correctly identified the crux of the issue, and your scare quotes around "help" suggest (pardon me if I'm reading you wrong) that you're highly skeptical of the idea that parents have their kids' best interests in mind. (You also seemed to suggest that reporting to child welfare would be more acceptable than reporting to a child's parents, but again, sorry if I'm misreading you.) Whereas I think most people think that almost all parents have their kids' best interests in mind, and I think most people are correct about that. We give parents tremendous leeway in kids' lives, and we expect the state to keep parents very well informed about their kids. I'm sure you can think of examples without me having to supply any, but I thought this post by SB commenter Dilan Esper covered a lot of good ground: https://dilanesper.substack.com/p/a-lot-of-people-on-the-left-dont
Regarding the trans issue specifically, I definitely think many parents will have a lot of concerned questions about the prospect of their child transitioning, but I think that's appropriate—it's a big step (or a series of big steps) with potentially serious and even irreversible effects! Sometimes it's the right step to take, but the idea that parents wouldn't be made aware that the step was even being considered strikes me as willfully ignoring the part parents play in kids' lives.
I wouldn't say I'm skeptical of the idea that parents have their kids' best interests in mind. I think that is true of nearly all parents. What I am skeptical of is that parents always hold accurate beliefs about what is in their kids' best interest. I think parents who support their child's transition, and those who vehemently oppose it, both think what they are doing will benefit their child. The difference is that one of them is correct and one isn't.
Taking examples unrelated to trans issues, I am sure parents who punish their children for changing religions think they are doing what is best for their child. Parents who don't vaccinate their kids think they are doing so as well. So do parents who send unruly teens to those abusive troubled teen camps that don't work. I'm sure all those parents had the best intentions for their kids, but we all know what good intentions are used to pave...
I don’t understand your point about religion. The school already isn’t required to notify the parents of students changing their religion, right?
I don’t care much about the secret trans issue because I think it probably only affects like 100 people in the country, but it seems to me that the correct policy is to not require the school to notify the parents of sexual identity if the kid wants to keep it secret.
I’d probably just leave it up to the schools. If a kid says “please don’t tell my dad because he’ll disown me and kick me out of the house” I don’t think we should have a law that removes teacher/administrator discretion.
The school won't notify the parents about the students' religion because the school isn't involved in their religions at all. That is, teachers and counselors won't suggest to students that they may be happier in a different religion, organize religious ceremonies, or supply students with religious clothing or other articles. They will do equivalent things related to gender transition.
I think this is right.
A lot of this boils down to the basic discomfort of the public school system requiring us to put our kids in the care of a teacher - someone we don’t know, don’t have leverage over, and don’t have particular reasons to think will exercise good judgment. If you were hiring a governess, and the governess told you “look sometimes your kid tells me things in confidence, and in order to maintain their trust, among other reasons, it’s important for me to keep their confidentiality”, it’s at least possible you’ll be fine with that - because you know the governess and specifically hired her to take care of your kids. Totally different dynamic when it’s a faceless employee of the state (ie the institution that can’t fix the pothole at the end of your street in fewer than 3 years) with an M.Ed degree.
Do you also think the school should be required to out gay students to their parents?
To me these seem like identical issues.
They aren't identical because only one invites a lifetime of medicalization.
But I will say, being normal means not obsessing about the issue. Although I see some of the same absurdities David calls out, I also get your point that it's ultimately affecting a very small number of people.
Well, that depends on the extent of the anti-gay feelings of the parents. Outing a gay student could conceivably result in physical abuse, or being forced into one of those conversion therapy operations. I think if the anti-trans contingent did not keep upping the stakes, everyone else could probably have a more reasoned response/strategy for the small number of kids who might eventually transition.
> Outing a gay student could conceivably result in physical abuse, or being forced into one of those conversion therapy operations.
Is that still a thing even? That super weird guy in the Biden administration (the one stealing women's luggage) had to invent stories about conversion therapy to gain clout.
> I think if the anti-trans contingent did not keep upping the stakes,
To be fair, I'm pretty sure it's the other side that's constantly pushing the boundaries.
If a kid comes out as gay, there is nothing that the school is supposed to do about it.
If a kid comes out as trans, there are a host of interventions that the school is urged or required to do--things that will make it clear to all other students and teachers that the kid is trans.
The only people left out of this are the parents. It's not a secret in the school that the kid is trans, whereas it may well be or stay a secret that the kid is gay.
What's more, as James C says below, there is a *medical pathway* that is *recommended treatment* (don't get me started) for kids who come out as trans. There is no such medical pathway for gay kids.
Parents don't expect to learn anything about their kids' romantic lives from their teachers. But I think a situation in which the teacher is addressing the kid as Bri but telling the parents "Brian is doing very well" has some real ethical problems to it.
The willingness to allow parents to inflict unbelievable levels of psychological distress in their children is insane though. Like apostate, trans children deserve a safe space to talk about it.
A lot of people deserve a lot of things. It doesn’t follow that the government, via schools, is an effective or net-positive vehicle to provide them.
Back when I was in school my teachers would inform my parents about my grades and nothing else. Seems like a good model.
If you were physically attacking other students, your parents wouldn't have been notified? And you think that is a good policy?
Or is this exaggeration?
As a current parent I can say that my kids' teachers tell us about how the kids are getting along socially, how happy they seem, how their behavior is.
A lot of the responses are twisting themselves in knots to discredit you as a monomaniacal anti-trans crusader, but the issue is really about the relationship between parents, their children, and the government, and that relationship is the all-time "political third rail" gold medalist.
No one should gaslight themselves into thinking that's a neutral topic or that the Democratic party can change the status quo around it without major backlash. It might be worth it anyway, to proponents, but no one should lie to themselves about the risks.
Unless that co-worker was Ben Carson. Who for whatever weird ideas he espoused on his own time, was undisputably a top brain surgeon.
This is a pretty strange argument. It implies that holocaust denial and flat-earth arguments should be avoided because they are "unpopular", not because they are untrue. The implication being that it would be ok to support those ideas if they were "popular"? Then it tries to graft this weird position onto a claim about parental notification and religion, while implying that "odd people" and "guidance counselors" are corrupting and/or proselytizing children at California schools. Right-wing moral panic much?
The law in question does not prohibit anybody from telling parents anything. It prohibits school district from adopting rules mandating that school personnel to inform parents if a child asks to use a different pronoun, or expresses a non-standard gender preference, or a non-standard sexual orientation. It also prohibits retaliation against personnel who choose not share this information with parents. Why was such a law considered necessary? Because the anti-gay, anti-trans right wing has been campaigning to require schools to adopt "mandatory outing" policies. Does the law change some ancient obligation of school personnel to tell parents everything that their children do and say at school? No - no such obligation has ever existed. The law was passed in response to anti-gay, anti-trans mandatory outing policies enacted by a handful of California school districts in ... 2023. These are the same districts trying to ban books that mention Harvey Milk.
If you have such a bad relationship with your kids that they don't want to tell you how they are feeling about themselves for fear of your reaction, then work on that relationship. You are not entitled to turn everybody at school into the Stasi just because sex and / or gay and trans issues creep you out. Speak to your kids. If you can't, then try speaking to their teachers, who are in no way prohibited from talking to you about it under this law. And if you are not obtaining the necessary level of surveillance voluntarily, you can always homeschool those poor children.
Re: unpopular views, I'm saying if you meet someone with one strange view, it's common to doubt their judgement across everything else.
For example, if you heard how RFK Jr handles bear carcasses, you wouldn't say "I won't trust him to handle the next dead bear he meets, but I'll still trust him to lead the country and handle our nukes."
See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/08/05/rfk-jr-dead-bear-central-park-new-yorker/
No - I am not part of that 5% of the population...
The bill Newsom signed seems obviously correct, if you think about it for more than a second. Just imagine it from the perspective of a kid instead of a parent. Imagine you are questioning your gender, religion, or anything else about your identity, and are scared that your parents might reject or punish you for it. Wouldn't you like to be able to talk to someone about it without worrying that it will get back to your parents? Oftentimes school officials are some of the only other adults that kids and teens meet and interact regularly with, it makes sense that they would be the best people to go to.
Your entire argument is based on a faulty assumption, which is that kids and teens never question their gender identity of their own volition, they only do so when they are bamboozled into doing so by malicious adults. This assumption serves an important rhetorical purpose, it allows anti-trans folks to portray themselves as concerned parents trying to protect kids and teens, instead of as cruel tyrants trying to hurt and control them. However, it is not well-founded in reality. The overwhelming majority of kids and teens who question their gender identity do not do so at the prompting of adult authority figures.
Let's take your religion hypothetical and imagine it again, without your assumption that kids never do anything without an adult instigating it. Imagine a kid or teen has spent some time on their own studying different religions, and is considering changing their religion. However, they are afraid that if they do so, their parents might hurt them. It seems to me that it's obviously a good thing if they are able to discuss their worries with some adult at school, without it getting back to their parents.
I think you're getting a little over wrought here.
"You would certainly not say "David thinks the holocaust never happened, and I'm ready for him to do that brain surgery on me""
Really? Does not seem obvious to me at all. Like, I would not be friends with them, wouldn't invite them to my house, etc, but what is wrong with them operating?
As a Jew it would make me concerned. Maybe he kind of wishes I was dead.
As a non-Jew I wouldn't be very concerned. If a racist was doing brain surgery on me, that's a shame that he's racist but I wouldn't worry about my operation.
Does Bernie ever wonder if his decades long political project was a waste of time?
Americans who aren’t extremely unlucky and who haven’t made extremely bad life choices are just plain much better off than a similar European with similar demographics. He has been reduced to printing bullshit stats to imply Americans are broke and only socialism can save them.
Enough, old man. Time to join Joe Biden off the political centre stage.
Until we have universal healthcare Bernie will have something to fight for.
If we get it he will have a major victory so he can call it all a success.
He will probably never have to reflect on the idea that the American economy actually works pretty okay even for non-super rich people.
Much better off? It’s August and a lot of Europeans take August off…
What's 28 days off to spend with family and friends when the weather's warm compared to powerful clothes dryers?
You joke but...
It’s a valid point - a Slowborer class German or Frenchman might be budgeting $10k more for vacations than an equivalent America. From an American perspective that would pay for a lot of square footage.
It's also easier for Europeans to take an "international" vacation, not just because of more time off, but because other countries are right nearby, conveniently connected by road and train, and have open borders. Maybe the real comparison is "intercontinental" vacations, but there's something to be said for being able to take a week to practice your Dutch without much trouble.
>> Americans who aren’t extremely unlucky and who haven’t made extremely bad life choices are just plain much better off than a similar European with similar demographics.
Better in what way? Richer? Sure, in most cases. But are they happier? I believe the answer is no, again, in most cases. Also they live shorter lives… The US doesn’t have many advantages compared to Western Europe at least and hence not much immigration from there for many generations now.
It also depends who you are. If you're working poor, your life may be materially worse in the US -- it's my understanding that low pay, just-below-full-time employment, short-notice call-ups etc. a la Walmart don't happen in Western Europe even at the low end of the employment ladder, because their labor laws are stricter and their unions have more power. If you have recurring medical needs, treating them will cost you much more in the US than anywhere else. The quality of the food easily available and affordable to the poor is low. Having a car is more of a necessity, because relatively few places have everything you need in walking distance, or have good transit (and many places don't even have consistent sidewalks). Low-income neighborhoods in the US are more dangerous than their counterparts in Europe, both with more street crime and more motor vehicle-related fatalities. Lower quality of life, not even compensated by higher incomes if you work a low-end job.
High-end opportunities, on the other hand, are better in the US. The top US universities have bigger budgets and more research output than the top European universities, even including the UK in Europe. The biggest movie stars are in Hollywood. Tech founders have a much better chance of making it big if they move to the US, and tech employees are paid far more in the US than elsewhere. Even for less conspicuous things -- doctors, engineers, business consultants etc. are paid more in the US than in other countries I've tried to compare to. You can compensate for America's disadvantages if you have a lot of money, or if your employer provides excellent perks (as some tech companies do), and enjoy all the advantages of being a wealthy and conspicuously successful person in a developed country.
There's also a matter of taste. If you like being surrounded by fields of grass, fields of concrete, and huge numbers of cars, and spending much of your time in one of those cars, you may like the American built environment. People who like dense, walkable cities, or good bike infrastructure, or buildings made to last for centuries, or lots of heavily ornamented structures from before ornamentation went out of fashion, will prefer the built environment of Europe. (Urbanists like the YouTuber Not Just Bikes have publicly "given up" on the United States and Canada and moved to places more to their taste, such as the Netherlands.) And people will generally be fond of whatever "home" is, and will want to live near people they know, speaking their native language and navigating familiar institutions, unless the improvement from leaving is drastic and undeniable.
I would not say that in general Americans are "just plain much better off" than comparable Europeans -- only some Americans are. Americans are more unequal, and American society and cities are configured to certain tastes.
I don't have stats to back this up, but anecdotally it seems like the immigrants to the US from other developed countries disproportionately work in high-end jobs where they have a shot at stardom, which is improved (at least in their case) by coming to the States. My own parents came from Israel, and know some recent immigrants from France, Germany, and the UK -- countries where the working class would have no reason to wish to become working class in the US, but medical researchers might find a pay raise and improved opportunity to work on the most exciting projects.
"- it's my understanding that low pay, just-below-full-time employment, short-notice call-ups etc. a la Walmart don't happen in Western Europe even at the low end of the employment ladder,"
As many of them would remain unemployed on the dole because Europeans are masters of not hiring people full time so firms aren't locked into a can't fire them situation. The only reason European countries, even Scandinavian ones, are less unequal than the US is because of government transfers. If you look at the Gini coefficients prior to transfers, things do not look that different.
If we assume my experience working for a massive German conglomerate is pretty representative of corporate-Europe then I think the middle-end opportunities are better in the States too. Because of the strict labor laws, there's just *WAY* less middle career job changing and that creates a very stifling labor market. Middle-manager labor has way more power in the US and corporations here have to compete more forcefully for talent.
I think the best rebuttal to that is the one that many neolibs make to people saying life was better in the 50s-70s in the US where people could live on one income. Which is that many/most people in the US could have that lifestyle also if they wanted to sacrifice by having a smaller house, only having one car, not paying for their kids to go to university, etc. But people don't because they like all those things.
Similarly, its very possible that people in the US could have much of the "European lifestyle," they would just need to accept being much poorer (like the Europeans are) to compensate.
This seems roughly correct and is the reason many people move here (myself included!). I still think it misses some cultural things though. European countries differ a lot , but in many cases I think us size and individualistic culture means people are more likely to be lonely, see family less often and have more superficial friendships. Also, even if the middle and upper middle class can the better end of the stick, most of them are still in danger of losing it all and falling into poverty. Prolonged unemployment means losing your healthcare etc. less safety net isn’t just bad for the poor. It makes the better off more worried for themselves and their kids.
>Americans who aren’t extremely unlucky and who haven’t made extremely bad life choices are just plain much better off than a similar European with similar demographics<
This seems a very broad statement. What level of income? What part of Europe? I'd rather be part of a top quartile DINK PMC couple who doesn't overvalue leisure in just about any part of the US than even the richest parts of Europe.
I'd rather be a child in a household at the 60th income percentile in Denmark than the United States. And the preference for Denmark would be extremely strong if we move from 60th percentile to 35th percentile. Not only "extremely" unlucky Americans finds themselves at the 35th percentile. Some are born that way.
“ I'd rather be part of a top quartile DINK PMC couple who doesn't overvalue leisure in just about any part of the US than even the richest parts of Europe.”
Overvalue is doing a lot of the work there. A US where the default is that people with professional office jobs don’t work in August is a very different world. Leisure is a lot more valuable if the default is that essentially everyone you know also gets the same time off.
All I meant was, if you really don't care much for time off, the European lifestyle isn't as much of a consolation for the radically lower pay we see at upper level jobs. I've been kicking the tires on a move to the EU. I don't think I'll be able to do it without a US employer who lets me work remote. European salaries are, uh, dismal.
My brother works at a US company in Germany and gets the best of both worlds, in the form of US type salary and social benefits by virtue of being a legal resident. He loves the lifestyle but always emphasizes that it is not a panacea, and that it would be a much harder call if his tax and salary situation was that of a German citizen.
I don’t know what country you’re thinking of but many of these upper level private sectors jobs come with what we’d call tenure. That can count for a lot as well. If you get RIFd at 48 and can’t find a new job that counts for a lot as well.
Americans may make more than similarly situated Europeans, but it’s not clear we are doing better. If you have a corporate job in America, you have less time off and less security than a similar person in Germany or France. If you are in the bottom 40%, you are likely materially worse off than your peer in Germany or France.
More like bottom 15%. Tons of people living excellent lives on modest pay in the flyover states. Lots of Europeans who are long term unemployed and having a tough go of it.
Here’s another example of Bernie screwing up the stats:
https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2024/01/americans-are-better-off-than-you-think/
It’s too late for him to change course. He loses too much and gains too little.
Median American income actually isn’t much higher iirc. You can look it up; the OECD has these #s.
Then account for life expectancy, health, vacation, family support, inequality, opportunity (actually quite poor in US for the disadvantaged), violence…
I’d maaaaybe take being top 20% in US. Not much less. Euros who move to the US do so for lucrative or prestigious opportunities. They’re not drawn from the middle of the distribution.
lol, “middle of the distribution” euros have been moving here in droves for decades. Tons of white ethnic/expat communities of polish/ukranian/greek/italian/spanish/portugese folks all over the country filled with working and middle class immigrants. Europe has poor employment prospects for the bottom 40% of young folks, youth unemployment very high.
Will everyone (on all sides) just shut the fuck up about trans people!
I’d like to go ONE day without having to think (positively or negatively) about trans people.
Godwin's law has changed. All comment sections now eventually lead to trans people or Hamas/Israel.
I hate omnicauses
Judging purely from the comments in order of popularity you brought up Israel first ;)
This is certainly one area where the SB mod policy would benefit from a more heavy handed approach.
Concur. Don't love Freddie's general mod style, but 'if the piece doesn't bring up trans stuff, directly, don't bring it up in the comments' is not a bad rule.
When he had multiple posts saying "please don't make everything in the comments about trans stuff" I was like "what is going *on* in those comments?" (I'm not a paid subscriber there). And now I know.
Agree!
I have to think, in certain people, it triggers some deep psychological fear that someone is going to cut their dick off.
Penis-stealing witches!
Lyndon Johnson once bragged that he had VP Hubert Humphrey's "pecker in his pocket"... so it really might be a Democrat plot!
I completely agree. Trans people are a very small number of people who are mainly just living their lives. Why they live rent free in everyone’s head makes no sense.
I think the success of the "weird" critique actually lies in high-school dynamics, which each and every American instinctively gets. Cool people tend to look down on people who seem humorless and aggressively obsessed with niche topics, and they especially look down on people who have very detailed critiques of your lifestyle without knowing you. A lot of Trump Republicans (starting with Trump himself!) also just look and dress weird. Calling them "weird" tells Americans that these people are exactly like those uncool, frustrated loners that you tried to avoid at all cost in high-school. Which is much more effective than calling Trump the second coming of Hitler or something.
Still, I wonder if there is risk attached to that kind of framing. Homosexuals have been branded as "weird" for decades because of the narrative that they are closeted pedophiles. It's also very easy to mark trans people as weird men who just like to get into women's bathrooms. That line of attack is incorrect, of course. But bringing "weird" back into the mainstream could also make it more effective. You do set a more stringent set of norms for "normalcy", after all.
The most head-scratching line in Matt's piece was, IMO, "The politics of 'they are weirdos, we are normal' certainly supports classic progressive values of tolerance and humane instincts..."
I mean, no? That's exactly the opposite of the way the taunt "they are weirdos" works and has always worked? As you say, has Matt *been* in a high school?
(I think in context Matt seems to be suggesting that tolerance is a default value and that Trumpian departures from it are perceived as weird or deviant, but it's a bit tough to parse and on its own the statement leapt out at me as a very strange claim to make. I'll note that the rest of the piece was easy enough to follow and it's really just this one parenthetical that stood out.)
Tolerance is a default value. The Left overrates how much of an electoral drag Vance is, but he certainly has a bunch of "the government should try to stop people from living differently than I do" beliefs.
Ideologues underrate the popularity of tolerance. When abortion and marijuana got on the ballot they both did well.
Yeah, a selling point of Trump to a certain chunk of people was the "do what you want, I don't care and I'll stop the libs from bossing you around" vibes he gave off. Vance is a step back toward the '80s-'00s Republican "I have opinions about the way you people live and I will be sharing them with you often" approach.
Round out the ticket with the QAnon Shaman at the top by adding Ned Flanders to the bottom.
This depends overwhelmingly on what people decide to put under the rubric of "tolerance" or not. One can categorize both abortion and marijuana as other-affecting rather than self-affecting, in which case they don't warrant the "tolerance" rubric any more than, say, murder or littering or playing loud music on public transit fall under "tolerance." People may genuinely not care about or support a given issue, but there seems like a wealth of evidence that (a) often they do care about the way other people live their lives -- which is why, e.g., Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell were court cases instead of...not court cases, and why gun control advocates don't think that personal ownership choices are more important than other considerations (or, often, not important at all) -- and (b) One man's behavior warranting Benthamite/Mill-style tolerance is another man's criminal offense against others, or else warrants correction through self-evidently benevolent paternalism like trying to get people not to abuse opiates.
That overthinks things immensely. Gay rights is another issue where the public turned out to be more tolerant than politicians were.
It isn't that the public is fully libertarian, but there's a lot of ordering people around the political class enjoys doing that the public sees as weird.
And BTW seeing abortion as primarily a fetal rights issue is massively weird- a lesson Republicans are learning over and over again.
"Abortions for some, miniature cannabis joints for others!"
>> Homosexuals have been branded as "weird" for decades because of the narrative that they are closeted pedophiles.
No. The “weird” reaction is simply a matter of it being counterintuitive to straight people, unless they’ve had close relationships and consistent interactions with out gay people, something that used to be quite rare… harmful stereotypes and fundamental misunderstandings of course made things worse, but did so precisely by taking the reactions to far darker places than the initial “weird” reaction…
You're right, I could've phrased that better
I think that this is precisely why Republicans focus so hard on the trans stuff even though it has virtually no impact on our lives. Even for live and let live types, transgenderism is weird. Republicans already play that game, Dems are just starting to use the same tactics. So no, I don't think it will backfire, unless Democrats allow the next election to be framed around trans issues instead of economic ones.
The right is responding to a forceful and somewhat coercive mainstreaming of trans stuff. The fact that overnight it became verboten to ask what a women is is extremely frustrating, and then the response is "why do you care so much?"
Which is confusing given that the left cares so much that they are making huge efforts to put trans people into every conceivable setting.
And it does impact our lives. I mentioned in another thread today (and have mentioned in the past here as well) that my wife was confronted with a fully grown naked man in the woman's locker room at her (former) gym. This was extremely distressing to her, especially because she holds very progressive political views. But the idea of an adult man walking in on her while she was alone and very vulnerable was shocking and is one of the reasons I'm vocal about the trans issue (such as it is).
Upending sex segregation is a serious social issue, and it's being handwaved away by people who can't understand why other people care, and who can't be bothered to make a coherent argument for it besides 'it makes trans people feel better'.
Thank you for this.
It’s frustrating enough to experience all of these changes in policy and norms without also having people snidely ask, Why do you care so much? The implication being that I must be a terrible bigot for caring at all about something that “doesn’t affect [me] at all” which again, is just a factually untrue statement.
Madness.
Thank you. It's exhausting to continually have these arguments against people who pretend to not understand what is being said and why. I appreciate you saying this.
I must be from a different time, because "Republican types" dominated in high school and "Democratic types" dominated college, where the latter was much less stifling and people could explore their weird side. I find this whole thing baffling because Republicans as "conservative" were always a bit more "normal" but the secret is that everyone is a bit weird.
“The case for the Biden electric car rule is that it will reduce pollution externalities. So why not reduce pollution externalities with a gasoline tax?
This kind of throwaway is what frustrates me about the product here. It is totally wrong and one simple trickish:
Former long time gas tax lobbyist. The motor fuels tax is very unpopular at the federal level and despite 5 surface transportation authorizations spanning decades, congress will not raise the tax. Yes it’s an elegant and clear tax (decreasing in value) but neither parties leadership would green light it. It was last raised as a minor tweak to a large bipartisan deficit deal in ‘93. The idea that is likely, simpler, or politically smarter than a green economy mandates is wrong. Which is why Democrats like their Republican friends before them abandoned it.
I think you miss the thrust of his point. Matt agrees that a n increased gas tax, like a carbon tax, is politically toxic. His point is “well let’s try to scheme our way to the same result that people all hate, but worse, and hope the people don’t notice” is not wise politics.
The tailpipe rule is a promulgated rulemaking. Meaning, for the time being it is totally doable. Whereas passing an increase to the motor fuels taxes has proven literally impossible, as the tax has not budged in 20 years despite numerous attempts.
So putting chevron aside, while both might “annoy you,” they are not qualitatively alike
That point is not in dispute. “Hey we can achieve a crappy version of the gas tax for now by imposing regs nobody will like” is a path towards regulators being neutered, which is maybe not the best thing in the world if you actually care about environmental protection. So you have to be careful about this stuff!
People don’t notice esoteric EPA rules unless they read the RIAs like I do for work.
Correct and also ditto
I understand his point but it’s not very good. Because they want to achieve climate reductions. Which is not a weirdo conviction. It’s politics. Sure it’s not a great cost benefit analysis. That’s politics. I dunno what to say but the idea that policymaking is just elegant tax policy is not how it works. So yeah, I dismiss the point.
The ACA was very unpopular (and inefficient!!) and lost the Dems 50 seats and probably a lot more longterm legislatively. But Obama wanted to get something done.
Matt’s politics have morphed from do things smart to effectively don’t do things.
I think you are missing his point significantly. The question in politics is always is it worth the cost. Is this specific policy really important or is it just "doing *something*" because so much of climate politics is often the latter. That's critical question because this policy has a fairly high political cost so it better be accomplishing something significant on something important.
I dispute it has a high political cost. The rule was changed with a much longer phase in and the target for U.S. electric vehicle adoption was slashed from 67% by 2032 to as little as 35%.
So, no, I don’t think it’s high salience politics. And I don’t think people who stand outside the political orbit appreciate how difficult this stuff is. What’s the counterfactual then? How do you plan to do emissions reduction with the next 3 cycles of tough senate maps?
Does it have a high political cost? I don't think it comes up that often
He isn't convinced that the politics of backdoor gas taxes are very smart. He thinks you may get it through in the first place but when people realize what you are doing they hate it. That's the opposite of Obamacare.
The phase in is long. I’m not sure people will notice
>>But Obama wanted to get something done.
It's NOT this simple. Obama naively adhered to a campaign promise that spent down a generation's worth of political capital to push through a reform package that ultimately had half of its core planks fail to make any difference... when he could have instead husbanded SOME of that political capital to get a more modest set of reforms passed and then pivoted to address the actual economic crisis facing him.
I was working in congress at the time. Of course it was not that simple but the powers that be chose to move forward, primarily pelosi, not out of protecting campaign promises but with a sincere belief that this was the right thing to do.
I do agree that Obama did not think about or care about the importance of governing and that it requires control of legislative branches. He certainly buried Dems in a hole and didn’t really respond to the crisis at hand.
Despite Matt and others rosy Obama view, Biden did wiser policy and accordingly retained much of the legislative branch on a relative basis. Biden is multi-decade senator steeped in party politics and Obama was sort of naive about his own self importance relative to that of the party.
Yeah, the idea that the introduction of a new tax on gasoline would be politically LESS toxic is extremely weird to me. You could probably do it like the European Union and fold it into a emissions trading system and hope nobody will notice. But good luck sneaking that past Fox News and the WSJ editorial board
We tried for years. The major concern was right wing tax backlash but also democrats not wanting to raise taxes on middle income Americans. A lot of hard work went into that and it failed, repeatedly.
I always scoff at how Democrats keep redefining the income threshold for middling income Americans upwards. There is this delusion that we can increase government spending for services and somehow tax an increasingly smaller portion of the population for it. So many narratives are stuck in 2009.
I mean, yeah, I agree that the constant upward redefinition is bad... but also the Cost Disease is real, and we should take seriously the fact that it directly implies that this sort of upward redefinition would naturally happen ANYWAYS even if Dems were somehow wrong to be DOING the redefinition. Blind squirrel finding a nut and all.
Either way, once this election's over and if we aren't too busy defending democracy from some coup attempt or another, we should spend the next few cycles just Cost-Disease-pilling the entire fucking country. Baumol's name should get the same reverent treatment as Keynes, and we should remake our public economics understanding with the Cost Disease at the center of it.
The jump from $100k to $250k to $400k all tracks with the switch of suburban college educated voters.
It also tracks the median income necessary to buy a house in the Bay Area.
Americans hate paying for things.
I doubt much more than Europeans. But Europeans don't have the opportunity to punish their lawmakers every 24 months. Midterms are a powerful and extremely under-the-radar veto point in our Madisonian system.
Beat me to it while I was still asleep. I agree with Matt that a busybody attitude is weird, and Pigouvian taxes are very much a subset of that. Bloomberg's soda pop tax was seen as weird, and unpopular.
You didn't read the very next sentence. He is making that exact point.
And on cue Vivek Ramaswamy publishes a defense of weirdness (in The Free Press nonetheless), https://www.thefp.com/p/america-the-weird?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
He too understands the risk for his political project if normalcy becomes a core standard among moderate voters.
Democratic politicians are less "weird" than their Republican counterparts, relatively speaking. But I think this misses an important aspect of Dems' branding problems.
The issue is that Democrats' brand is shaped in large part by people who are very weird. Prominent people at mainstream cultural institutions (writers, scientists, actors, etc.)
1. Have cultural values that are very left-wing relative to the average American, and
2. Spend all of their time saying "WE LOVE DEMOCRATS AND ARE ACTIVELY TRYING TO HELP THEM WIN."
Democratic politicians aren't nearly as left-wing as this group, but they've effectively outsourced their branding because they don't really spend any time *forcefully arguing* that these people don't speak for the party. This is why, despite the fact that very few Democratic candidates wanted to defund the police, the party was tarred with that slogan anyway.
Republicans, you could argue, have a similar issue. But their politicians are much closer to sharing the preferences of people in right-wing media. So they actually don't *want* to draw any distinction.
How much of this perception issue is also downstream of the fact that the average person pays more attention to entertainers than politicians or technocrats? Even a relatively obscure figure like the rapper BOB got a lot of media attention when he started publicly supporting flat Earth theories. "Entertainer says something" gets clicks. "House Backbencher does something good" gets fewer clicks.
Yeah 100%. Democrats' branding has been hijacked by the people who are in front of cameras and writing headlines. Very hard to fight back against that.
It applies to everyone nowadays but since media is so decentralized it's almost impossible to run a comms strategy other than trying to post and hope it's a hit. More accurately, it's almost impossible to get supporters to shut up.
If Democratic politicians aren't nearly as left wing as that group, then why *don't* they forcefully argue that those people don't speak for the party?
Good point, but usually it's better to try to achieve unity than to have internal squabbles very publicly. I agree with you that they need to punch left at times, but it's a tricky balance. You don't want to piss off the people most likely to vote for you.
Both sides have a problem with not confronting their wingnuts. To the other side, it looks like complicity. Which it often is.
I think the key to beating the Weird rap while still pursuing interests that could be classified as Weird is to appear normal on the salient things and quietly pursue the weird stuff. Honestly Republicans had this strategy down pat from Reagan until Bush jr. What they did was focus on appearing as the party that made life easier via tax cuts, deregulation, and libertarian vibes, while in the background doing things like quietly stacking the judiciary to pursue really weird stuff like rolling back Roe and making radical interpretations of the 2nd amendment law.
Trump has opened the field such that Democrats have a shot at claiming the mantle of Normal. I am kind of pessimistic they'll be able to achieve or hold the mantle for long - our larger coalition necessarily includes those society seems Weird, and the right still has good reflexes and media tactics to tie us to our Weirdo allies in the eyes of the median voter. Keeping the mantle of Normal will eventually require us to call some of our allies Weird and I don't think we have the stomach for it.
Yes, and for this reason the "weird" meme will probably have a pretty short half-life before it too becomes stale and rote, simply a marker of tribal identity, and the Trump campaign figures out an effective counter to it. Ideas tend not to stay contained to the context they originated in, and I predict the Harris campaign will pretty quickly lose control of this one
The effective counter is to simply call us (the left) weird. Seriously, have supporters of this rhetoric ever been on a playground?
The problem with non substantive critiques i.e. childish insults is that they can be directed at anyone, anytime
I'm not too happy with the "weird" insult. I AM WEIRD! My friends, if you're commenting on Slow Boring, you ARE weird too. Non-weird people don't do that.
I'm just not jazzed about this idea that weird is bad. Do we want mediocrity and conformism, everyone drinking the same brands of soda and beer and consuming the same media and gossiping about their coworkers and spending tons of time on social media? Who gets to decide what's "weird"? It's like "cool," a meaningless word I utterly rejected all the way back when I was a teenager. Other kids: "Such-and-such thing is not cool!" Me: "So? I don't care. I like Thing. So what if it's not *cool*?"
Now, of course, there is a bad side of weird - there's weird-as-in-creepy or weird-as-in-extremist - but then I'd much rather call Vance creepy than weird. Why taint a good word by association?
Also, I'll never not recommend the book "The WEIRDest People in the World" by Joseph Henrich. The battle hymn of the "weird is good, actually" people!
I have been trying really hard to get creepy to stick to Vance instead among my offline peers.
I think the problem is that everyone got about 10 years worth of weird all packed into the year 2020 and people are still recovering.
CREEPY. That's a more accurate word for the problem of Trump, Vance, and their most active supporters. "Weird" is true but doesn't reflect their full deviation from conventional values. Creepy creeps, all of them.
I like you're point that ideas should be "weird" but political parties should try to avoid being too weird. I think about something like gay marriage. On the one hand when Andrew Sullivan wrote his now famous TNR article it was a very "weird" thing to advocate from all directions. Obviously Christian conservatives hated anything that gave gay people rights. But as he points out ad nauseum, he was attacked by the gay left for pushing a supposedly "straight" institution on gay couples. The "genius" of his essay and later writings on the topic was framing gay marriage as a fundamentally conservative proposal. It was about bringing a mainstream and traditional social institution and expanding it to include everyone. Social conservatives talked ad nauseum about how gay marriage (and still talk ad nauseum) was actually destroying marriage but it was the exact opposite. It was about expanding very traditional social norms. It was an extension in a way of the argument that southern Civil Rights leaders tried to make. Protecting and upholding the rights of black Americans was actually keeping with the Founder's vision of universal rights; it was segregating and Jim Crow that contravened the constitution and Declaration of Independence.
As someone who would like some more center left and and left wing views to come to fruition policy wise, I think this is why "Abundance Agenda" has a real chance to be a winning Democratic message going forward. Because it's advocating change but advocating for change by adhering to very American traditions and ideas about the world; growth, invention and entrepreneurial spirit. "Go West young man" is a famous saying and in "Abundance Agenda" that cry is more achievable in a world where California actually builds enough housing for all the people who want to come. Investing in green tech isn't just saving the planet from climate change (although it is that), but it's about fostering the very American spirit of invention and entrepreneurial spirit that can lead to scientific breakthroughs and growing our society.
Just sort of a reminder to me that framing your message as "normal" in the American sense is not just realizing that people have status quo bias. It's that Americans have a sense of unique purpose and tapping into that "tradition" is counterintuitively the best way to get the change you want to see happen.
Unfortunately, the online footprints of any young person who has explored interesting ideas online will probably make them unsuitable for high-profile electoral politics. Imagine how any of the best 2010s bloggers would be skewered for some strange idea once explored in a post (let alone guilt-by-association of what ends up in the comments section).
We are enabling a neo-puritan thought police to de facto eliminate anyone from (public-facing) influential positions in politics. This version of morality does not value discovering, accomplishing or creating anything, it’s about studiously avoiding stating anything that could possibly offend anyone.
That's true for now, like it used to be true that getting tattooed while young could hold you back later in life. But when enough people with tattoos and an online history get to middle age, well, you can't disqualify everyone. Society might just have to start being a little more tolerant and honest about how people actually are
I’m a bit surprised that still so few senators have tattoos. I guess they’re mostly a couple decades older than me still. But the people younger than me that have run in presidential races (Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Buttigieg, JD Vance) don’t seem to either.
Might be another few decades. Just like electing people with non-English/Dutch ancestry to the presidency needed to wait nearly a century after German and Irish became common ancestries.
How do we know? The wise get tattoos that they can cover with regular clothing. (One interesting thing - on the Peace Corps subreddit a common question is whether someone can serve with tattoos. Usually the answer is, if you can cover them.)
Even if something is considered “normal” it could still limit choices.)
Well, if you follow the Senate dress code, you’ll mostly have pretty full body coverage, at least if you’re male. Campaigning also tends to people dressing up in a conservative manner. So maybe many more senators have them than we know.
The types of people that want to win, and also can win, statewide elected office seems to have pretty small overlap with the types of people who want tattoos
Takesters like Maya and Milan shall be blazing trails for their age cohorts and the next generation.
Yes, hopefully this is temporary. However, this dynamic wrt online footprints reminds me of the recent Astral Codex Ten post about Nietzchean vs. slave morality. There is a (universal?) tension between lionizing those who achieve/create and preferring those who, while mediocre, simply do not cause offense or make others feel bad.
That's why we need GDPR so that people have a right to delete their embarrassing past.
Regarding calling Democrats "busybodies" - am I the only person to notice that there are TONS of regulations that we're all 100% fine with and a very small subset that get shouted about as "Democrats trying to tell you what to do!!!". No one is out here arguing about letting consumers decide between leaded vs unleaded gasoline or letting Honda sell a car without seatbelts for $2K less. There are DOZENS of things that are regulated about what McDonald's can sell or how they have to prepare what they sell, but "no plastic straws" is qualitatively different? I'm not saying that you can't argue against an idea or that some regulations aren't bad ideas, but don't act like the regulation that you don't like is some novel thing and that free markets reign everywhere. It's all shades of the same color and it's foolish to act as if we all had 100% freedom until we started using paper straws.
Seatbelts have much more evidence in favor of them and are more popular than plastic straw bans, which are useless and annoying.
Spoken like someone who has no idea what it was like when seatbelts were introduced. Go back and watch a news report from the time when seatbelts were mandated. People were PISSED. According to them, it was the end of all personal freedoms. That's what you don't seem to understand; something is only normal because you've experienced it your whole life.
Yes, I know. I was around when they were made mandatory *and* have family members who hated it at the time. *However* you said "letting Honda sell a car without seatbelts". I'm definitely not old enough to remember cars without seatbelts at all.