this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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I'm not sure how the impending climatic doomsday is going to make human rights unimportant?
It is an abstraction, an anecdote really. When ordinary people are collectively in dire straights, there is little time or voice for those on the edges that become collateral damage. It is like the military when an army is being pursued in the field by another superior force–the wounded and baggage train support that are unable to fight are left behind. The ethics of the primary force are only circumstantially applicable. No one cares about the disabled or outliers when the attorneys judge and jurists are in crisis mode. While those examples are poor in their applicable timelines and the medium scale big picture. If one abstracts another few layers higher, at the decades to more centuries and even lifespans of civilizations perspective views, the overall stresses and strain on a civilization alter the landscape of the philosophical and morality. Civil rights struggles had little meaning or traction during a world war. Martial law is a mechanism that extinguishes all civil rights in a single mechanism.
I'm not taking sides to making excuses for the behavior of others. It is just my intuition and curiosity allowed to roam freely in the good and the bad without distinction in an attempt to think without bias.
When someone tells me of an unprecedented population displacing event, I see the refugee crisis and disproportionate effects on the poor and disadvantaged. The larger the scope of the poor people problem the larger will be the numbers of people on the edges that fall through the cracks. The experience is empirical from someone that has fallen through the cracks.
If we're 3 meals away from chaos, or 9 meals away from anarchy, human rights won't be unimportant, but would you place them above your own survival or feeding your children?
It's the subtext for so many doomsday/zombie movies. When it really comes to the crunch, what wouldn't you do ?
I think the logic is essentially right wingers keep winning elections. Their supporters tend to argue first and foremost it's a win against "woke" while the money/interests behind it tend to be "let's burn this planet down and get ALL the oil." If the Left conceded on say trans issues or whatever, maybe we'd win, whixh would undoubtedly benefit the billions who may die because of climate change issues.
(Unsure if this would work or if it'd just split the left etc myself but I think that's the logic.)
An analogy a friend made while making this argument was that the Civil War was essential for Black emancipation etc and we can all agree it was a good thing. BUT, especially in those days, if abolitionists had also demanded trans recognition or whatever, maybe fewer states would've joined the Union or maybe the movement would've never gotten off the ground and there's a possible future wherein Black people might still be slaves because, even with the best intentions, we didn't pick our battles.
It's a utilitarian answer to a Sophie's choice.
Wow, this should be downvoted more.
What if we conceded on your rights or whatever?
Plus the idea that trans rights lost Democrats the election is ridiculous. There were zero trans speakers in the DNC, and Harris did cater to transphobes by saying she will go with state laws.
So the question remains, who else are you willing to throw under the bus because you think that their rights are too edgy?
Utilitarian is not what you think it is. Your comment just shows a complete lack of empathy for people living in the same social space as you.
I think people who think that the rights of any group's rights is "too much" to appease and appeal to a society of oppressors are complicit to the oppression.
You think republicans were watching the DNC or are listening to Harris on trans rights?
There is a reason that one of the ads the trump campaign ran most heavily was about trans issues and casting Harris as too liberal on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3BXYjoAzq0&ab_channel=TheJimHeathChannel (it's a horrific ad, so uhh, trigger warning but you can see what they're doing.)
How many conservatives do you know socially and how many of them didn't say this was a victory against woke?
I mean, I just answered the logic of the question. I'm not sure what the answer is, nor am I confident abandoning part of the Dem coalition works as we'd split the progressive vote which is death in a 2 party system.
BUT. If the Far Right keeps winning elections, which they generally seem to do by killing the Left on culture issues (this keeps playing out across the world) this will doom billions of the poorest on Earth.
I'd ask you a similar question. Forget trans rights, say the abolitionists had included gay rights but back in the 1800s. Unless you have a wild perspective of history, it's pretty safe to assume they wouldn't have won nearly as much popular support as they did. So, how much longer would you have allowed slavery in order to be morally right but unable to help either slaves or homosexuals?
Do I wish the world were better? Absolutely! But, we live in the world that is, not the world we wish it was.
Finally, this is exactly what utilitarianism is. Utilitarianism is trying to promote the maximum good for the maximum number of people. The chief criticisms are generally around situations much like this, where the philosophy implies you are willing to inflict unfair suffering on a small number of people to maximize the collective gain of everyone else (technically including the small number.) What do you think Utilitarianism is?
Sorry, I won't cater to the anti-woke majority. They are shaped by decades of well-funded fascist propaganda and complicit media and social media outlets.
This is how "woke" was even introduced in our vocabulary in the first place.
These efforts were never matched in breadth and throughput by those on the anti-anti-woke side. Saying that Democrats should cater more to the anti-woke lynching mob does not cut it. It is the quintessence of the ratchet effect. It only leads to greater success rate of said propaganda efforts.
So to translate your argument, the fascist propaganda apparatus indeed has shaped an anti-woke majority, but leftists should not yield to them under no conditions: it will only normalize bigotry. Plus they already did lower the tones on trans issues. It did not win them the elections. Biden did take on the bigots with pro-trans policies and he had won, on the other hand.
So what leg does your argument even stand on except sharing some of the bigotry? We should push the narrative more and more towards equality, not conceding that absolute equality is utopian. The more you annoy the bigots the better.
The Democrats never addressed the propaganda apparatus that brought us to this. And now we should focus more on organizing rather than retrospectively catering to transphobes and racists to win elections. That is why I think your argument is despicable and comes from a position of privilege. If it was your rights/survival on the line and not someone else's you wouldn't be suggesting political trade-offs.
Right enough, you are doing this right now: Because your life is at threat now, you say "shiiit we should have sacrificed the trans pawn to win the political chess after all". Guess what, this is the dog-eat-dog mentality that fascism instills in people, having its way already.
The answer is solidarity and organizing, not trade-offs.
So, again, I'll ask a fairly simple question.
Say the abolitionists had included gay rights but back in the 1800s. Unless you have a wild perspective of history, it's pretty safe to assume they wouldn't have won nearly as much popular support as they did. So, how much longer would you have allowed slavery in order to be morally right but unable to help either slaves or homosexuals?
Edit: Becaude its not just trans folks at risk, it is the billions of poor people who will die from climate catastrophes. They don't have our privilege of knowing that even if the climate goes bad, we'll be basically okay.
We have two vulnerable groups to protect, one is much larger than the other, by orders of magnitude.
The non-crackers are a much bigger group than the genocidal crackers so from an utilitarian standpoint we should kill all crackers
I already said no. We have a totally different mind model here. You think that there is a static majority with crystalized opinions, a conservative inertia that we have to adapt to. I believe that the revolutionary powers compete with fascist propaganda to win over the majority, who is bound to different material interests.
When this deceptively mild approach of appeasing the majority used, it legitimizes that the fascists are somehow in the right to a degree.
That is what I cannot stand about centrists. I am an anarchist, there is no middle ground between me and, well, a number of things that are utterly unacceptable. There is no middle ground to nazism, and corporatism, for example. By upholding these standards, I am dragging society towards absolute equality.
With your appeasement approach, you legitimize fascists, which is called the ratchet effect. Without revolutionary powers dragging people leftwards, centrist appeasement pushes the mainstream rightward.
Having said that, the proposed example is completely out of historical context, and is wrong on so many levels. I can't go into all the details right now, but the very idea of "throwing homosexuals in the mix" is preposterous given the historical context.
Let me direct you to the fact that the British Empire paid reparations to slave owners, but even to this day if you try to mention Reparations to the Caribbean and African nations you will be met with vile harassment from hordes of nazi trolls. So I cannot educate you in Marxist political economy right now, but you comparing abolitionism to gay rights is comparing apples and oranges, and the equivalence is unwarranted.
Only under the concurrent prism of anti-wokeism these are deemed comparable, from the viewpoint of being "not cisgender heteronormative germanic/anglo/saxon Christian male". So you would not be bringing this even remotely up if you were not ever so slightly affected by anti-woke propaganda yourself.
And if the public doesn't go along, we just keep killing the planet and billions of the poorest and most vulnerable folks so we can feel good about ourselves?
That seems pretty damned privileged to me.
And yes, it's a silly hypothetical to illustrate a point, that's what hypotheticals are. It's not like we tie people to train tracks and see what trolley drivers do.
Just seems wild to me that you assume everyone is down with what we believe to be right. It's easy to say you are dragging society forward when the consequences of not winning elections are fairly mild for you while the people at risk live elsewhere and are desperately poor.
And yet again, I don't actually believe there's a way for the Left to pitch trans issues in a way that A) wins broad support and B) doesn't alienate our progressive base, so it's kind of a moot point. (Even throwing it back to states, which mostly works for Dems as we have the biggest states etc and there's still freedom of movement probably wouldn't be enough.)
Then fuck the Left, I guess?
Then fuck "our" "progressive" base?
If the "Left" had spent a fraction of the resources to match the vile torrent of anti-trans propaganda, the situation would be different, with regard to both of your points about pitching trans issues to the progressive base.
Like, John Oliver and Jon Stewart showed exactly how a mainstream progressive media can combat anti-trans demagoguery by Republicans, not to mention Scientific American, the American Psychological Association, and other bodies. You probably weren't listening because if you don't think this is a way to "pitch" then you might have been listening to other sources that make the matter unpalatable, like "biological males in female sports" and what have you.
So I take it as a given that you were listening to the wrong sources about it, and you are at least partially anti-trans yourself. On the other hand, you might not be listening to all the analyses after the fact that point to other issues as to why Democrats lost the election. See for example this thread, this comic strip, and this thread also.
In a nutshell, Harris did already try to appeal to the transphobes and she failed. So this should be end of discussion. I am not discussing compromise of the human rights of any group in order to appease to either moderate or extreme bigots.
I adore that your sources were: Yourself, a comic strip and a paraphrasing of a (solid) late night comedian.
Because I don't watch many late night comedians I'm absorbing the wrong sources? Jesus fuck.
Admittedly, I did watch Stewart's take and it was pretty silly. The essence was that because Harris said things, the Right should've listened. Which is as dumb as people on the Right saying that "trump said he respects and loves women so I don't get how the libs think he's anti woman."
Oliver's point is similar, Harris was quiet on trans stuff. Which okay but being quiet on an issue just means the other side gets to paint you howver they want on it. Which is EXACTLY what the trump campaign did by running this vile, but effective ad (which I believe was their most frequently run ad in the last few weeks of the campaign) to ZERO pushback from Harris (again, no way to rebut it without alienating our progressive wing, so we just take the L on this.) You might also read this PBS article where a journalist points out that, of the money they tracked, the trump campaign spent more on anti trans ads than on housing, immigration and the economy combined.
To say that trans issues weren't a thing this election because your side didn't talk about then is absurd.
And frankly, you are compromising the human rights of a group, it's the poor billions who will suffer the effects of climate change. I get that neither you, nor anyone you know will be affected. And that the suffering of those who live elsewhere isn't really a trendy cause so easily forgettable but personally, I think they should be included in our moral calculus.
I mean, before this thread I hadn't thought about it much but damn, the sport thing would be such an easy bone to throw moderates with almost no real world costs (apologies to the handful of high level trans athletes.) Given that it's an issue that some 70% of America disagrees with us on it does seem like an easy way to demonstrate we aren't the crazy party.
It is a whole thread, not just my analysis. I also put thought into it, so I won't recite every point I carefully phrase there to a rando centrist, so live with it.
Directly responding to your very argument though, are you going to engage with these responses or what?
Stewart took on an Alabama MAGA moron legislator on trans youth heatlhcare bans. We are probably not talking about the same segment. The part you are talking about is probably the one I am criticizing in the thread you refused to read because it was written by me, so why should we bother with your tired argument? This borders on sea-lioning since a couple iterations ago, and I think if this is the case it is actionable.
But you talked about pitching to the progressive base, not the opposite side. MAGA fanatics are cult-minded morons that dismiss everything that diverts from their narrative. There is no comparison to centrist and center-left democrats base, who operate under totally different rules than a fucking Nazi cult.
Your example about the Ad is addressed to a cult.
You said:
Just searching around Lemmy you can find fine rebuttals to this bullshit. You make it sound like it is unthinkable to rebut these hateful tropes. This is more or less what Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro tout: That their common sense is unrebuttable. It is not.
She could have rebutted, and take them on. Same goes for Rachel Levin. They chickened out of it. Furthermore, the mainstream progressive media not only omitted to address misconceptions and dangerous cliches, but they chimed in with thinly veiled TERFism, and this is because the interests behind the Democrats are in part transphobic as well.
This also responds to these words of yours:
I keep saying they abstained from matching the excessive anti-trans propaganda. What is your point?
I said that Oliver and Stewart, the Scientific American, the APA, and several other bodies have addressed trans issues to the progressive base, and no-one in the left thought they were unpalatable until now. The progressive media would have protected against this, that is more than a decade in the happening, but they did not.
Shit man, this is such a complex study that I can easily point out that 60% of Democrats think that trans representation has not even gone far enough.
Above all, I don't think that trans issues are edgy and unpopular at all. Until a couple years ago it was a strictly medical thing, with a very niche activism surrounding it, mostly on legal representation and medical gatekeeping issues.
It was the fascists who spent millions to demagogue on that point for many years, and I think people should be educated on trans issues as they should a decade ago.
At this point people who take anti-trans propaganda seriously are lost causes to me, and this includes people who fall for an ad like the one you posted. There is no point to cater to them from a pro-trans perspective, it is like trying to appeal to a 1936 German crowd applauding Hitler about the human rights of Jews at this point.
The view you defend here is essentially a compromise to concurrent Nazi discourse, which as I said is unacceptable, and I don't care about Democrats ratings. I rather see that the extreme left everywhere dials up the pro-trans issues and organize defense and survival programs.
Again I have cited arguments against the supposedly self-evident low hanging fruit you evangelize here.
I think that I have responded to all your concerns here or elsewhere in my Lemmy posts and comments, and I won't respond further. You probably come from a naive self-designated center-left perspective, but the discourse of this post borders too closely to sealioning and concern trolling, that I will not waste more of my time on.
Edit: Holy shit, was curious about why Alred was getting singled out. Because he said he didn't support trans women playing sports with the other women? If that's the most anti trans Democrat candidate ever and your next move is "What else could she do, outlaw trans people?!?" you need to give your head a shake. No wonder we lose to a man who has more orange makeup than brains.
I mean, your comic made the same basic point that Oliver did. Which I already responded to. In depth.
You could, uhhh, look back at the Pew research I already shared.
I love your argument is simultaneously "we can win them over with enough messaging! The DNC didn't put enough into trans messaging to overcome propaganda! Also, those people we can win over are lost causes!" Pick a lane!
I guess that's the difference. I've met some of the people who will be affected by climate change and seen the communities that will be destroyed. They aren't abstract. It's very easy to figure winning these elections doesn't matter when you know damn well it really doesn't affect you. I just find that view reprehensible as I think it's throwing the most vulnerable people under the bus so you can feel good about being on the right side.
Life in large, pluralistic society is full of uncomfortable compromises. Most moral progress is made because enough people with old Conservative views have died and the median voter is ready to move forward, not because we screamed at people. (Though, frustratingly, the Left seems to have either lost the messaging game or taken such silly positions that we are no longer dominating the youth vote so we may have, through our evangelizing, set progress back much farther than needs be. How fucking annoying are we such that people would prefer trump to us?)
Are you sure you know what those terms mean? This seems like when you had no idea what Utilitarianism was.
Sea lioning doesn't just refer to disagreeing with someone, here's the original sea lion comic:
https://wondermark.com/c/1062/
I'm hard pressed to see how, relatively politely, responding to the comments you keep leaving on my original response to someone else's question fits that at all.
As I hope you're true to your word and done with this, have a good weekend.
Actually people had much less of a beef with homosexuality before the 50's and the pink scare. Lord Byron was like, an open bisexual. Victorians has nipple rings as a fad.
Also abolitionists and suffragettes and the like weren't exactly wildly popular.
Your hypothetical scenario is not only uninformed, but also a false equivalence. We don't live in those time periods, we can focus on more than one thing at a time, and you're also fixing blame on the movement to make things better rather than on the people who are actively making things worse. You should be blaming the rich for making global warming worse, not the people who are fighting against it and losing because they are daring to say trans people shouldn't be a problem.
I mean, Byron had to flee England for fear of lynching and Oscar Wilde spent two years in prison for homosexuality.
And the abolitionists weren't wildly popular but they were popular enough to win a broad base of support in the North.
And I'm sure folks a couple hundred years ago could multi task.
How is it a false equivalence though? The basic notion is that there are things you can be morally right on that may cause more actual harm.
Meanwhile, I only ever started this to answer someone's question. As I've said repeatedly, I don't think it's an effective tactic as you'd split the progressive vote.
That being said, culture war shit and immigration is what the Right is running and winning on.
If you want to reign in the rich and corporations on climate change, it ain't going to come from the Right. So, we need to win elections.
It's false equivalence because, again, these are two separate scenarios.
The first is your hypothetical assumption based off of a completely different culture and time period, and the second is, you know, the here and now in the present day. Factual reality.
Arrogantly going "well I think this would've gone badly if they did something completely different totally equates to what's happening now" is a pretty ballsy form of false equivalence. You can't even come up with a real scenario to compare the present situation with.
Are you misunderstanding how a hypothetical sistuation works? Or how analogies work?
The basic idea is that it is difficult to picture an important movement, like the abolition movement, succeeding if they had expanded their mandate to include all groups, even if it would have been the right thing to do.
Similarly, while the Left has the moral highground, not all of society is with the Left yet. And so, we're being painted as wacky folks trying to do some crazy shit and we keep losing elections.
Why do you think almost every Far Right leader rallies against Woke? From Bolsanaro, Orban, La Pen, Meloni to trump, it's been a winning issue with a majority of voters. I'm old enough to understand that elections have serious consequences and that winning them matters. If a common thread that seems to win majority support across the world keeps coming up, heck, maybe it's time to look at it.
I think you really don't know what a false equivalence is.
So yeah, could tell you about how the exit polls said most people voted based on the economy and it wasn't because Democrats hint at helping trans people or how the right demonizes them.
Or that your strategy of trying to become diet conservative doesn't work, especially since the Democrats have and are basically doing that.
Or that the same goal could be achieved by getting more election and voting change, like ending gerrymandering and putting in ranked choice voting.
Or maybe I'd meet you halfway and say if the Democrats decided to rebrand stuff as "helping all Americans" rather than outright saying that it's for trans people, they might get some of working class rural Americans on their side. Maybe.
But since you don't figure out what a false equivalence is, I'm not sure you'd really get it, ya know?
And since you're willing to throw my friends' lives away rather than look at other options, I'm not really keen on talking to you much.
Tailism never works