What in the hell is happening? It’s like the more we progress socially the more the religious zealots get to go fucking crazy.
let's not go crazy here, this story is from Utah. Utah is basically full of religious zealots and has absolutely not progressed socially in the last two decades outside of maybe Salt Lake City.
You gotta remember, there are two Americas. Rural America is closer to a fundamentalist country in the Middle East or Africa.
Like most of the time when these states come up, I feel obligated to note that not only are there over half a million Democrats in Utah, but also plenty of majority Democratic districts.
Religion has had a stranglehold on society for millennia, and now that their power is slowly fading away as people turn away from it they are lashing out.
They're too short-sighted to see that this behavior is only going to push more people away from them and hasten their decline.
Ironically the religious view that evil exists in certain types of people is something that I've recently adopted.
Really? Over the last decade or so I've moved more towards a material conditions view, where material conditions is inclusive of neurotype - some people are naturally high anxiety, low openness, high purity sense, and high traditionalism, and that's not something they have direct control over - and even if they did, they wouldn't have control over the algorithm that drives them towards a given set of values for those parameters, and even if they did, they wouldn't have control over the algorithm that decides which algorithm to use for deciding which algorithm to use for deciding those values, ad infinitum. The buck grounds out in things outside our control.
I've never seen this line of thinking as useful. For practical things-- the actions you take and the beliefs you express-- their effect is not connected to whether you're a conscious, free-willed entity, or whether you're a collection of chemical and physical processes that emulates the first option.
It's the same argument as "I have no free will, so it's not my fault I'm committing this crime." Ok, well then it's also not my fault that I'm arresting you.
In short, just because you can explain why a certain action is taken, that doesn't mean that the action is justified.
I would suggest that on the contrary, it suggests a useful point of intervention. A great deal of crime descends from poverty. If you don't like crime, you could focus on it being about the individuals committing the crime, or you could focus on fixing the poverty. Doing the former has gotten us the highest proportion of our population in prison in the world, higher than any police state that I am aware of.
If you're using it to diagnose or study and not to justify then yes it's an excellent tool.
I think of myself as a consequentialist. I care about outcomes, and having an understanding of the inputs and the function gives you much better control over the outputs.
This is fascism, the religious bit is really just peripheral. They believe in inequality based on some kind of identity.
Many religions don't teach homo/transphoba, much of the world's homo/transphoba comes from a particular set of religions.
- Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.
- Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.
- For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.
- Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons — doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.
Libertarian capitalism created the perfect breeding ground for fascism.
This always happens when society starts to see a shift. It sucks but it's also a good thing in the long run. Just the angry dying gasps of a cult that we don't need or want anymore.
I mean... There was a commercial for Jesus on Hulu earlier today lmao. They're losing it
Another cisgender girl in Utah has been accused of being transgender, leading to fears for her safety in the midst of an ongoing moral panic over transgender participation in sports.
Anti-trans legislation and rhetoric is a win-win for bigots! Not only do you get to oppress the minority of people who are trans, but you can also oppress women (and men who don't conform to stereotypes, but mostly women) by baselessly accusing them of being transgender.
The fear and humiliation these cisgender girls are being subjected to is real, and deserves to be addressed. However, it also underscores the threats of violence that are increasingly darkening the lives of transgender people, particularly transfemmes, nationwide. If the mere possibility that a girl might be transgender is enough to spur such an extreme outpouring of rage the danger an actual transgender girl would face in similar circumstances is hard to overstate.
If they feel a cis gender person needs to be protected after being accused of being trans, that suggests that people who are actually trans are in just as much danger and should be receiving the same protections.