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A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

economist.com

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Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#71

Post by AnimalMuppet »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #41
Moodles wrote: post #21

> The arguments the two sides put forward, in other words, are complex and debatable. But many trans activists think that any disagreement is tantamount to hate speech and try to suppress it. This is 100% my personal experience also. Even on HN last week someone said I should try to be a "better human" and compared my suggestion that maybe someone might oppose transgender women in women's spaces for reasons other tha…

The idea is to set up rhetorical either-or's and then browbeat the majority into silence: Either you support unlimited immigration or you are a racist. Either you are 100% on board with the entire vaccine schedule or you are an anti-vaxxer. Either you say that Covid was a natural occurrence or you are a conspiracy theorist (and probably a racist too). And so on. Say what one will, but it's effective. I think one reas…

> Say what one will, but it's effective.

Yes and no. Yes, it's effective at shutting people up. No, it's not very effective at convincing people that you're right. It's more effective at convincing people that you're completely unreasonable, and that it's better to just not talk to you at all.

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#72

Post by tetranomiga »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #68
tetranomiga wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no historical reason to think that not supporting extreme speech will lead to fascism. There are historical reasons to think that curbing extremist speech protects democracy (see the Weimar Republic).

There are also historical reasons to think that tyranny has to suppress free speech in order to survive. So even if extreme speech can lead to tyranny, free speech can lead you back out - if you can keep the tyranny from destroying the free speech.

That's an "if" so big I don't know what your point is.

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#73

Post by AnimalMuppet »

tetranomiga wrote: post #72
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also historical reasons to think that tyranny has to suppress free speech in order to survive. So even if extreme speech can lead to tyranny, free speech can lead you back out - if you can keep the tyranny from destroying the free speech.

That's an "if" so big I don't know what your point is.

My point is to keep track of the order of cause and effect. Unlimited free speech may create a tyranny. But tyranny always at least tries to limit free speech. So when you see a limiting of free speech, you should ask "Is this really in defense of liberty? Or is it just tyranny trying to preserve and extend itself?"

Note that tyranny trying to preserve and extend itself almost always says that it's in defense of liberty...

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#75

Post by istorical »

tetranomiga wrote: post #14

Gender politics is a cancer on the left, even though I agree with it, it takes up so much time and energy away from things that would benefit everybody including trans people, like universal healthcare, better employee protection laws and better, more available education. Such a small percentage of the population has been the center point of so much discussion and debate, and for what benefit? All I see it doing is g…

The same could be said for most wedge issues. In the US, gun rights and and abortion also become a focal point of US politics despite the existence of issues that deal with millions of preventable deaths (automobile safety, obesity epidemic, poverty), issues that deal with hundreds of thousands of displaced peoples and killed civilians (Afghanistan and Iraq war, war mongering over Syria, Libya, Iran, etc), and climate change, which our brightness minds continue to tell us could lead to not insubstantial percentages of all forms of life on our planet going extinct and billions or trillions of dollars of economic cost.

But we just focus on emotional trigger point issues. See focus on and mass protests because of police brutality (hundreds of deaths a year) compared to zero widespread action on the injustice of the prison system (hundreds of thousands of lives ruined, literal slavery and imprisonment in cages over antiquated unequally applied drug laws).

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#76

Post by tetranomiga »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #73
tetranomiga wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an "if" so big I don't know what your point is.

My point is to keep track of the order of cause and effect. Unlimited free speech may create a tyranny. But tyranny always at least tries to limit free speech. So when you see a limiting of free speech, you should ask "Is this really in defense of liberty? Or is it just tyranny trying to preserve and extend itself?" Note that tyranny trying to preserve and extend itself almost always says that it's in defense of libe…

"Is this person defending free speech in favor of liberty? Or because his anti-liberty extremism won't be tolerated otherwise?".

It works both ways so this isn't a practical way of looking at implementation of free speech. You can't keep a system that doesn't protect itself free forever - propaganda travels faster and further than truth, and I doubt the founding fathers wrote the first amendment with mass media in mind.

You can start the argument of who gets to decide what should be allowed and what shouldn't, and in the current political climate (at least in the USA) the answer to that is obviously nobody. Ideally those decisions would be made during a time of cultural unity, where a whole nation can say "These are our values that we want to write in stone", like Germany did with the new constitution in the 20th century where it put well-defined limits on what kind of speech should be forbidden.

It's doubtful if that kind of unity is even possible in the USA anymore, so I'm worried that, on a long enough time-scale, unfettered free speech will inevitably lead to tyranny of a kind because there is no system in place to protect it.

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#77

Post by [deleted] »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #41
Moodles wrote: post #21

> The arguments the two sides put forward, in other words, are complex and debatable. But many trans activists think that any disagreement is tantamount to hate speech and try to suppress it. This is 100% my personal experience also. Even on HN last week someone said I should try to be a "better human" and compared my suggestion that maybe someone might oppose transgender women in women's spaces for reasons other tha…

The idea is to set up rhetorical either-or's and then browbeat the majority into silence: Either you support unlimited immigration or you are a racist. Either you are 100% on board with the entire vaccine schedule or you are an anti-vaxxer. Either you say that Covid was a natural occurrence or you are a conspiracy theorist (and probably a racist too). And so on. Say what one will, but it's effective. I think one reas…

[deleted]

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#78

Post by TaylorAlexander »

Moodles wrote: post #46
threatofrain wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why would you discuss someone's medical suffering by leading with a topic on trans elite sports, which focuses on an extreme niche and elite phenomena?

Because I am making the point that even mentioning something as extreme as that still gets me lambasted with abuse. So if we can't even discuss that civilly, how on Earth are we meant to discuss more nuanced issues?

People don’t like their identity being debated. Bringing up trans women in sports as a talking point would be pretty upsetting to most trans women as it is likely to feel like you’re invalidating their personal experience of being trans.

There’s this thing with marginalized communities where people outside of the communities “just want to have a discussion” but the stakes of that conversation are way too high for marginalized people. Trans people’s existence is not for you to challenge or debate. The best thing to do in situations like this is to let the marginalized people figure out what they need and then quietly listen to their conclusions. It’s not really something that’s there for you to “discuss”.

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#79

Post by dang »

tetranomiga wrote: post #67
tarboreus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why focus only on fascism? What about authoritarianism? Look at the USSR and the modern CCP.

Because the west and especially the US has, very specifically, a fascism problem.

It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. Can you please not do that? It's against the rules here because it destroys the curious conversation that HN is supposed to exist for. We ban accounts that do this, regardless of what their ideology happens to be. See [1] for more explanation.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Re: A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities

#80

Post by throwaway0a5e »

zwieback wrote: post #13

I think the courts are the right place for this battle, some fundamental free speech rights for both sides need to be enforced. I didn't think this would the necessary in academia but with universities turning into service industries it seems inevitable.

Right or wrong courts pretty much always lag popular consensus in a democracy so the debate will happen elsewhere first.
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