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The March of Dimes Syndrome

city-journal.org

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Re: The March of Dimes Syndrome

#41

Post by righthand »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #35
righthand wrote: post #33

This is propaganda belittling social causes and ignoring societal decline. Not everything gets better always. Why is this on HN?

Because it was posted by someone who didn't know (or did know) that the mag is wallpaper for The Manhattan Institute. ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Journal ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Casey#Return_to_pri...

Reading it for me it is clearly propaganda. I didn’t even know it’s link to politics until I read HN comments. The targeted social causes and logic hoop-jumping alone in the article is a pretty obvious sign IMO.

Re: The March of Dimes Syndrome

#42

Post by Georgelemental »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #24

"So activists have moved the goalposts once again. It is no longer enough for conservative Christians to tolerate same-sex marriage—now they must be legally required to bake cakes and design web pages for the weddings." The article lost me here. I mean, I'd love to say I took the above quote out of a surrounding context that explains it more fully and sheds more light but I can't. Instead I find more exasperation tha…

> conservative christians are not "legally required" to support same-sex.

Yes, they are, at least according to the people who keep suing Masterpiece Cakeshop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

Jack Phillips was not accused of refusing to bake a cake for clients because of their sexual orientation (immutable charateristic of the client). He was accused of refusing to bake a cake celebrating a same-sex wedding event. Phillips was perfectly willing to bake cakes for clients of any sexual orientation, he just didn't want to send a message in support of a specific event. According to the activists who have made it their mission to ruin his life, this is illegal.

Re: The March of Dimes Syndrome

#44

Post by mistercow »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #40
Aloha wrote: post #16

This at its core is the problem with activism , be it left or right - what do you do once you 'solve' the cause you set out to solve? The answer is very rarely "ride off into the sunset" - often its moving goalposts.

I strongly disagree. Problems always exist, and new ones pop up app the time. And organizing people to advocate for fixing the problems they face is a job that's worth doing in any society. You would never accept this logic for programmers. Should they just give up their salaries once the product is good enough?

And not even once the product is good enough. It’s like suggesting devs should quit after closing a single ticket.

Re: The March of Dimes Syndrome

#45

Post by aprilthird2021 »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #24

"So activists have moved the goalposts once again. It is no longer enough for conservative Christians to tolerate same-sex marriage—now they must be legally required to bake cakes and design web pages for the weddings." The article lost me here. I mean, I'd love to say I took the above quote out of a surrounding context that explains it more fully and sheds more light but I can't. Instead I find more exasperation tha…

> They are "legally required" to treat some people like all the other people their business supports in public - to do otherwise is the definition of segregation.

But of course, segregation is allowed in some circumstances. Like a women only gym is common sense even if it's segregation, so too is tackle football being only for men.

Racial segregation is more universally decried in almost all forms (except acting a part!).

Is same-sex relationships like gender or like race or like something else entirely? We're still figuring it out. It was very recently that we all thought there was a strong genetic basis for same-sex attraction, but now, after sequencing the entire human genome, we know there isn't. So these things are in flux, I don't think the cake thing is as black and white as most people make it out to be.

Re: The March of Dimes Syndrome

#46

Post by thread_id »

Search for "March of Dimes Syndrome" on Wikipedia and the topic does not exist. But now it can. The first paragraph if published on wikipedia would be loaded with [citation needed] as in 'this claim needs references to reliable sources'.

Re: The March of Dimes Syndrome

#47

Post by Martinussen »

Georgelemental wrote: post #38
TulliusCicero wrote: post #15

> I later learned that a term exists for this phenomenon—the March of Dimes syndrome—and that the tendency affects many other movements, too. Why, last year, did the Human Rights Campaign declare a “national state of emergency” for LGBT people? Why was the election of the first black American president followed by the Black Lives Matter movement? Why have reports of “hate groups” risen during the same decades that ra…

Your theory doesn't explain this part, though (emphasis mine): > It is no longer enough for conservative Christians to tolerate same-sex marriage—now they must be legally required to bake cakes and design web pages for the weddings. It is no longer enough to protect gay students from harassment—now these students must have access in elementary school libraries to how-to manuals for anal sex. Public schools must encou…

That entire paragraph is mostly a strawman, or, if you're feeling charitable, coming from an extremely surface-level awareness of the actual issues they're talking about.

Re: The March of Dimes Syndrome

#48

Post by Georgelemental »

zzzeek wrote: post #31

> It is no longer enough for conservative Christians to tolerate same-sex marriage—now they must be legally required to bake cakes and design web pages for the weddings. Isnt it enough that we can no longer lynch gay people with impunity? now they want to be treated as though they are "normal"? > But however much the backlash has hurt the original cause, the controversies keep activists in business. People getting ma…

[flagged]

Re: The March of Dimes Syndrome

#49

Post by cypherpunks01 »

lovidico wrote: post #29

The author of this article evidently is ignorant to the current state of the world. Simply having the existence of a group become no longer illegal doesn't mean that rights are guaranteed at all. Groups advocating for women's and LGBTQI rights have continued to exist despite advances because groups working to undo everything they have achieved also continue to exist. There is obvious evidence of this - women's and LG…

The whole thing is ridiculous and cartoonish. The main thrust behind the author's litany of complaints seems to be: (and I'm guessing the author hasn't been the subject of a whole lot of discrimination)

Are you gay? Black? Woman trying to prevent sexual violence? Interested in preventing smoking or reducing birth defects? Stop and look around, things are better now! Don't worry or complain any more, those problems were already taken care of!

The timeless "get a job" argument.

Re: The March of Dimes Syndrome

#50

Post by aprilthird2021 »

MissTake wrote: post #4

“and the whole LGBTQIA+ alphabet was a protected class” Blatantly false. Given the huge number of recent anti LGBTQ+ laws that have been created in the last few years, it is quite apparent that the exact opposite is true. There are some parts which have been hard won, but one just has to look at how many people feel they have the right to not deal with LGBTQ+ people, even when it’s their public duty to do so (e.g. th…

> Given the huge number of recent anti LGBTQ+ laws that have been created in the last few years, it is quite apparent that the exact opposite is true.

Something about this type of framing always gives me pause. Because lumping in the current slate of gender-assigned-at-sex-is-your-gender laws with laws about not teaching sexuality-related topics in schools with laws about who can access financial and legal marriage benefits feels disingenuous to me.

They are different topics with different consequences and which say different things about our society. Each is not simply a matter of pro or anti LGBTQ+.

And it feels like an attempt to dissuade us from really discussing the issues at the core of each to frame them all as such.

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