Maybe you haven’t been convinced by a good enough argument. Maybe you just don’t want to admit you are wrong. Or maybe the chaos is the objective, but what are you knowingly on the wrong side of?
In my case: I don’t think any games are obliged to offer an easy mode. If developers want to tailor a specific experience, they don’t have to dilute it with easier or harder modes that aren’t actually interesting and/or anything more than poorly done numbers adjustments. BUT I also know that for the people that need and want them, it helps a LOT. But I can’t really accept making the game worse so that some people get to play it. They wouldn’t actually be playing the same game after all…
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.
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.
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.