I swear to god, every time i hear about conservatives getting upset about gay and trans rights I’m more convinced it’s projection. They want to have the freedom to follow their own preferences but have been taught by someone in their family and/or society that certain preferences are completely unacceptable. Rather than go against the grain, they lean into the hate side of it. “If i can’t have that, you sure as hell can’t–and if you do, you’re gonna pay dearly” seems to be the philosophy. All this because they want to explore their sexuality but they decided the social price is too much. Not allowed to have what they crave, now they just scorn those that are brave enough to face the storm they themselves avoided…or they just hate people having freedom. Probably both.
Their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications. All that has ever mattered is ingroup loyalty. Reality itself is defined by interpersonal trust. What’s true today is simply dictated by people above you in The Hierarchy, and your job is to make whatever mouth noises justify them. If they weren’t right and better and handsome then obviously they wouldn’t belong in that high position. It is impossible for someone to simply be wrong. That would require an objective means of evaluating claims. In their worldview, that is not what claims are for.
This constant quest for logical explanations is a category error. Logic is not what they’re doing. They think the whole world runs on who-says. Like if they get their guy to be the head scientist, he could make the sun go around the Earth.
I did. This whole conservative theory-of-everything has been pinging around my brain for years, as many answers to ‘what the fuck are they doing’ became undeniably incomplete.
The hardest aspect to deal with is that this worldview is not fragile. There’s no ‘are we the baddies?’ moment where someone snaps out of it. If it was just a reverse cargo cult, there’d be more people who reject the invitation. So we can’t tell ourselves these people secretly know we’re right. This is not an act or a strategy. It has to be some internally consistent way of filtering events… and it has to look like what we’re doing, from the outside. Because in exactly the same way we tell ourselves everyone’s trying to be reasonable - they tell themselves we’re just performing loyalty.
It’s tribalism. Simple as that. It’s humanity’s default us-good-you-bad protect-the-village mindset, expanded from trusting your witch-doctor’s opinion on leeches to trusting your news anchor’s opinion on horse dewormer. I mean, he’s gotta be right. Look how much money he has. His penis must be enormous.
I don’t think your idea precludes the idea conservatives are bitter about their own self-repression. The social cost of exploration being too high is flip side of the strict adherence to hierarchy for world view. If there wasn’t some emotion to tap into the narrative wouldn’t land nearly as well as it has
It’s only anecdotal, but a lot of the people I know who were hateful like that while growing up actually did come out as LGBTQ+. Some were trans, some were gay, some were bi, etc.
Some of them are just a-holes though. One dude complained about a gay classmate. He never liked it when I asked him why he was thinking about what the other guy was doing with his bits so much. I’ve always thouht it was a fair question. I never did get an answer, though.
The thing is it’s only just tangentially related to trans rights. I mean they’re making a character creation screen and they do need to know what pronouns to refer to the character as in game dialog as the player is playing it. So they need to know that for the game to work.
These fools seem to want Bethesda to add logic to restrict the pronouns on the character creation screen. So it’s not that they’re angry that Bethesda made an effort to be inclusive. They’re angry that Bethesda didn’t put in an effort to explicitly exclude trans people.
That and I think they’re just generally triggered over the word “pronoun.” Triggered by words that describe words. There’s something very wrong with these people.
Have you read Terry Pratchetts book Thud? It touches on that briefly. For what its worth i agree with you. Nothing else makes sense. Especially when so many vocal homophobes get caught having same-sex fun.
I think they want what trans, gay, lesbians, etc have. In terms of resources, jobs, money, social contacts. So, just like it happened with religion, they highlight the difference between you and them. Tribes created. Now it’s a Us against Them where them are different, so not human, inferior. If they are not human we can do whatever we want to them. And the rights start to be eroded. People arrested. We can go further down the line but you know what happens. The Them get eliminated and the Us get the resources. We’ve seen this happen for ages.
People will eventually stop giving a fuck. This same shit happened in 1954 w/gay people. Gay people started suing and winning, and society moved forward.
We’ll likely see the same thing. Generally, it has to get worse before things get better. Back then, it started when scientists got fed up with getting their buttholes inspected by “security” to make sure they weren’t gay today (embellishing a bit here, but the gist is that they got fed up with the constant fear mongering and told the security teams to fuck off).
I’m sure we’ll reach a fever pitch and then someone will tell them to fuck off, as is usual. Then everyone will forget about it, save for some older folks.
Check out the Lavender Scare: the prosecution of gays and lesbians in the federal goverment by David K Johnson. It’s an uplifting book on how social movements get going and how it provides a sea change for society at large, even straight folks, in this case.
To be clear, there’s 50 years from 1954 to when gay marriage was first legalized. And 40 years ago, we even thought we were done with the whole abortion debate. Don’t even need to get into how long it took for people with Brown skin were legally treated anywhere near equal. BLM was how many years after the Emancipation? And still opposed by people who “want to leave it all well alone”. It’s a big deal that it takes that long to enact minimal change (considering we have a seated SCOTUS Justice who said we need to reconsider the constitutionality of gay marriage)
The real problem, perhaps, is everyone coming to the defense of the modder, even here. People saying “just let people do what they do” (see highly upvoted comment here). If the intolerant side “do what they do” and the rest of us get bored or sick of the human rights side, then it takes 50 years, or 100 years, or more to make meaningful change.
Rather than go against the grain, they lean into the hate side of it. “If i can’t have that, you sure as hell can’t–and if you do, you’re gonna pay dearly” seems to be the philosophy.
Making a game mod that only effects people who choose to install it seems like a poor strategy for achieving that.
I swear to god, every time i hear about conservatives getting upset about gay and trans rights I’m more convinced it’s projection. They want to have the freedom to follow their own preferences but have been taught by someone in their family and/or society that certain preferences are completely unacceptable. Rather than go against the grain, they lean into the hate side of it. “If i can’t have that, you sure as hell can’t–and if you do, you’re gonna pay dearly” seems to be the philosophy. All this because they want to explore their sexuality but they decided the social price is too much. Not allowed to have what they crave, now they just scorn those that are brave enough to face the storm they themselves avoided…or they just hate people having freedom. Probably both.
You’re overthinking it.
Conservatives don’t believe things. Conservatives believe people.
Their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications. All that has ever mattered is ingroup loyalty. Reality itself is defined by interpersonal trust. What’s true today is simply dictated by people above you in The Hierarchy, and your job is to make whatever mouth noises justify them. If they weren’t right and better and handsome then obviously they wouldn’t belong in that high position. It is impossible for someone to simply be wrong. That would require an objective means of evaluating claims. In their worldview, that is not what claims are for.
This constant quest for logical explanations is a category error. Logic is not what they’re doing. They think the whole world runs on who-says. Like if they get their guy to be the head scientist, he could make the sun go around the Earth.
This is kind of deep. Feels true. Did you come up with this?
I did. This whole conservative theory-of-everything has been pinging around my brain for years, as many answers to ‘what the fuck are they doing’ became undeniably incomplete.
The hardest aspect to deal with is that this worldview is not fragile. There’s no ‘are we the baddies?’ moment where someone snaps out of it. If it was just a reverse cargo cult, there’d be more people who reject the invitation. So we can’t tell ourselves these people secretly know we’re right. This is not an act or a strategy. It has to be some internally consistent way of filtering events… and it has to look like what we’re doing, from the outside. Because in exactly the same way we tell ourselves everyone’s trying to be reasonable - they tell themselves we’re just performing loyalty.
It’s tribalism. Simple as that. It’s humanity’s default us-good-you-bad protect-the-village mindset, expanded from trusting your witch-doctor’s opinion on leeches to trusting your news anchor’s opinion on horse dewormer. I mean, he’s gotta be right. Look how much money he has. His penis must be enormous.
I don’t think your idea precludes the idea conservatives are bitter about their own self-repression. The social cost of exploration being too high is flip side of the strict adherence to hierarchy for world view. If there wasn’t some emotion to tap into the narrative wouldn’t land nearly as well as it has
It’s only anecdotal, but a lot of the people I know who were hateful like that while growing up actually did come out as LGBTQ+. Some were trans, some were gay, some were bi, etc.
Some of them are just a-holes though. One dude complained about a gay classmate. He never liked it when I asked him why he was thinking about what the other guy was doing with his bits so much. I’ve always thouht it was a fair question. I never did get an answer, though.
The thing is it’s only just tangentially related to trans rights. I mean they’re making a character creation screen and they do need to know what pronouns to refer to the character as in game dialog as the player is playing it. So they need to know that for the game to work.
These fools seem to want Bethesda to add logic to restrict the pronouns on the character creation screen. So it’s not that they’re angry that Bethesda made an effort to be inclusive. They’re angry that Bethesda didn’t put in an effort to explicitly exclude trans people.
That and I think they’re just generally triggered over the word “pronoun.” Triggered by words that describe words. There’s something very wrong with these people.
Whenever you hear a conservative complaining about anything at all, it’s always projection/admission or both.
“They’re rigging the elections,”
“They’re gonna riot if Biden doesn’t win,”
“They’re running pedophile rings under their favorite pizza parlor,”
I could go on.
Have you read Terry Pratchetts book Thud? It touches on that briefly. For what its worth i agree with you. Nothing else makes sense. Especially when so many vocal homophobes get caught having same-sex fun.
I think they want what trans, gay, lesbians, etc have. In terms of resources, jobs, money, social contacts. So, just like it happened with religion, they highlight the difference between you and them. Tribes created. Now it’s a Us against Them where them are different, so not human, inferior. If they are not human we can do whatever we want to them. And the rights start to be eroded. People arrested. We can go further down the line but you know what happens. The Them get eliminated and the Us get the resources. We’ve seen this happen for ages.
deleted by creator
People will eventually stop giving a fuck. This same shit happened in 1954 w/gay people. Gay people started suing and winning, and society moved forward.
We’ll likely see the same thing. Generally, it has to get worse before things get better. Back then, it started when scientists got fed up with getting their buttholes inspected by “security” to make sure they weren’t gay today (embellishing a bit here, but the gist is that they got fed up with the constant fear mongering and told the security teams to fuck off).
I’m sure we’ll reach a fever pitch and then someone will tell them to fuck off, as is usual. Then everyone will forget about it, save for some older folks.
Check out the Lavender Scare: the prosecution of gays and lesbians in the federal goverment by David K Johnson. It’s an uplifting book on how social movements get going and how it provides a sea change for society at large, even straight folks, in this case.
Society has moved on to attacking Trans and non-binary people, gays included in this ignorant lot (obviously not all gays).
People gonna hate what they don’t understand or if something makes them uncomfortable.
To be clear, there’s 50 years from 1954 to when gay marriage was first legalized. And 40 years ago, we even thought we were done with the whole abortion debate. Don’t even need to get into how long it took for people with Brown skin were legally treated anywhere near equal. BLM was how many years after the Emancipation? And still opposed by people who “want to leave it all well alone”. It’s a big deal that it takes that long to enact minimal change (considering we have a seated SCOTUS Justice who said we need to reconsider the constitutionality of gay marriage)
The real problem, perhaps, is everyone coming to the defense of the modder, even here. People saying “just let people do what they do” (see highly upvoted comment here). If the intolerant side “do what they do” and the rest of us get bored or sick of the human rights side, then it takes 50 years, or 100 years, or more to make meaningful change.
Making a game mod that only effects people who choose to install it seems like a poor strategy for achieving that.