The costs of trans visibility

this is the trans visibility thread but you took another issue as an example so I'll take yet another one because imo it generalizes.

I want to be sure, at any cost, we will never be forbidden to eat meat, and meat production and sale won't ever be taxed so heavily as to make it a rare luxury either.

I am willing to die for that.

which is why I don't cede any ground at any step toward any law that mandates emission reductions in any sector. because that opens up a direct line of attack to meat.

and because climate change extremists do list banning/heavily reducing meat consumption as one of their many specific goals, it's not that I am making that up as a vague threat.

that's why 2) in your post is completely wrong. it is especially wrong when the incremental change can become the precedent upon which the disaster you want to avoid is justified legally.

another example, seat belt mandate laws.

seat belt laws make sense on paper.

minimal incurred cost for very significant benefit to the people mandated. hard to find a most cost effective form of state paternalism (technical paternalism: we choose for you because we make better decisions).

so that's why as a pragmatic classic liberal/libertarian leaning person I used to accept them and didn't share libertarians hatred of those laws.

I was completely wrong and they were completely right.

we got mandated masks with countless people citing seat belt laws as the example why mandating masks is reasonable, lawful, pragmatic and so on.

I infinitely prefer a society that doesn't mandate both seat belts and masks (and anything else to individuals for their safety) that one which mandates both and more.

I couldn't attack mask mandates in principle having agreed with seat belt laws.

I ended up having to discuss the specifics of efficacy of masks, but the left can make up "science" deciding which studies to fund with public money, controlling journals, and deciding which "experts" we are supposed to believe.

it's a game you can't win.

so in retrospect horrific violence happened because of seat belt laws, the slippery slope was real, and I was wrong.

I won't make that mistake again, a 1% threat of horrible things happening down the line will be more than enough for me to oppose the first step in the causal chain

I’m going to hazard a guess that your disagreement with climate activists isn’t that far down the causal chain. I am recklessly speculating right now that you and climate activists have different views on the precarity of the earth’s climate and how much reducing carbon emission’s will salvage the planet’s fate.

If that just happens to be true (big if, I know) then I would say that difference is what’s leading you and climate activists to different conclusions on whether we should take steps to reduce carbon emissions, not your willingness to die to keep beef and lamb prices stable or their naïveté on the knock-on effects of their legislation on said prices. If I were a mediator charged with having you and climate activists see eye to eye, I’d start with the stuff in the first paragraph.

So if all that’s the case, then why put the focus on the thing way down the causal chain rather than the much more fundamental disagreement sitting right there at the heart of the issue?

Well, I SUSPECT it’s because saying you’re passionate about your right to eat meat is a more popular stance that puts you on stronger footing to win arguments in a politics sub forum of a poker website than making it all about how you don’t believe the science.

I gave the mask mandate example as well from another slippery slope example, which is something most people in this forum either were fairly indifferent about, or mostly in favor, at least given my conversations on the topic with them in the past.

And afaik most people in this forum would agree with higher regulations for animal farming which would increase prices, even if they would more for "ethical" considerations than for CO2 emissions considerations, so I dont think you can claim I defend low stable meat prices because it's a popular take here, I don't think it is

As a policy matter, the mask mandates did not follow from seat belt laws in any real material or functional capacity. Different slope, different ski resort entirely.

What common sense traffic regulation HAS paved the way for is making an easy analogy for people to draw from, making it harder for you to win an argument about mask mandates in a politics subforum of a poker website.

It's funny because I thought you were going in a complete other direction about how traffic violation enforcement schemes can lead to "horrific violence" (like, actual literal violence), but we've already got plenty off-topic items to clear off the docket so let's let that lie...

If we were to conduct a 2-question poll to the members of this sub:

1) Do you believe we should be forbidden from eating meat?

2) Do you think climate scientists are wrong in their assessment of how much harm carbon emissions will have on the planet?

I FEEL like the shrewd political arguer in you has already intuited which is more popular and have chosen your attack line on climate legislation accordingly. But who am I to say, I'm just a down-home LLSNL poster.

this is common, believe it or not, the nra does not approve of people owning assault rifles

they do however fight every attempt at banning them simply because they know once assault rifles are banned it becomes exponentially easier to widen the scope of that ban

also luc, at the risk of derailing this thread, masks were not a big deal, not the inconvenience people made them out to be and at the time were the best known option to employ

i was also in china for most of the pandemic where wearing a mask was never politicized and it was 100x better - yes there were plenty of chinese who didn't wear masks but nobody was like "oh that stupid conservative" it was instead "oh i guess he doesn't like masks" - it was no different than "i guess he doesn't like wearing polos"

Mask mandates followed seat belt mandates in public acceptance and in legal acceptance in many places.

The horrific violence was torturing children with mask mandates in schools. Yes it was torture. Yes i will never forgive the torturers and those who agreed with them.

5/8/2020 CNN

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/05/us/seat-belts-masks-coronavirus-wellness-trnd/index.html

CNN

The debate over masks today is a lot like the decades-long fight to mandate seat belts | CNN

The debate over masks today is a lot like the decades-long fight to mandate seat belts

Both are touted as essential safety measures to prevent people from dying. Both are minor accessories that, when first introduced, drew opposition from a vocal few who felt they were too restrictive.

But seat belts have succeeded. Yes, it took decades of jumping legislative hurdles, an effective and catchy campaign (“Click it or ticket”😉 and the eventual buy-in from carmakers to make them a reflexive part of driving.

Today, the same arguments against seat belts are being used to oppose masks.

WaPo in 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2...

And so on.

[QUOTE=rickroll;58721092]
also luc, at the risk of derailing this thread, masks were not a big deal, not the inconvenience people made them out to be and at the time were the best known option to employ

/QUOTE]

You are utterly wrong for kids (and for people with beards which insanely were mandated them anyway even if ALL guidelines in healthcare re people who actually have to wear masks for actually useful reasons, tell people they can't with a beard, they don't work).

8 hours masked at 6y old with only 30-60 min interval to eat (spaced out, away from others) is torture. And some places in the USA (not in the EU afaik) mandated masks from 2 years. That was utterly criminal, people should be in jail for that.

And yes if seatbelt mandates had been fought and considered illegal under the "the state has no right to mandate your safety against your will", mask mandates would have been impossible.

In other to mandate for third parties, you have to prove they are contagious, you can't assume they "might be" and limit their freedom, that's basic law.

anyway back to the topic of thread, if someone disagrees with the idea that minors could be sterilized and mutilated if they have gender disphoria , as it happened and is still happening (albeit less than 1-2 years ago) in several countries, it's absolutely reasonable to fight trans activists at every legal step from the first one , which can be pronouns or bathrooms.

Any legal recognition anything has to be changed in society to accomodate them (with the force of the law, not just because of courtesy) increases the chances of physicians being allowed to prescribe puberty blockers, then hormones, the surgery to minors.

That specific slippery slope *proved real already*

maybe all the people advocating for sterilizing trans minors are the real transphobes working deep undercover?

If that is "torture" then having your posts take up so much space is also "torture".

If you were mandated to read them 8 hours/day yes, they would be (same would apply to most posters content)

We're a million miles off-topic (not just with the examples, but even the broader discussion on slippery slopes was a tangent), so this will probably be my final response on it:

This somehow feels like the opposite of a slippery slope argument. This is more like two slopes running parallel to each other and we slid the same distance down each of them.

It's just two different instances of the government mandating a similar thing using a similar cost-benefit analysis with minimal cost incurred with life-and-death stakes on the benefit side.

Poll pre-pandemic audiences walking out of the theater for a movie about a pandemic, and no one is going to say that the scenes of people wearing masks really goes to show the dangerous knock-on effects of seat belt legislation.

Based on the fact that you put "science" in scare quotes and that you're using terms like "torture" and "horrific violence", I'm going to infer that the REAL breaking point for you between seat belt laws and mask mandates is that you disagree with others on both the cost and the benefit of wearing masks. That's the crux of the argument. The rest is rhetorical flourish.

Some doubts come to mind when the most extremists people do stuff that is so out of line with majoritarian opinion, it is bound not to help "the movement". But some people actually believe they are all fighting for a "slavery abolition" kind of right, whatever topic they discuss.

So you get climate activists making most people angry because they block infrastructure, and people advocating for surgery for minors or for biological men to play in the olympics against women and so on.

It's not rethorical flourish to claim that mask mandates couldn't have happened if we had been succesful in considering seat belt mandates illegal.

Back to trans issues to give proper examples, even if it costed very little to accomodate uncommon pronouns in official IDs, we shouldn't. We shouldn't give any legal consideration to the whole topic. When it's not a medical issue, it should be simply a private issue in all occasions, same as the color you choose to give your hair. When it becomes a medical issue, if it ever can be one, they are just patients like all other patients.

Oh, I don't read most of your words. I just scroll on by. It's still torture on the level you're assigning to six-year-olds wearing masks.

The logic heads out there might spot something unusual about the bolded statements and phrases above.

Sorry man but you don't get to decide how much my kids suffered.

You have failed to spot the unusual thing about the bolded statements.

I'll elaborate:

Passing a law banning patients and their doctors and families from getting prescribed gender affirming care IS legislating gender theory. It just happens to be the gender theory you subscribe to.

Your credo that "The state has no right to mandate your safety against your will" went away the second the state was mandating a safety parameter you agree with.

So again, the crux of the argument is yours and trans activists' differing theories on gender. Arguing about anything else is just talking past each other.

I understand you can't argue about that in this thread, so I can't blame you for not sticking to that discussion in this instance. But it's just a pattern I'm noticing in our short time together...

Ehm except my anti-paternalist credo was about adults as i wrote, AND the very very very important difference from mandating something active vs not allowing something yet to minors (when adult they can do whatever) which no, it is not symmetrical at all.

In fact for adults i would not apply ANY restriction to procedures, i wouldn't even consider them medical (so subject to FDA , medical approval and so on), adults should be allowed to modify their bodies (for gender identity reasons, or for any other reasons) completly without restrictions (using their own money though).

I am not against rules that ban people under age of X from buying and consuming alcohol (we can discuss the X), or other substances which adults can consume. That's paternalism for people who society decided aren't yet mature enough to decide in their best interest in some topics, so we limit their choices in those topics.

I don't see how that shouldn't apply to *permanent body modifications* as well. It's not a medical issue btw, it's orthogonal to whether it works or not to alleviate specific instances of gender disphoria. It's about age of consent, you aren't mature enough to make a decision with so long and significant consequences for the rest of your life. And that's a political choice not a medical one, and it doesn't require any denial of gender identity.

Alright, my last game of spot the logical inconsistency was unfair, I'll give you an easier one this time:

the mandated the masks in schools to protect the teachers, and adults in the family, at least here that was the motivation.

If it was for them they would have mandated 3y+ but they didn't in any place in europe.

RaiseA let's clarify for the nth time then move back to the thread as I tried many times to do already.

I am not against babyseat mandates in car for babies ok?

I don’t necessarily disagree with what you’re saying about the dynamic between the pragmatic and the ideal. The only issue is that a) my point of view is much more progressive than 90% of society and b) I’m not convinced that categorically we can think of trans and other rights the same way. That’s because in other groups, there’s not really a question of what it means to be a woman or black biologically. And in the case of gay rights, I mean if you have sex with someone of the same sex you are gay pretty much unless they are a passing trans person ig. However in the case of being trans, I mean that can vary by culture and even period of time, plus there is absolutely no foolproof test to 100% determine someone is trans. Also in other groups, they might have identity specific medical needs but they don’t rely as heavily on medical practices just to exist. Furthermore how we integrate them into society is really important, and the gender abolitionists have really done a number on the community by undermining that integration.

Yeah when we zoom out and look at a general analysis of social movements, people can try to make analogies about how I am akin to the people that didn’t support gay marriage but wanted gay people to be left alone. But what you have to understand is that it’s more like I’m actually fighting the people that want to abolish marriage in general as a way of reaching equality between the sexual identities and AM advocating for gay marriage in this analogy. Meaning my beliefs are pretty progressive on this subject and has been for some time, it’s just that I don’t buy into the extremists and want to make sure we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot by buying into the most extreme vision of society that pro-trans gender abolitionists/anarchists are arguing for.

I’ve heard the arguments, they’re bad and they harm trans people. That’s my point.