Like, they kept telling Cletus that the immigrants are why his paycheck is small, and that the big city liberals want to eradicate him. He says “Damn those immigrants” and then you come out of the woodwork telling him he’s the problem with the country and then boom: you’re suddenly the liberal who he’s heard hates him, word made flesh, just as the prophecy foretold.
Exactly and the flipside of this is targeting the liberals and catering to the idea they can be morally superior, and building this meritocratic notion where the “Cletus” actually deserves to be poor and stupid. This mechanism basically removes individuals from the political economy and moralizes the outcomes caused by it as representative of their individual virtue. This idea of “virtue hoarding” has been used to describe this which I think can be pretty accurate. It can’t solve anything either, and it’s actually a very conservative approach to the topic at large because it doesn’t acknowledge the economic material causes of why they’re like this or try to solve the thing that causes these disparities. It makes it all about the individual and their moral choices. A lot of what’s ignored from the people who liberals love to appropriate in their ideaology, like MLK Jr, is the radical notion of economic equality that made them so unpopular at the time, even among people who were morally opposed to racism. If you removed these prejduces from “Cletus,” a lot of the city liberal types would still find him detestable as a person, and he would probably be asked to leave if he tried to enter one of their workplaces. Despite him having more materially in common with the liberal professional worker, the liberal likely believes themselves to have more in common with their bosses.
The anti-trans agenda is the most brilliantly executed wedge issue I’ve seen in a long time. Most “yokels” don’t have any personal experience with trans people. They have no reason to hate them. Even if they’re creeped out by what they don’t understand, the numbers are so few that you couldn’t under any stretch of the imagination convince them that they’re a threat.
But the “foaming at the mouth big city liberals who hates anyone from outside the city” archetype? THAT looks like a threat. There are tons of city folk. They run the government. Do they really hate me?
You want to keep the working class infighting? Drop a trans issue into the mix. The country man says “Boy, now I tell you h’what, I’m not sure about that” and some genius will come out of the woodwork and say “FACIST!” and then boom, they have presented as the rabid threat. Sides are entrenched. Dialogue immediately erodes to ad hominem, both sides paint their strawmen, and they’re convinced that it isn’t a dispute over ideas but rather of the other side being intrinsically defective as people.
And in the squabble, education funding is cut. Class sizes grow. More money funneled to defence. Raytheon gets a contract to vaporize brown kids. CEO gets a 200 million bonus. The system works as intended.
It’s way more likely someone knows a gay person than a trans person at this point so there’s that unknown factor to exploit. It’s also just more of a reality that your gender identity doesn’t matter as much materially to the sort of path in life you’re expected to take, and there’s a lot of economic reasons for that. One being the cost of living and housing has already required two working adults in many places, another is industry specialization and professionalization. We also have a lot more identity technologies available to us, ways we can construct and inhabit identities and validate other people’s identities. The funny thing is in many cases these virile straight male types are actually using the same gender ideology as the trans person, they’re just as much discovering and finding out how to express their male-ness as the trans person is discovering how to best display the gender or non they prefer to be seen as. Even the adage “you aren’t born a man, you become one” is basically the same notion Judith Butler presents under feminist theory. And of course the male identity stuff is commodified to shit just like anything else can be.
All the queer meme pages were making fun of Raytheon’s DEI program this year so I think there’s more awareness about this stuff in general now. I’m at a place where they’ve been putting in a top-down program like this and it’s also the non-conforming people in the company asking the hard questions in the sessions to the diversity industry consultants which is great to see. I’ve also experienced the liberal “ally” condemnation in public once which was very uncomfortable, all because they heard a friend (who had transitioned) and I call each other “dude,” which they were quick to point out very loudly to the entire party, “UH SHE’S A WOMAN!” Thankfully my friend loudly responded back “women can be dudes too” which shut her down, but I was just like girl get out of our business, and why are you listening to my friend and I greet each other, you don’t know anything about our relationship. The worst thing is she was sober doing this lol.
Exactly and the flipside of this is targeting the liberals and catering to the idea they can be morally superior, and building this meritocratic notion where the “Cletus” actually deserves to be poor and stupid. This mechanism basically removes individuals from the political economy and moralizes the outcomes caused by it as representative of their individual virtue. This idea of “virtue hoarding” has been used to describe this which I think can be pretty accurate. It can’t solve anything either, and it’s actually a very conservative approach to the topic at large because it doesn’t acknowledge the economic material causes of why they’re like this or try to solve the thing that causes these disparities. It makes it all about the individual and their moral choices. A lot of what’s ignored from the people who liberals love to appropriate in their ideaology, like MLK Jr, is the radical notion of economic equality that made them so unpopular at the time, even among people who were morally opposed to racism. If you removed these prejduces from “Cletus,” a lot of the city liberal types would still find him detestable as a person, and he would probably be asked to leave if he tried to enter one of their workplaces. Despite him having more materially in common with the liberal professional worker, the liberal likely believes themselves to have more in common with their bosses.
Exactly! And again, it’s absolutely manufactured.
The anti-trans agenda is the most brilliantly executed wedge issue I’ve seen in a long time. Most “yokels” don’t have any personal experience with trans people. They have no reason to hate them. Even if they’re creeped out by what they don’t understand, the numbers are so few that you couldn’t under any stretch of the imagination convince them that they’re a threat.
But the “foaming at the mouth big city liberals who hates anyone from outside the city” archetype? THAT looks like a threat. There are tons of city folk. They run the government. Do they really hate me?
You want to keep the working class infighting? Drop a trans issue into the mix. The country man says “Boy, now I tell you h’what, I’m not sure about that” and some genius will come out of the woodwork and say “FACIST!” and then boom, they have presented as the rabid threat. Sides are entrenched. Dialogue immediately erodes to ad hominem, both sides paint their strawmen, and they’re convinced that it isn’t a dispute over ideas but rather of the other side being intrinsically defective as people.
And in the squabble, education funding is cut. Class sizes grow. More money funneled to defence. Raytheon gets a contract to vaporize brown kids. CEO gets a 200 million bonus. The system works as intended.
It’s way more likely someone knows a gay person than a trans person at this point so there’s that unknown factor to exploit. It’s also just more of a reality that your gender identity doesn’t matter as much materially to the sort of path in life you’re expected to take, and there’s a lot of economic reasons for that. One being the cost of living and housing has already required two working adults in many places, another is industry specialization and professionalization. We also have a lot more identity technologies available to us, ways we can construct and inhabit identities and validate other people’s identities. The funny thing is in many cases these virile straight male types are actually using the same gender ideology as the trans person, they’re just as much discovering and finding out how to express their male-ness as the trans person is discovering how to best display the gender or non they prefer to be seen as. Even the adage “you aren’t born a man, you become one” is basically the same notion Judith Butler presents under feminist theory. And of course the male identity stuff is commodified to shit just like anything else can be.
All the queer meme pages were making fun of Raytheon’s DEI program this year so I think there’s more awareness about this stuff in general now. I’m at a place where they’ve been putting in a top-down program like this and it’s also the non-conforming people in the company asking the hard questions in the sessions to the diversity industry consultants which is great to see. I’ve also experienced the liberal “ally” condemnation in public once which was very uncomfortable, all because they heard a friend (who had transitioned) and I call each other “dude,” which they were quick to point out very loudly to the entire party, “UH SHE’S A WOMAN!” Thankfully my friend loudly responded back “women can be dudes too” which shut her down, but I was just like girl get out of our business, and why are you listening to my friend and I greet each other, you don’t know anything about our relationship. The worst thing is she was sober doing this lol.