How does that work?
Between that and the water-carrying for anti-trans bigots, this has no place here.
Just because people are being systematically squelched for questioning gangsta rap or giving amphetamines to kids doesn’t mean they are “bigots”. They may care more about individuals than the people who view the kids as just a cog in a machine, and the administrators who cover their butt and barely know anything about the kid.
I believe that water-carrying is being done in the other direction far more — the capitalist industries that make a profit.
Check out the following issues and ask yourself whether all they have in common is “conspiracy nuts”, or whether on the other side they have a highly organized cooperation to push a change through, and to deplatform and delegitimize anyone — even previously respected experts or people whose job it is to deal with these issues - who dares to make too much noise or criticize whatever agenda is pushed:
Weapons industry / military industrial complex — the latest being the war in Ukraine, but previously in Iraq etc.
Plastic - recycling (later revealed to be a scam)
Depression - I saw lots of pushback right here on HN when questioning SSRIs and imbalance theory, but since the 2022 meta-study that died down
Vaccines - we are all aware of how pervasive the push for censorship was, just look at the latest revelations out of FB, Twitter
(CBDCs and National IDs - coming soon)
Gangsta Rap - anyone speaking against it or its misogyny is attacked
Trans activism - anyone voicing any concern for overdiagnosis, or the economic system that separates kids from both their parents, or even continues to use the psychiatric perspective of a disorder or dysphoria out of a concern for children, is shamed as “on the wrong side of history”.
BLM - Anyone discussing any other killings other than by cops of unarmed Black men was systematically attacked
MeToo - Men told to be quiet, listen and not be part of the conversation. Once again rape is very important topic, but the concept got “overdiagnosed” and stretched to the point where someone like Matt Damon making a nuanced distinction becomes persona non grata
To be clear, a man disagreeing with the following tweet is not the same as normalizing rape, but look how quick one side (the water-carrying one, in my opinion) is to paint the other as an “antisemitic/racist/white supremacist/misogynist/putin-supporting/bigot” for merely speaking up and voicing different opinion: https://twitter.com/driverminnie/status/941905518284566528?s...
There are groups who pounce on anyone attributing disparities in economic outcomes to any other factors than the one-dimensional explanation of systemic sexism, racism, etc. It is like when some Zionists explain criticism of Israel purely in terms of systemic antisemitism, or some anti-Zionists navel-gaze at Israel call it the world’s worst violator of human rights and hurl epithets at anyone who mildly disgrees. When you have an agenda you tend to do lots of adhominems. It shuts down the conversation and prevents real discussion exploring other factors. Because institutions have an agenda and they co-opt people into enforcing it. Whether it’s regular Han Chinese in China supporting the locking up of Uyghurs for the “greater good”. Or Sunni/Shiite proxy wars in Yemen. Their “solutions” are invariably worse than the problem, which in any case is upstream and probably due to the very institution and government working together to create it.
The well-meaning activists who carry water for these industries and agendas do not engage in good faith. They are so convinced they are morally superior that they simply insinuate you’re a bad person and then respond in passive-aggressive one-liners!
I said the systemic causes of problems are upstream. I named several of them: A, B, C that exacerbates X, Y, Z. That doesn’t mean A causes Z.
Gangsta Rap may be responsible for a totally different phenomenon than gender dysphoria: namely, the increase in violence, misogyny etc. in some Black communities. With the rise of Black music moguls it became essentially self-blaxploitation:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr6gb1w72xA
And also influenced a lot of bad memes among many Black youth:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagging_(fashion)
This in turn hurt their economic chances as a class, to get high-paying jobs.
This shares elements with other similar examples, which are nevertheless distinct. For example, TikTok and Instagram harming the psyche of young teen girls, with one in three attempting suicide:
https://www.chconline.org/resourcelibrary/teen-girls-report-...
That’s insane! This was NOT the case in previous generations. But notice how few people in mainstream media talk about the upstream causes, and how they mostly discuss medicating this newfound problem away.
Similarly with diabetes, very few people talk about the prevalence of sugar in so many plants we eat (fructose in fruits for instance) or the government actually supporting high fructose corn syrup and genetically modified crops with sugar… or factory farms and so on…
https://weather.com/news/news/2018-10-03-fruit-so-sweet-zoo-...
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it:
Take gender dysphoria for instance. It used to be called Gender Identity Disorder in DSM-4. Then it was renamed, and the approach of listing “Disorders” became replaced with “Traits” to lessen the stigma of a “disorder” while at the same time identifying traits that present in many otherwise normal individuals. https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2015.1...
It is now becoming normalized to the point that 1 in 20 young adults identifies as nonbinary. Where it doesn’t add up is that this dysphoria was a serious disorder whose side effects included attempting suicide at a rate of 30-50%, depending on which study you looked at! Now, are you going to tell me that 2% of all young adults are attempting suicide in USA? Somehow I doubt that. It is too high. Hence it is overreported and overdiagnosed. The “social contagion” theory from 2018 is a part of an alternative answer but it goes deeper than that. It has to do with society making both parents work harder than ever to make ends meet and abandoning its children to be raised by school administrators. It has to do with capitalist industries like the music industry pushing gangst rap / drill music to young kids, instagram / tiktok pushing sexualization and much more very early on.
ADHD seems to be the new “hysteria” — for children instead of women. Hysteria was a catch-all “disorder” that was massively overdiagnosed, and by the way is how the medical industry invented the vibrator. Turns out the problem was upstream. Go figure! https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181107-the-history-of-t...
Today, one in five middle aged women is given SSRIs and ADHD kids are medicated with amphetamines! And many people are conditioned to carry water for the industry, and shut down any questioning of it. Until meta-studies come out to debunk the industry’s claims: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
What I would say is, we should try to fix our capitalist society where both parents work for corporations and stick their kids in public schools where they have to sit still for long periods, and which are modeled on the outdated corporation / factory model. Look at other countries, eg Finland has much better aligned schools and the prevalence of ADHD is far lower.
Same thing with society in general. Middle-aged women are depressed for a reason. With the rise in divorce rates they are often divorced, feeling unattractive and alone. Our society has a lot sad lonely people, our people live in cities, order amazon and food in, and hardly know even their neighbors:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
Record levels of sadness in teens — look at TikTok and sexualization of women and body images, before prescribing antidepressants.