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So here's a thing. This week I'm basically taking over this thread by the way until I get bored or enough people tell me to shut up and go away.
One of my friends posted a link to a FiveThirtyEight article analyzing the results of a recent poll on Americans' feelings on LGBTQ rights. I don't really read a lot of 538 - I was kind of a junkie for it in 2016, looked for reassurances that Donald Trump would definitely, totally lose from Nate Silver's reasoned analyses, and I kinda re-evaluated my coping strategies when Trump won.
But a friend posted a link to the article and so I needed to read it to figure out how much I should panic. I'm still reasonably disinclined to panic. I mean, any more than I'm already panicking. There's still a fairly significant chance that I might be systemically exterminated within the next five years, after all.
What fascinates me about this article is that it uses a term I hadn't heard before - "cross-pressured". As far as I can tell, this is used to describe a situation where poll results show that one person holds two mutually incompatible beliefs - that they exist in a state of cognitive dissonance. When it comes to trans rights, an _extraordinarily high_ number of people are "cross-pressured".
In this light it makes perfect sense that the Democrats have no coherent platform. They're trying to appeal to the electorate, and the beliefs and desires of much of the electorate are meaningless and nonsensical.
But there is perhaps sort of a vicious circle happening here, in that the incoherence of the Democratic party _legitimizes_ incoherence in the population. People who call themselves "moderates" turn out to, in practice, model severe cognitive dissonance more closely. In other words, the electorate, as well as the Democratic leaders, are fundamentally incapable of coping with empirical reality.
The funny thing is, as a trans person, I don't really see this as a _new_ way of thinking. I think there was _always_ a certain amount of contradiction and incoherence when it came to normative beliefs about trans people. As long as nobody digs too deep, as long as nobody asks too many difficult questions, everything _seems_ to make sense.
But it doesn't. The principles I was raised from birth to live my life by, they don't make sense. They are, in fact, batshit crazy. And people are coming up with more and more ridiculous euphemisms to disguise this increasingly obvious fact. "Cross-pressured" is apparently one of the more recent. I can't wait to see what the wonks think of next.
― Kate (rushomancy), Tuesday, 2 August 2022 02:31 (one year ago) link
three months pass...
two weeks pass...
one month passes...
four months pass...
eight months pass...