Because stirring up hate against vulnerable minorities, by positioning them as a threat is a well tested and effective technique for the power hungry to gain and retain power. And it’s effective, because it works by pulling people in and making all of the conversation about whether or not it’s right to hate on the group they’re targeting.
The more I read these comments it sound like the USA is entering its Hitler phase.
https://www.faena.com/aleph/umberto-eco-a-practical-list-for-identifying-fascists
In an essay published in the New York Review of Books, Umberto Eco distilled the 14 typical elements of “Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism,” while warning that, “These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
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The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
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The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense, Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
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The cult of action for action’s sale. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.” Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture, the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
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Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.” Appeal to social frustration. “[…] one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.
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The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
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The enemy is both weak and strong. “[…] the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
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Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
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Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
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Everybody is educated to become a hero. “in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
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Machismo and Weaponry. “This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.”
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Selective Populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
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Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
It is also exceedingly important to note that plenty on the Right don’t explicitly hate Trans people. That’s a rhetoric. They may be worried about some of the news “reports” and “”“stories”“”, had to triple quote that one, and yes the radical Right and MAGA do buy in hard and hate due to racial and superiority bullshit. What so many on the Right who are on the fence about these things are truly scared of…
Is having an opinion that deviates from the people around them who they’ve known probably all their lives. Unlike us on the Left who hiss and spit at one another every time one of us has a family gathering, many on the Right fear alienating their social circles.
If you ever want to change the mind of someone on the Right you really just need to soothe their rabid, horrid, twisted by those around them, frothing soul of an angry jackass and make them feel as if they can actually believe something else could be the truth.
But by GOD can it be tiring.
Spot on. The fucking bathroom issue I keep hearing kills me. They are in there to take a shit Karen not to pass you brownies though the stalls and play a game of peak a boo above the stalls
I still don’t understand their claims that bathroom segregation makes anyone “safer”
Do they think there’s some kind of law on the books that says “Anyone who matches the gender on the sign can diddle anyone inside they want!” cause that’s how they act…
Personally I find it silly that bathrooms are segregated at all when stalls exist.
Personally I find it silly that bathrooms are segregated at all when stalls exist.
You mean the 3-foot particle board separator with a 2-foot gap at the bottom and a solid inch of space around the entire door, the gap large enough to make eye contact with someone at the sink while you’re sitting with your pants down?
Because that’s what passes for a “stall” in 99% of America. Privacy never even came into the conversation when they designed those damn things. They are designed to give the bare minimum illusion of privacy while still being easily stared through to make sure no one is doing drugs in your bathroom. At any point in time any employee of any company has a right to come into the bathroom, peer through the crack in the door and make sure you’re in there dropping a dook properly and not say, shooting up heroin. And you can’t stop them even if you wanted to, the stalls are designed to make that possible.
So, with that knowledge, I sort of almost understand the people that get all up in arms about this. Because there is almost NO expectation of privacy in ANY American public bathroom. If we had European style stalls this would never have been a problem in the first place. But because anybody can just walk up and literally make eye contact from outside the stall while you’ve got your pants down, some folks can be understandably concerned about that.
That doesn’t excuse any of this mess and it doesn’t make them correct, but non-americans don’t realize how shoddy our typical public restroom is. The anger at trans folks should instead be directed at the cheap-ass building contractors that mandate bathrooms that don’t give you privacy.
Edit: These are what I’m used to seeing.
If you’re tall, your eye level is over the top of that door. If you’re a young kid, the bottom of the door doesn’t even start until your chest or shoulders. If you’re medium height the gap around the door is your peephole, whether you want it to be or not.
As someone who grew up in a conservative household in a deep red state, I think that part of it is that a lot of people are letting Lizard Brain dictate their response to transgender people.
Let me give you a personal example. A while back, I went to a social dance, and there was a trans woman there. Before the dance starts proper, the couple that runs it will teach a dance lesson, and we rotate partners while that’s going on. Eventually, I was rotated into being her partner. For some background, she was obviously early on in her transition; she still looked like a dude in a dress, she didn’t quite have the appearance down yet. But she gets huge props for not only having the bravery to go out as herself, but doing it in fucking Arkansas.
So I rotate over to her, and it dawns on me that she’s trans. In my head, Lizard Brain immediately starts screaming. “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?! THIS PERSON IS OBVIOUSLY A DUDE IN A DRESS, HE MUST BE UP TO SOMETHING IF HE’S DRESSING AS SOMETHING DIFFERENT THAN WHAT HE IS! RABBLERABBLERABBLERABBLERABBLE”
Keep in mind, where I grew up, you just didn’t see trans people, and even now, it still tickles that primal part of my brain that was trained to be uncomfortable around people who aren’t white and straight.
The difference between me and many of the people I grew up around is that I recognize that it’s happening and try to tone Lizard Brain out when it starts screaming. A lot of other people listen to it and don’t care that the person that it’s screaming about is exactly that: a person.
This is so real. It takes a LOT of effort and time to train this out. If someone isn’t willing to go through that then it makes sense that it would fester.
I had lots of times when i was younger learning about queer culture when i got mad at things. Especially after an overly polite and patient person took the time and effort to explain something to me. Unlearning hate is painful. Learning to liberate yourself is painful.
I think a lot of people feel that pain and decide to run from it and double down on the hate because that way they don’t need to learn and change or pry open their mind to an alternative.
Then there’s the whole fear of conflicting with your own community as a factor.
Many conversations with many different people. I can’t recall as this was mostly a decade ago, before it all clicked for me that humans are diverse and nuanced and it’s fine. My guess would be pronouns and wide net incel stuff. Not that i was particularly bad but deprogramming a Catholic suburban upbringing in american masculinity culture and propaganda is a monumental feat.
I think the fact that i was willing to listen, think critically, and engage in self doubt is what invited the conversations. Still, they were being very charitable with their energy and time.
I’m really grateful for that, especially after recognizing in not as cishet as i thought i was.
I remember reading that when people have racist reactions like what you’re describing it’s like a different part of their brain triggers and then their frontal lobe (for higher logic) sort of suppresses it. I really wish I could remember more about this but I definitely remember learning about this in psychology. Something like when a baby sees someone of a skin color they haven’t seen before they get nervous, but when they’re older different parts shut it down. The memory is very fuzzy.
For a simple example: my mother is Catholic and until Trump came along, a lifelong single-issue Republican voter who always said she would be a Democrat if it weren’t for abortion. She attends church in an extremely progressive, famously LGBTQ-friendly town.
There’s a transwoman who attends her church (let’s call her Rita). This lady is probably in her mid-50s to mid-60s and has been a fixture at the church for at least 5 years. My mom has been in choir and bible study groups with her for years now. She still just can’t see Rita as a woman. Treats her politely but behind her back refuses to call her “she” and says she’s a “man in a dress”.
She’s really offended that Rita uses the ladies’ room. I’ve asked her why and she can’t articulate it, she just feels like it’s an invasion of her privacy, because men don’t belong in the ladies’ room. And when I point out that Rita isn’t a man, she just rolls her eyes. I’ve asked her if she’s worried that Rita is in there for predatory purposes and she admits that she doesn’t think Rita intends any harm. I’ve asked her how she’d feel if she were forced to use the men’s room and she says “but that’s different!”
My mom prides herself in being a moral person, and still can’t manage to get past her bigotry to see Rita as a woman. There are just too many mental blockades against it. But since she thinks she’s so highly moral, she thinks she must be correct in this situation. It excuses her from finding empathy and bettering her attitude toward trans folks.
My longwinded point is that when people who consider themselves highly moral are bigoted, there’s almost zero chance of getting through to them. And I think a lot of the people who are bigoted against trans folks feel that morality is on their side and being trans is morally deviant, so they think they’re justified in their prejudice.
It’s strange to them.
When people encounter something that’s different from what they are used to, they don’t know how to process it. It makes them uncomfortable. Some people, instead of learning how to deal with that feeling like a mature adult, blame the individual for making them feel uncomfortable and resent them for “making them feel that way”. Just staying away is not enough, they must be punished for existing.
All because someone felt a little icky when they thought about a girl with a weiner.
well yeah they don’t like the thought of a girl with a weiner, you can’t degrade and classify women into being just a hole+reproductive organs if they might not have that. (but also pre-op trans dudes can’t use women’s bathrooms cus they aren’t women but still will never be men???) bigots are bigots.
This is really it. They feel strange about it and cannot grok it. It’s bizzarre that it can break even people that I hold in high regard.
For instance Graham Linehan, the brilliant writer of Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd went completely of the rails like his own father Jack when it came to transgender people. There’s people who just cant cope. Even including LGBT+ people. Theres plenty of gay people that hate transgenders with a passion and fail to see that the very same hate was directed at themselves a generation before.
It boggles the mind. But really people feel really icky about the fact that people can choose their gender when they are being plagued by being welded to that gender in most of their lives.
Even as someone who fully accepts trans people and has trans friends and family, it’s still an adjustment to some really old, deeply-seated habits and mental structures. I’m over 50 so I was set in my ways when I learned about “they” pronouns and it still takes work for me to get it right. If I didn’t care about the people involved, it would be very easy to see it as a burden or annoyance.
Because fascists need a ~scary other~ to scapegoat to erode everyone’s rights.
