The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
I am currently reading the Curtis Yarvin profile in the June 9 issue, and I'm finding it absolutely chilling.
It's hard to describe what this person believes and stands for, other than the complete destruction of the political and governmental order as we know it--some of which DOGE has already done.
The extremely chilling part is that this man approves of the writings of a retired economics professor from UNLV named Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who believes that universal suffrage should be replaced by rule by what he calls a "natural elite" and calls for "communists, homosexuals, and others who oppose this rigid social structure to be 'physically removed.'"
We all can guess exactly what he means by "physically removed."
Call me an alarmist, but I can see it coming. I've said time and again that once they get tired of rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants, they're going to turn on gay people (they're already doing it to trans people). They will trot out the old lies that we're child molesters and "groomers" and deviants and encourage violence against us and eventually start rounding us up; look what happened to the Japanese Americans during World War II, except I don't think they'll stop at just interning us.
Really, this is figuring into my attempt to decide whether it would be better (safer?) to stay in a historically well-identified "gayborhood" or keep the house and try to live quietly in a dispersed community where there is no identifiable "gayborhood."
When they start rounding us up or at least charging us with spurious crimes, I'm going to get a lot of the best scotch I can and all the pills I can.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on June 17, 2025, 10:34:09 am ---Did you find out anything, Serious? From the preview email I get, it looks like this week's issue might be a good one.
--- End quote ---
Yes, thanks for asking! They're supposedly fixing whatever went wrong with my subscription, hopefully immediately, and will extend it by the number of missing issues, but said they can't promise to send me the old issues, because they don't always have adequate supply, I guess. I can still access them online, of course, so I should go through this thread and see what people have commented on that I'd really like to read. Anything stand out in your memory as a must-read?
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on June 19, 2025, 05:23:58 pm ---Call me an alarmist, but I can see it coming. I've said time and again that once they get tired of rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants, they're going to turn on gay people (they're already doing it to trans people). They will trot out the old lies that we're child molesters and "groomers" and deviants and encourage violence against us and eventually start rounding us up; look what happened to the Japanese Americans during World War II, except I don't think they'll stop at just interning us.
--- End quote ---
Well, I'm probably a bit naive and I realize these things aren't always unpredictable -- I think the ruthless stuff ICE is doing is surprising even MAGA types -- but so far I don't see huge red flags for gay people. Trans people, of course, are a different thing. I think people find transgenderism confusing and icky and nonscientific and threatening and possibly fake and all kinds of other things. But I feel like they're much better at accepting gay people because they can relate to them in most ways. Gay people want to marry the ones they love, for instance, and straight people can understand that desire. I haven't heard anyone say anything overtly homophobic for a long time (if you don't count the fuss about drag queens and "grooming," which I suppose you probably should count).
I realize that when we started talking 20 years go (!!! I still can't get over that number), marriage equality, which wasn't even being widely called marriage equality yet, seemed extremely unlikely. And Matthew Shepard had been murdered just a few years before. And I live in a partisan bubble, of course, both socially and geographically. But nowadays I see same-sex marriage, for example, becoming so mainstreamed that average centrist people kind of casually accept it, even if they don't share it.
A guy I work with at the paper just became a columnist. He's smart and likable and knowledgeable and I think readers will probably enjoy his columns. A lot of them are about local government and things like that. In the one I just read, he casually mentions his husband. I'm sure lots of people -- myself included, tbh -- may pause over that and think about how shocking that simple offhand statement would have been throughout much of their lifetimes. But those people are, well, dying out, and in their place are young people who think nothing of homosexuality and are even pretty pro-trans and nonbinary (again, I'm basing this on what I've seen living in very blue city and not super red state, but it includes my experience a few years ago visiting a high school in a bland suburb for a story about a theater production and having *all but one* of the five or so students the teacher gathered for me to talk to identifying as they/them, or he/him when they did not look biologically male). So who knows. Trump did not win in a landslide, despite what his supporters like to think/say. That said, though, he and Stephen Miller are using terrifying policies in attempts to suppress choices they don't like and keep Americans for objecting to them. Today's scare was seeing a reference to their sending military to Los Angeles, "the first of the blue cities" where supposedly they will try to do the same.
Jeff Wrangler:
Nevertheless, as far as same-sex marriage goes, the Fundies have Obergefell in their sights, and with the current make-up of SCOTUS. ... The odious CT has already said that decision should be revisited.
serious crayons:
Yeah? Hey CT, if you're so eager to turn back the clock on Supreme Court decisions, how would you like it if we revisit Loving vs. the State of Virginia!
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