It's been on my mind recently that the global hope of lgbt people is China.
That's gonna sound weird to anyone that thinks China is anti-lgbt, but the reality is that only exists among the old and they're phasing out. China's trajectory for lgbt issues is likely to be positive, because China's trajectory for PEOPLE issues is positive.
The west is in decline, and with it the marginalised groups are being scapegoated as targets to distract the population from their declining conditions. Lgbt issues are likely to deteriorate across the west as the decline continues, as are other issues such as migrants and race.
China will represent a population of 1.4 billion people in ascendancy and with a positive trend towards these issues I believe it's going to eventually become the place with the best conditions along similar lines to Cuba. It will represent the largest block of lgbt people in the world, and the lgbt people of China will become the largest advocate of lgbt conditions elsewhere in the world.
This hasn't happened yet, but the trends are there. It's coming in the longterm.
The tl;dr version is that by the 80's the GDR was becoming aware that the marginalized status of queer people made them vulnerable targets for blackmail and exploitation by Western powers in what they termed the "political misuse of homosexuals". A kind of goofy phrase, but it does capture the nature of the situation, as the legal and social status of queerness in the GDR meant that Western agents could force queer people to become informants or assets under the threat of forcibly outing them and ruining their lives (something that the West does everywhere I would imagine, the most salient example currently being how Zionists do this to Palestinians). The SED ordered the Stasi to develop a solution and they ended up proposing several. Many of them being the usual ramping up of surveillance (as at the time queer people were ironically organizing alongside the church), but one suggestion was to "find resolution[s] to homosexuals’ humanitarian problems." And so they literally just did that, almost over night. They launched massive education campaigns, opened up state-run queer clubs in major cities, allowed personals for queer people to be run in newspapers, legalized queer marriage, allowed state-funded gender transitions, allowed queer people to adopt. This all happened around 1985 or so, which meant that for a brief period the GDR was (legally) the most progressive place in the world on queer issues. Culture obviously lags behind considerably, so it was no paradise, but there was a significant effort by the government to combat that with education about queerness for the wider public. Unfortunately, pretty much all of this was swept away when the GDR was basically annexed by the FRG, and modern Germany still, almost 40 years later, has not come close to what the GDR offered to queer people.
The author is a bit of a lib, but here's some further reading if you're interested: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/gay-liberation-behind-iron-curtain/
This is the funniest reason to support LGBT rights. In every single other country national security is one of the reasons that gay people are oppressed. There is something deeply satisfying to me about supporting gay rights for material reasons.
This is like the opposite of playing crusader kings 2. In that game its not optimal to make withcraft or homosexuality legal because it makes it so easy to blackmail people.
If the AI were better at using blackmail in 3, it might still be smart to legalize things, because you can use hooks to force fellow vassals to join factions. If you had a player vassal, for example, you might want to legalize a lot of stuff to remove their leverage.
Yeah I'd imagine the meta for single player and multiplayer are super different. I'd imagine intruige in general is way more important in multiplayer. In single player you can basically brute force your way to victory with stewardship and either marshal or learning occasionally.
I've been thinking about this comment for a couple days now. It strikes me that the capitalists copied the gdr in dealing with their growing discontent lgbt communities when queers started organising into the Gay Liberation Front and dozens of other orgs, all of which were radical and full of communists.
The capitalists gave concessions to the lgbt movement, partially integrating them into society and improving their conditions in order to deradicalise and coopt the movement. This worked rather fantastically, as the lgbt orgs and movement and Pride events are firmly lib now, lacking radicalism.
As the conditions for trans people continue to decrease I am increasingly coming to the belief that creating ML trans people will eventually lead to concessions and integration in order to deradicalise the movement. It's not going to produce communism, but it would produce better conditions for trans people. It's a historically proven viable model for generating results for lgbt people.
They aren't that bothered about queer activism, it's not enough to generate results. They ARE bothered by society being threatened by queer MLs.
This is the strongest argument I have seen for convincing people to actually actively learn and become MLs for the purposes of improving the conditions of lgbt people.
I want this to happen, and also, it reads like Americans who believe that gen z and millennials will save the country. Obviously there's a difference between the nazi state of America and China, but the former has taught me to distrust generational hopes, including those in a different national/political contex
I think the important thing here is it's not just generational but institutional. China HAS improved its protections over time and it is absolutely following medical science on trans people and building children-specific clinics rather than what the west is doing which is going backwards. The direction in China is forwards while the direction in the west is backwards. Expecting these to cross over seems natural.
There are two main reasons you want to use specialist clinics for children. The first is primarily because children are more likely to have uncertainty about their identities. The second is because children are developing organisms and have very different bloodtest results depending on what age they are and what part of their development they're in. You need psychological clinicians specially trained in the uncertainty these children have and how to address it without leading them (and deal with parents too) and you need specialists in child development to handle all the weirdness you can get with children at different ages if you're administering something like puberty blockers to hold off their development until they're at an age to decide on transition.
This is fairly good recent research if you're interested in recommended clinical guidelines: https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2024/04/09/archdischild-2023-326500
Another less talked about reason in my opinion is that it puts all these people that have the same problem in close proximity which means they inevitably meet other parents and other children dealing with it. This has positive outcomes in terms of constructing support networks.
It's been on my mind recently that the global hope of lgbt people is China.
That's gonna sound weird to anyone that thinks China is anti-lgbt, but the reality is that only exists among the old and they're phasing out. China's trajectory for lgbt issues is likely to be positive, because China's trajectory for PEOPLE issues is positive.
The west is in decline, and with it the marginalised groups are being scapegoated as targets to distract the population from their declining conditions. Lgbt issues are likely to deteriorate across the west as the decline continues, as are other issues such as migrants and race.
China will represent a population of 1.4 billion people in ascendancy and with a positive trend towards these issues I believe it's going to eventually become the place with the best conditions along similar lines to Cuba. It will represent the largest block of lgbt people in the world, and the lgbt people of China will become the largest advocate of lgbt conditions elsewhere in the world.
This hasn't happened yet, but the trends are there. It's coming in the longterm.
Desperately, relentlessly shouting at the remaining AES states to learn the lessons the GDR did in it's final years
what are the lessons the GDR learned to be more inclusive?
The tl;dr version is that by the 80's the GDR was becoming aware that the marginalized status of queer people made them vulnerable targets for blackmail and exploitation by Western powers in what they termed the "political misuse of homosexuals". A kind of goofy phrase, but it does capture the nature of the situation, as the legal and social status of queerness in the GDR meant that Western agents could force queer people to become informants or assets under the threat of forcibly outing them and ruining their lives (something that the West does everywhere I would imagine, the most salient example currently being how Zionists do this to Palestinians). The SED ordered the Stasi to develop a solution and they ended up proposing several. Many of them being the usual ramping up of surveillance (as at the time queer people were ironically organizing alongside the church), but one suggestion was to "find resolution[s] to homosexuals’ humanitarian problems." And so they literally just did that, almost over night. They launched massive education campaigns, opened up state-run queer clubs in major cities, allowed personals for queer people to be run in newspapers, legalized queer marriage, allowed state-funded gender transitions, allowed queer people to adopt. This all happened around 1985 or so, which meant that for a brief period the GDR was (legally) the most progressive place in the world on queer issues. Culture obviously lags behind considerably, so it was no paradise, but there was a significant effort by the government to combat that with education about queerness for the wider public. Unfortunately, pretty much all of this was swept away when the GDR was basically annexed by the FRG, and modern Germany still, almost 40 years later, has not come close to what the GDR offered to queer people.
The author is a bit of a lib, but here's some further reading if you're interested: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/gay-liberation-behind-iron-curtain/
This is the funniest reason to support LGBT rights. In every single other country national security is one of the reasons that gay people are oppressed. There is something deeply satisfying to me about supporting gay rights for material reasons.
This is like the opposite of playing crusader kings 2. In that game its not optimal to make withcraft or homosexuality legal because it makes it so easy to blackmail people.
If the AI were better at using blackmail in 3, it might still be smart to legalize things, because you can use hooks to force fellow vassals to join factions. If you had a player vassal, for example, you might want to legalize a lot of stuff to remove their leverage.
Yeah I'd imagine the meta for single player and multiplayer are super different. I'd imagine intruige in general is way more important in multiplayer. In single player you can basically brute force your way to victory with stewardship and either marshal or learning occasionally.
I've been thinking about this comment for a couple days now. It strikes me that the capitalists copied the gdr in dealing with their growing discontent lgbt communities when queers started organising into the Gay Liberation Front and dozens of other orgs, all of which were radical and full of communists.
The capitalists gave concessions to the lgbt movement, partially integrating them into society and improving their conditions in order to deradicalise and coopt the movement. This worked rather fantastically, as the lgbt orgs and movement and Pride events are firmly lib now, lacking radicalism.
As the conditions for trans people continue to decrease I am increasingly coming to the belief that creating ML trans people will eventually lead to concessions and integration in order to deradicalise the movement. It's not going to produce communism, but it would produce better conditions for trans people. It's a historically proven viable model for generating results for lgbt people.
They aren't that bothered about queer activism, it's not enough to generate results. They ARE bothered by society being threatened by queer MLs.
This is the strongest argument I have seen for convincing people to actually actively learn and become MLs for the purposes of improving the conditions of lgbt people.
deleted by creator
I want this to happen, and also, it reads like Americans who believe that gen z and millennials will save the country. Obviously there's a difference between the nazi state of America and China, but the former has taught me to distrust generational hopes, including those in a different national/political contex
I think the important thing here is it's not just generational but institutional. China HAS improved its protections over time and it is absolutely following medical science on trans people and building children-specific clinics rather than what the west is doing which is going backwards. The direction in China is forwards while the direction in the west is backwards. Expecting these to cross over seems natural.
Children specific clinics sounds interesting, any resources or could you explain the difference in approach?
There are two main reasons you want to use specialist clinics for children. The first is primarily because children are more likely to have uncertainty about their identities. The second is because children are developing organisms and have very different bloodtest results depending on what age they are and what part of their development they're in. You need psychological clinicians specially trained in the uncertainty these children have and how to address it without leading them (and deal with parents too) and you need specialists in child development to handle all the weirdness you can get with children at different ages if you're administering something like puberty blockers to hold off their development until they're at an age to decide on transition.
This is fairly good recent research if you're interested in recommended clinical guidelines: https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2024/04/09/archdischild-2023-326500
Another less talked about reason in my opinion is that it puts all these people that have the same problem in close proximity which means they inevitably meet other parents and other children dealing with it. This has positive outcomes in terms of constructing support networks.
Certainly true, I believe that’s the difference in the situations. We’ll have to wait to see
I hope you're right
(though I'd like it if LGBT+ wasn't so vulnerable in the west too, why can't we have both?!)