Cannot emphasize enough that Kamala's answer about trans healthcare in prisons was the most moderate acceptable answer, and opposition evinces either a weird torturous cruelty towards prisoners or a belief that trans care is basically optional.
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The law is that trans people are not discriminated against. I would have preferred a full-throated defense, but the answer she gave was essentially unassailable and still managed to piss off the Chaits of the world.
There's a perfectly usable moderate answer that the Republicans use whenever they're confronted with unpopular positions: "well, we'll look into that" or "yes, I've heard your concerns, we'll measure the harms" handwaving BS while still planning to do the full nine yards while they're in office.
They think that it’s an optional set of cosmetic treatments for delusional people who should be put in a padded cell and given electroshock. And so they see this as “they get freak plastic surgery for being insane people who also committed crimes, AND making them feminine (and thus degenerate)”
I always felt like "I will follow the law" was a very clever rhetorical sleight of hand being that the law under Biden was that trans people are the gender we say we are and we should be given what we need on the Medicare dime.
"Look we just need to feed some people to the bigotry Moloch" is a position that one could entertain. But if that's your position, say it with your fucking chest.
also some of this is the game — like even with left candidates we're not running on open borders, we are running on slowly improving the immigration system because that's the fewest number of people we can feed to bigotry moloch while remaining electable
The thing with chait is that he's a transphobe and a Democrat. He wants to be able to stay as those two things, so he uses arguments about tactics to justify his bigotry
So what? How many democrats used to be against mixed race marriages? Gays in the military? Etc, etc. Some people are going to be behind the times on their ‘liberal’ values. People like Chait treat public opinion as set in stone, instead of something that will change when their party sets the tone.
Very few of them. Even Chait himself didn't vote based on trans issues. The thing is, it's currently possibly to be a transphobe and a Democrat and if you made it impossible to be both you'd better say least have a sense of how much support you'll lose and instead of claiming it's a rounding error.
nah you can just change people's minds. around the same percentage used to oppose gay marriage, and before that interracial marriage. political parties aren't supposed to just follow the whims of their voters. sometimes they need to stake out a position and say "these are our values."
Just circling back to this. I think the reason Kristol has come down here and Chait on the other side of this question is that Kristol is a fanatical believer in some vision of American democracy. Chait is just a dinner-parties writer. https://bsky.app/profile/billkristolbulwark.bsky.social/post/3licop6x5b225
after decades of being able to set our watches by the opposite of whatever he said, coming to often feel strong agreement with bill kristol is one of the most disorienting developments of the past few years
Kristol supported the Iraq War because he believed in spreading American democratic capitalism at the point of a sword. Chait supported it because he hates those annoying college kids. Both suck shit, but the distinction between them is how you get here.
Also a lot of those anti-Iraq War paleocons and libertarians turned out to be Nazis because it was the idea of spreading democracy (a thing they hate everywhere) that turned them off, not killing brown people (a thing they love).
On point! I think it's a hard pill for many people to swallow, that some of the (reckless, criminal, incompetent, destructive) Iraq War support came from a genuinely earnest place
Back when the Iraq War started I thought the Weekly Standard crowd had some nefarious hidden reason for their war advocacy but now I wonder if they were just naive about how to spread democracy
I think their beliefs are complicated and contradictory, and riven with racism. But I think their belief that what they were trying to do was spreading democracy was a genuinely held belief.
I mean, I was against the war, but that Sadam was a monster we were responsible for did have a certain resonance. Democracy seems to be a bit hard, too easy to be one person one vote one time.
I felt like I was taking crazy pills when people characterized that answer as throwing trans people under the bus, given that the law she said she'd follow was one that supported transpeople, which she & Biden helped pass.
It was a substantively correct answer that also shied away from defending trans medical care on the merits. But like, fine, the important thing is that she defend the law.
Trump spent a fortune to convince people that she supported the genital mutilation of children. Choosing to not give them a sound bite is entirely reasonable.
Standing firm on your position with less enthusiasm than some people want to see is not throwing anyone under the bus.
Yeah I wasn't fond of her campaign dropping the trans merch from Biden's campaign, but I knew she was on my side and I knew she was doing it to win, not because she's secretly conservative or anything.
Biden being an old white Catholic man made it difficult to portray him as a radical, even when he did something like respond to a question about how many genders there were with, "at least three."
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For some reason, sexual sins are the worst sin to most people, so that’s why Trump can get away with his things.
but you got to be damn sure its a limit case
we have not just limited evidence it's the case with trans rights we have lots of evidence the other way
The difference now is that a lot of folks missed the Bulwark turn in 2015, and he's become a true Poaster in the last year.
https://bsky.app/profile/sababausa.bsky.social/post/3le5c6pj2hk2o
Standing firm on your position with less enthusiasm than some people want to see is not throwing anyone under the bus.
Unfortunately, I think the "burn it all down" politics are too popular in the online Lefty LGBTQ echo chamber and you get your protest voters.