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In fact, now is exactly the time to double-down on it, for fear that otherwise it might drop out of the headlines or be put in perspective.īut there’s a second and far more serious function of upping these attacks, these “jokes”, at the present moment, a function with a dark history and potentially dangerous consequences. The first is obvious: every handwringing attack and “pronoun joke” aimed at trans people is intended to perpetuate their ongoing culture war campaign against trans rights, a profitable and potent line of attack which can’t be neglected just because of the distraction of geopolitical conflict. Their attacks on LGBTQ people, and especially on trans people, with tired jokes about pronouns and rainbow-coloured tanks serve other functions. But are any of these “commentators” actually making that point either? No, not really. To see the invasion of Ukraine as having any relevance to gender and sexual diversity in NATO military ranks would be an act of truly unhinged projection. Faced with the most serious conflict in Europe since the Balkan Wars, and maybe even since World War II, faced with a resurgent Russia pushing for regime change or occupation in its sovereign neighbours, faced with potential atrocities, faced with a new sanctions regime crippling the Russian economy, potentially catastrophic fuel shortages, tanking markets, global geopolitical realignment, they asked the big question: did trans people do this? Yet there was one hot take that I saw persistently sprouting up across much of the political spectrum, from wax cocaine drain Don Jr to former revolutionary communist, present clockwork contrarian and eternal forehead Brendan O´Neill. In fact, I think I was doing something similar, and it was only on reading a few more pieces from outside my usual ideological frame such as this interview with Anatol Lieven that I could begin to create a new body of knowledge with which to understand how much I knew, and how much I didn’t know.
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If it appears I’m mocking this habit, I’m not, or, only the more extreme outliers. Is the Russian Federation a communist state ? Is Ukraine George Floyd ? Is Boris Johnson Winston Churchill ? Are NATO critics Neville Chamberlain ? Is Putin Voldemort ? If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We all have our lenses through which we read the world, and it’s natural that when something new occurs that sits outside our frames of reference, we try to apply our ideological frames to understand it - usually unsuccessfully.
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This is the exhausting economy of the always-online and the internet-poisoned, a toxic mix of the need for attention, novel positions with which to rise above the crowds, and a sludge of irony and sincerity. So instead we see a mixture of good faith, bad faith and ugly faith attempts to read the crisis, as it were, from your standard misguided UK/Ireland or US/Cuba comparisons to a flurry of infographics, from teenage-bedroom-edgelord-Stalinists (I know whereof I speak) to “I could fix him” Putin-mommies to “Is this an aesthetic?” to “ my only cultural reference is Harry Potter/Marvel/Star Wars ” to the new worst thing on the internet, NFT bros. The wise thing to do, if you are uninformed, is to listen, not speak, but let's give ourselves a break - there is no real dopamine rush from observation online. The political landscape of other countries has always been used in the West for a proxy territory to hash out domestic politics, especially in the moments after crisis breaks, when informed knowledge is a little thin on the ground, like now.