Tumgik
#Moral Panic
charliejaneanders · 4 months
Text
“It definitely broke our spirits,” said Brittany Harris, 17, a junior and the co-president of the club, when she heard that the board didn’t want to accept the grant that students had worked on for weeks.
LGBTQ teens won a grant for their school. Adults sent the money back. (Now no longer paywalled!)
19K notes · View notes
catwoman-lover · 11 months
Text
The hush around the murder of Jordan Neely is eerie. A white man murdered a poor Black man for expressing frustration, bystanders failed to intervene, and the NYPD let the murderer go without arrest or charges.
There should be widespread outrage right now. Instead, there were a couple small protests.
I’m terrified, wondering, if this passes by with such a subdued response, what’s next?
1K notes · View notes
quasi-normalcy · 1 year
Text
What bugs me about the transphobic moral panic is that it very blatantly has absolutely nothing to do with actual trans people. Everything is rotten, trying to fix it would inconvenience people with money and power, and so they select an unpopular minority group who's recently been the subject of increased media prominence to be a lightning rod for public rage in lieu of actually trying to improve anything. And millions of people who should know better--who *would* know better if they sat down and thought about it for five minutes-- just mindlessly go along with it because, when you have a boot on your face, stomping on someone else feels like power.
500 notes · View notes
lizardsfromspace · 3 months
Text
Today I learned (via someone asking about a commercial that's not documented anywhere else) about the Murder Is Not Entertainment Alert by the organization Parents of Murdered Children
Which like. I don't want to be too harsh here. But it's bizarre. I thought they were criticizing insensitive portrayals of violence against children or something, but there's apparently been a group protesting EVERYTHING with a murder in it since 1993 (though the alerts cut off in 2019 - their last target was Quibi)? From murder mystery parties at random companies, to commercials where someone reads a murder mystery novel, to violent video games (oddly their biggest target was the fighting game Project Justice?) to "Goodbye Earl", to fury over sympathy for death row prisoners to 9/11 documentaries having 9/11 footage in them to Disney's Haunted Mansion (bc the ghosts are dead). One of the weirdest moral guardians I've ever seen
Also what are they talking about here. There was a commercial where someone was stabbed for Amy Grant???
Tumblr media
136 notes · View notes
free-if-we-want-it · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
NOTHING BUT THIEVES performing "Impossible" (Live in L·Obs, FR - Jan. 2021)
54 notes · View notes
Text
We are witnessing a state-created moral panic backlash against calls to defund the police that rivals anything we talk about in similar terms and will have similarly dire consequences for the population. https://www.curbed.com/2023/06/atlanta-cop-city-design-architecture-tactical-village.html
192 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
By: Colin Wright
Published: Oct 2, 2023
On September 25, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) announced that they were cancelling a panel discussion titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology,” originally scheduled as part of their annual conference in Toronto from November 15–19. The cancellation and subsequent response by the two organizations shows the extent to which gender ideology has captured academic anthropology.
The panel would have featured six female scientists, specializing in biology and anthropology, to address their profession’s growing denial of biological sex as a valid and relevant category. While terminological confusion surrounding the distinction between sex and gender roles has been a persistent issue within anthropology for decades, the total refusal of some to recognize sex as a real biological variable is a more recent phenomenon. The panel organizers, eager to facilitate an open discussion among anthropologists and entertain diverse perspectives on a contentious issue, considered the AAA/CASCA conference an optimal venue to host such a conversation.
The organizations accepted the “Let’s Talk About Sex” panel without incident on July 13, and planned to feature it alongside other panels including those on politically oriented subjects, such as “Trans Latinx Methodologies,” “Exploring Activist Anthropology,” and “Reimagining Anthropology as Restorative Justice.” Elizabeth Weiss, a professor of anthropology at San José State University, was one of the slated panelists. She had intended to discuss the significance in bio-archaeology and forensic anthropology of using skeletal remains to establish a decedent’s sex. While a 2018 article in Discover titled “Skeletal Studies Show Sex, Like Gender, Exists Along a Spectrum” reached different conclusions, Weiss planned to discuss how scientific breakthroughs have made determining the sex of skeletal remains a more exact science. Her presentation was to be moderate; she titled it “No Bones About It: Skeletons Are Binary; People May Not Be,” and conceded in her abstract the growing need in forensics to “to ensure that skeletal finds are identified by both biological sex and their gender identity” due to “the current rise in transitioning individuals and their overrepresentation as crime victims.”
Despite having already approved the panel, the presidents of the AAA (Ramona Pérez) and CASCA (Monica Heller) unexpectedly issued a joint letter on September 25 notifying the “Let’s Talk About Sex” presenters that their panel was cancelled. They claimed that the panel’s subject matter conflicted with their organizations’ values, jeopardized “the safety and dignity of our members,” and eroded the program’s “scientific integrity.” They further asserted the panel’s ideas (i.e., that sex is a real and important biological variable) would “cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.” To ensure that similar discussions would not be approved in the future, the AAA/CASCA vowed to “undertake a major review of the processes associated with vetting sessions at our annual meetings.”
The following day, the panelists issued a response letter, expressing their disappointment that the AAA and CASCA presidents had “chosen to forbid scholarly dialogue” on the topic. They rejected the “false accusation” that supporting the “continued use of biological sex categories (e.g., male and female; man and woman) is to imperil the safety of the LGBTQI community.” The panelists called “particularly egregious” the AAA/CASCA’s assertion that the panel would compromise the program’s “scientific integrity.” They noted that, ironically, the AAA/CASCA’s “decision to anathematize our panel looks very much like an anti-science response to a politicized lobbying campaign.”
I spoke with Weiss, who expressed her frustration over the canceled panel and the two presidents’ stifling of honest discussion about sex. She was concerned about the continual shifting of goalposts on the issue:
We used to say there’s sex, and gender. Sex is biological, and gender is not. Then it’s no, you can no longer talk about sex. Sex and gender are one, and separating the two makes you a transphobe, when of course it doesn’t. In anthropology and many topics, the goalposts are continuously moved. And, because of that, we need to stand up and say, “I’m not moving from my place unless there’s good scientific evidence that my place is wrong.” And I don’t think there is good scientific evidence that there are more than two sexes.
Weiss was not the only person to object. When I broke news of the cancellation on X, it immediately went viral. At the time of writing, my post has more than 2.4 million views, and the episode has ignited public outcry from individuals and academics across the political spectrum. Science writer Michael Shermer called the AAA and CASCA’s presidents’ letter “shameful” and an “utterly absurd blank slate denial of human nature.” Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and political science at Duke University, described it as “absolutely appalling.” Jeffrey Flier, the Harvard University distinguished service professor and former dean of the Harvard Medical School, viewed it as “a chilling declaration of war on scholarly controversy.” Even Elon Musk expressed his disbelief with a single word: “Wow.”
Despite the backlash, the AAA and CASCA have held firm. On September 28, the AAA posted a statement on its website titled “No Place For Transphobia in Anthropology: Session Pulled from Annual Meeting Program.” The statement reiterated the stance outlined in the initial letter, declaring the “Let’s Talk About Sex” panel an affront to its values and claiming that it endangered AAA members’ safety and lacked scientific rigor.
The AAA’s statement claimed that the now-canceled panel was at odds with their first ethical principle of professional responsibility: “Do no harm.” It likened the scuttled panel’s “gender critical scholarship” to the “race science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” the main goal of which was to “advance a ‘scientific’ reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups of people.” In this instance, the AAA argued, “those who exist outside a strict and narrow sex/gender binary” are being targeted.
Weiss remains unconvinced by this moral posturing. “If the panel was so egregious,” she asked, “why had it been accepted in the first place?”
The AAA also claimed that Weiss’s panel lacked “scientific integrity,” and that she and her fellow panelists “relied on assumptions that ran contrary to the settled science in our discipline.” The panelists, the AAA argued, had committed “one of the cardinal sins of scholarship” by “assum[ing] the truth of the proposition that . . . sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.” In fact, the AAA claimed, the panelists’ views “contradict scientific evidence” about sex and gender, since “[a]round the world and throughout history, there have always been people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy.”
There is much to respond to in this portion of AAA’s statement. First, it’s ironic for the organization to accuse scientists of committing the “cardinal sin” of “assuming the truth” of something, and then to justify cancelling those scientists’ panel on the grounds that the panelists refuse to accept purportedly “settled science.” Second, the panel was organized to discuss biological sex (i.e., the biology of males and females), not “gender roles”; pivoting from discussions of basic biology to murkier debates about sex-related social roles and expectations is a common tactic of gender ideologues. Third, the AAA’s argument that a person’s “gender role” might not “align neatly” with his or her reproductive anatomy implies the existence of normative behaviors for members of each sex. Indeed, this is a central tenet of gender ideology that many people dispute and warrants the kind of discussion the panel intended to provide.
The AAA’s statement made another faulty allegation, this time against Weiss for using “sex identification” instead of “sex estimation” when assessing the sex of skeletal remains. The AAA claimed that Weiss’s choice of terminology was problematic and unscholarly because it assumes a “determinative” process that “is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher.”
Weiss, however, rejects the AAA’s notion that the term “sex determination” is outdated or improper. She emphasized that “sex determination” is frequently used in the literature, as demonstrated in numerous contemporary anthropology papers, along with “sex estimation.” Weiss said, “I tend not to use the term ‘sex estimation’ because to estimate is usually associated with a numeric value; thus, I do use the term ‘age estimation.’ But just as ‘age estimation’ does not mean that there is no actual age of an individual and that biological age changes don’t exist, ‘sex estimation’ does not mean that there isn’t a biological sex binary.” She also contested the AAA’s claim that anthropologists’ use of “sex estimation” is meant to accommodate people who identify as transgender or non-binary. Rather, she said, “sex estimation” is used when “anthropologists are not 100 [percent] sure of their accuracy for a variety of reasons, including that the remains may be fragmented.” But as these methods improve—which was a focus of her talk—such “estimations” become increasingly determinative.
After making that unfounded allegation against Weiss, the AAA further embarrasses itself by claiming that “There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification,” and that sex and gender are “historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories.”
Each of these assertions is empirically false. An individual’s sex can be determined by observing their primary sex organs, or gonads, as these organs determine the type of gamete an individual can or would have the function to produce. The existence of a very rare subset of individuals with developmental conditions that make their sex difficult to assess does not substantiate the existence of a third sex. Sex is binary because are only two sexes, not because every human in existence is neatly classifiable. Additionally, while some organisms are capable of changing sex, humans are not among them. Therefore, the assertion that human sex is “dynamically mutable” is false.
Weiss appropriately highlights the “false equivalency” inherent in the claim that the existence of people with intersex conditions disproves the binary nature of sex. “People who are born intersex or with disorders of sex development are not nonbinary or transgender, they are individuals with medical pathologies,” she said. “We would not argue that because some people are born with polydactyly (extra fingers or toes), often seen in inbred populations, that you can’t say that humans have ten fingers and ten toes. It's an absurd conclusion.”
On September 29, the AAA posted a Letter of Support on its website, penned by anthropologists Agustin Fuentes, Kathryn Clancy, and Robin Nelson, endorsing the decision to cancel the “Let’s Talk About Sex” session. Again, the primary motivation cited was the panel’s opposition to the supposed “settled science” concerning sex. The authors disputed the panelists’ claim that the term “sex” was being supplanted by “gender” in anthropology, claiming instead that there is “massive work on these terms, and their entanglements and nuances.” They also reiterated the AAA’s false accusation that the term “sex determination” was problematic and outdated. Nonetheless, the canceled panel could have served as a prime venue to discuss these issues.
In response to these calls for censorship, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) issued an open letter to the AAA and CASCA. FIRE characterized the groups’ decision to cancel the panel as a “retreat” from their scientific mission, which “requires unwavering dedication to free inquiry and open dialogue.” It argued that this mission “cannot coexist with inherently subjective standards of ‘harm,’ ‘safety,’ and ‘dignity,’ which are inevitably used to suppress ideas that cause discomfort or conflict with certain political or ideological commitments.” FIRE implored the AAA and CASCA to “reconsider this decision and to recommit to the principles of intellectual freedom and open discourse that are essential to the organizations’ academic missions.” FIRE’s open letter has garnered signatures from nearly 100 academics, including Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Princeton University’s Robert P. George. FIRE invites additional academic faculty to add their names.
The initial letter and subsequent statement by the AAA/CASCA present a particularly jarring illustration of the undermining of science in the name of “social justice.” The organizations have embarrassed themselves yet lack the self-awareness to realize it. The historian of science Alice Dreger called the AAA and CASCA presidents’ use of the term “cardinal sin” appropriate “because Pérez and Heller are working from dogma so heavy it is worthy of the Vatican.” Indeed, they have fallen prey to gender ideologues, driven into a moral panic by the purported dangers of defending the existence of biological sex to people whose sex distresses them. The AAA/CASCA have determined that it is necessary not only to lie to these people about their sex but also to deceive the rest of us about longstanding, foundational, and universal truths about sex.
Science can advance only within a system and culture that values open inquiry and robust debate. The AAA and CASCA are not just barring a panel of experts with diverse and valid perspectives on biological sex from expressing their well-considered conclusions; they are denying conference attendees the opportunity to hear diverse viewpoints and partake in constructive conversations on a controversial subject. Such actions obstruct the path of scientific progress.
“When you move away from the truth, no good can come from it,” Weiss says. The AAA and CASCA would be wise to ponder that reality.
==
I miss the days when anti-science meant creationists with "Intelligent Design," flat Earthers, and Jenny McCarthy-style MMR anti-vaxers.
It's weird that archaeologists are now denying evolution and pretending not to know how babies are made. Looks like creationists aren't the only evolution-denial game in town any more.
128 notes · View notes
batwynn · 5 months
Text
Almost every day I think about that first post I saw a few years ago where someone decided that people enjoying the cuteness of otters needed to be destroyed for the sake of ‘reality’ and ‘facts’. The post was open from start to finish that they were telling you that otters did ‘horrible things’ because they wanted to ‘break the illusion’ or whatever. It was full of language and tone that implied or outright said that people were ‘stupid’ or ‘foolish’ for liking otters, and that they should be punished with this information. This fact. This fact that was a twisted form of humans applying their moral concepts on to wild animals, to begin with, but was also simply being put out in to the world to hurt people for liking that animal. And then I think about how everyone started sharing this ‘fact’, post after post sharing the same tone and language of punishment, of implied ‘stupidity’ for ‘not knowing’. People gleefully commented this ‘fact’ on thousands of otter picture posts, they posted it a million times on the otter fan facebooks, they made tiktoks, they hammered it in over and over again. Don’t like otters. Don’t think they’re cute. They’re Bad™️. You’re a Bad™️ person if you like them. And people genuinely believed that. I saw so many people genuinely hurt by this, who thought they were a bad person and needed to stop liking or sharing otter pictures. Or they’d add a little note at the bottom, ‘I know otters are Bad™️ but I still think they’re cute.’ And I can’t not think about how pointlessly fucked up and cruel that entire thing was from the start, and how manipulative and shitty it was. And how it spun out into the universe until even now, on an otter video posted earlier this year, there’s dozens of comments about how otters are Bad™️ because one person decided that this wild animal doing something that is repugnant to humans, the animal with no knowledge that this is Bad™️ or with malicious intent (because it’s a wild fucking animal), meant they needed to hurt and punish anyone who liked that animal. And, finally, that people were so afraid of being seen as morally wrong/Bad™️ that they destroyed their love for this animal on the word of some fucking rando online without stopping to look internally at their own moral compass and understanding of animal behavior.
138 notes · View notes
jstor · 1 year
Text
Some of the ridiculous things that we've collectively freaked out about in the past and the not-so-distant past: women wearing pants, rock and roll, bicycles, marihuana, "vocal fry"...
414 notes · View notes
therobotmonster · 1 month
Text
If you have something to add to the discussion, put it in a reblog.
And if you're making, or even backing up, an accusation, put your evidence in that reblog.
I will repeat this for the people in the back. Commenting in the tags was invented as a tradition back when the alert system on tumblr was very, very annoying. That has changed, it's now just tradition, and should be used where appropriate.
You can use it for dittos and attaboys and 'OMG I can't evens' and the like, but if you're trying to actually contribute to the conversation at hand, particularly if it's a serious issue, REBLOG like an adult.
I saw this on the recent Palworld thead:
Tumblr media
None of these accusations is supported or sourced, and I've made a separate post to explain why in depth on deepdreamnights. But what's relevant here is if you say something like this, you should be linking to your evidence, or at the very least making it a proper reblog so it can be involved in the discussion.
Tumblr media
It is your responsibility to check the veracity of claims that you pass on to others.
Really read over that post and then think back to John Green.
Or, just, you know, any moral panic in goddamn history.
Passing on rumors of wrongdoing, particularly when you "have no knowledge" of the situation, is irresponsible and potentially dangerous behavior. There's this attitude that if the issue is serious enough that the safeguards can be taken off and alarm bells rung. But that's backwards. The more serious the issue, the more effort should be put to verifying them correctly.
If you consider plagiarism a deeply important issue, then you should be more careful, not less, when passing on accusations of it. Doing otherwise isn't just a mistake, it's an ethical failing.
37 notes · View notes
silvermoon424 · 4 months
Text
It's always wild to me when I hear about the "Pokemon is literally demonic" Evangelical moral panic of the 90s/2000s. I grew up Catholic and despite Catholicism's MANY flaws hating Pokemon is not one of them. My Catholic parents happily embraced my and my brother's Pokemon fanaticism and the same was true of my classmates at my Catholic school.
Pokemon cards did get banned in my Catholic school though... because older kids were taking advantage of younger kids and pressuring them into bad trades. They were like "Pokemon may not be demonic, but it is causing playground scuffles so we gotta shut it down" lmao
42 notes · View notes
geekysteven · 5 months
Text
Tumblr media
50 notes · View notes
Text
The UK government is right now trying to ban trans women from using the same HOSPITAL WARDS as cis women, in the middle of a healthcare crisis where all wards are overstuffed and understaffed.
What the actual FUCK???
The health minister is on record saying it's only "wokery" that has led to trans and cis women (AND men!) to be allowed to use the same spaces IN THE HOSPITAL so far. (For context, his political party has been in power for the last 13 years... so would have overseen or been happy with that happening for this duration anyway... yet suddenly NOW it is a problem???)
I can't believe this is real life.
52 notes · View notes
movietonight · 9 months
Text
Another thing about Germany being overly eager to ban horror is that it's important to produce art that is gross and violent and scary. Horror allows us to deal with feelings like fear of the unknown, deep dark taboo desires or disgust in healthy ways. In a way horror is like children playing pretend when they're developing their brains.
When you read more about Monster Theory there's the whole idea that legends and rituals about monsters come from the need to have scapegoats and rituals that allow us to confront anything taboo. When there was a huge moral panic in the 80s about horror films some scholar were like wait a minute maybe it's actually healthy to watch horror films.
By banning anything disgusting, controversial, violent or scary we might actually be stunting our development. Yes this includes films you were told were just mindless torture porn. Yes even that one. Yes, even when it includes that topic. No, it can't all be "elevated horror". No you don't have to watch all of them.
54 notes · View notes
possumcollege · 7 months
Text
Tumblr media
What if girls E-bike to BOYS?
What if boys E-bike to DRUGS?
What if Communism gets an E-bike?
What if E-bikes make our children too fast to receive Christ's love?
42 notes · View notes
free-if-we-want-it · 8 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
74 notes · View notes