Once a political position becomes fashionable, it has already won

Edit: I feel like this post is badly written and doesn’t get its point across. As soon as I finish the post I’m working on right now, I’m going to try to fix it. My apologies for any confusion and delay.

I observed a decade or so ago that support for gay marriage had become very popular among the young and fashionable. At that point, I stopped worrying about the issue, on the assumption that support would soon tip 50%.

I never expected trans people to get much popular support, simply because there are so few of them. Facebook and Twitter have proven me wrong, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the issue fell off people’s radar screens. Trans folk are still considered pretty ‘weird’ by a lot of people.

“Feminism” and “Critical Race Theory” had become quite popular on the internet and among the cool people (at least, by my standards of cool), and have only become more prominent.

Racial issues I expect to continue being fairly high-profile, while feminist issues will remain largely in the background (by which I mean that no one stages large street protests over murdered women.)

Illegal immigration seems like an issue with high potential to become the next big popular thing, especially since it can ride on anti-racism’s coat tails and increasing numbers of young people in this country are people whose families immigrated from Mexico in the first place.

What do you think? What will be the next big thing?

 

On an unrelated note, I just realized that the “pus” in platypus is from the Greek for foot, eg, octopus, not from Latin, so the plural platypi is pseudo-Latin. I’d go with “platypodes”, since podes is the plural of pus, but then no one would have any idea what I’m saying.

The Rise of Atheism

Millennials increasingly are driving growth of ‘nones’
“Millennials increasingly are driving growth of ‘nones’”

 

While I question the data on Catholics, the overall numbers look accurate. This is not surprising–frankly, anyone who is surprised has been living under a rock–though I do have to constantly remind myself that even in my generational cohort, over 50% of people claim to be religious, because I find the notion vaguely unbelievable. (Even when I was a kid attending church, I noticed that my fellow “religious” kids didn’t act like they really believed in all of this god stuff, so how religious can all of those people really be?)

The interesting part is simply the phenomenon: society is becoming drastically less religious (even members of the older cohorts are becoming less religious over time.) (I suppose the other interesting part is the insulting hostility of the comments on the piece toward religion/religious people. Is it really necessary to constantly insult the majority of people in the country?)

The big question: WHY?

(I have my own theories, but I’d love to hear yours.)