Why this post? Because one of the few problems with nested-thread commenting systems is that you eventually reach a point where new comments are in columns so thin they can barely accommodate a word per line. And that's what is starting to happen here so I'm moving my replies to KN@PPSTER, and Keith Preston can either follow or not, as is his wont. The Preston comment elements to which I am replying are in block quote:
“While I'd say 3.5% is a little low for actual LGBT folks,”
I'm just going by what the data drawn from the most credible studies on this question show. It's long been claimed, at least since Kinsey, that homosexuals make up ten percent of the population. But more recent and more methodologically sound studies place the figure at about a third that. Maybe the more recent data is wrong, maybe it's not. But that's what it shows.
I am similarly skeptical of Kinsey's claims (or at least of the usual interpretations of his data). But there's a pretty big gap between 3.5% and 10%, and the 3.5% number refers only to "homosexuals," not to bisexuals, trans-sexuals and the "Q" that's recently started appearing at the end of LGBTQ to represent other "queers" of various sorts.
I'm not really trying to belabor this, but I'll restate my premise: You have claimed that one reason it's not smart to focus on e.g. "gay rights" is that it's a small percentage of the population involved. I think the population proper is larger than you think it is AND THEN there's the whole "affected" thing. LGBTQ folks have parents. They have siblings. Some of them have children. They have friends. They have acquaintances. They have co-religionists. They have allies.
So to the extent that you are strategically writing off LGBTQ-related issues based on size of population affected, I'll once again state that I think that the other group which you regard as strategically significant is a much smaller group, both in core group (e.g. I think that actual racial/ethnic "separatists" compose significantly less than 3.5% of the population) and in size of group "affected" (specifically in the US, I think that racial/ethnic separatism has permanently lost most of its actual and potential appeal to those beyond its handful of hardcore activists).
I don’t much care about the state of US politics at present. I orient myself towards where I think things will be 30-40 years from now. By that time the "liberals"” of today will be the ostensible conservatives, and the future liberals will be hard leftists. Imagine an America of 30 years from now where the conservatives are similar to today’s Obama Democrats, and the liberals are like the present day academic left, the US Green Party, or the Scandinavian states. Imagine a regime of this type with control over America's military-industrial complex and police state (which may well be much larger by then). That's the likely future of American government. Meanwhile the economy will continue to go down the tubes, and class polarization will increase. The latter will be brought about through a combination of state policy, overall economic deterioration, and large scale immigration from poor regions.
This explains a lot of our differences. I've already publicly predicted that the existing political system will have collapsed by 30 years from now (in the US, definitely; the cracks also seem to be widening in the "world order" generally, such that I'm comfortable predicting the collapse of the Westphalian nation-state as a global paradigm within the same timeframe).
So while I can see why you might think in terms of what groups to try to cobble together into an alliance to effect revolution at that point, I'm operating on the premise that the revolution is coming regardless of what we do, and coming well before you expect it. Thus I'm thinking in terms of what that post-revolutionary world will look like. And I'm more interested in doing my little part of making that world than in trying to put together "strategic alliances" that I consider neither necessary nor desirable.
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