The interesting question is what measures will pay off best in the long run.
Actually lying about the science might blow up later. On the other hand, saying that we don’t know what causes gender dysmorphia, but it begins very young, is not a matter of choice, and gets relieved by living as the gender that feels right to the dysmorphic person—and living in that way is not harmful-- is harder to say forcefully than to say “born that way”.
Yeah, if I’m talking to someone from who I can assume rationality, I’ll say all that (and that the sexist gender beliefs and patriarchal power structures that prevent trans people just flipping across in high school like it was a mere incidental fact, like hair colour, should be destroyed anyway for over-determined reasons). But I have no intention to give truth to enemies. Enemy is defined as: a person whose unshakeable beliefs harm the people I care about. If a lie makes them back off, lying is good.
Once your cause has embraced the dark arts how can you be sure what you’re doing is actually saving people from hurting? Are you sure the evidence for this belief, or the evidence that convinced you to join that cause in the first place wasn’t just another ‘pious lie’?
We’re willing to do any damn thing to find a sense of closure, of vindication. We don’t actually care to reduce evil, since we’re subconsciously quite aware that it would require us to take unacceptable measures. To enforce a ruthless order and violate the sanctity of the individual, to disarm the weak and make them submit to their fate. Many here have been hinting darkly at this for a long time. The reactionaries are completely correct in their bleak worldview. There is no deliverance. Good intentions are a self-righteous delusion, in a sense. Suffering can only be minimized by monstrous and inhuman policies. Someone will always scream and scream behind locks, walls and chains, behind a facade of normality. Finding happiness in slavery is the best that most people can count on.
I think the former paragraphs here presume that politics is the domain of deluded do-gooders, rather than people (including those at the bottom of the heap) fighting self-consciously for their interests (or the interests of a broader alliance, TDT and all that.) It doesn’t strike me as hypocrisy to throw one’s enemies into the gulag, or to decieve them in warfare, even as you attempt to avoid the gulag and see through deceptions yourself.
We’re willing to do any damn thing that saves the actual people that are hurting.
If this upsets you, I will enjoy schadenfreude.
The interesting question is what measures will pay off best in the long run.
Actually lying about the science might blow up later. On the other hand, saying that we don’t know what causes gender dysmorphia, but it begins very young, is not a matter of choice, and gets relieved by living as the gender that feels right to the dysmorphic person—and living in that way is not harmful-- is harder to say forcefully than to say “born that way”.
Yeah, if I’m talking to someone from who I can assume rationality, I’ll say all that (and that the sexist gender beliefs and patriarchal power structures that prevent trans people just flipping across in high school like it was a mere incidental fact, like hair colour, should be destroyed anyway for over-determined reasons). But I have no intention to give truth to enemies. Enemy is defined as: a person whose unshakeable beliefs harm the people I care about. If a lie makes them back off, lying is good.
Be cautious. Be extremely cautious.
How do you tell whether someone has unshakable beliefs?
Once your cause has embraced the dark arts how can you be sure what you’re doing is actually saving people from hurting? Are you sure the evidence for this belief, or the evidence that convinced you to join that cause in the first place wasn’t just another ‘pious lie’?
We’re willing to do any damn thing to find a sense of closure, of vindication. We don’t actually care to reduce evil, since we’re subconsciously quite aware that it would require us to take unacceptable measures.
To enforce a ruthless order and violate the sanctity of the individual, to disarm the weak and make them submit to their fate. Many here have been hinting darkly at this for a long time.
The reactionaries are completely correct in their bleak worldview. There is no deliverance. Good intentions are a self-righteous delusion, in a sense. Suffering can only be minimized by monstrous and inhuman policies. Someone will always scream and scream behind locks, walls and chains, behind a facade of normality. Finding happiness in slavery is the best that most people can count on.
...For fuck’s sake, donate to SIAI.
I think the former paragraphs here presume that politics is the domain of deluded do-gooders, rather than people (including those at the bottom of the heap) fighting self-consciously for their interests (or the interests of a broader alliance, TDT and all that.) It doesn’t strike me as hypocrisy to throw one’s enemies into the gulag, or to decieve them in warfare, even as you attempt to avoid the gulag and see through deceptions yourself.