Guest post: You’re hostage to the integrity of those you let do your thinking
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Mile-high semi-free press.
They were unfamiliar with the concept of people who had pursued so-called sex-change drugs and surgeries but later regretted these interventions and sought care to help remedy the results.
You’ve taken one side of an issue, but haven’t researched the issue enough to realize its full ramifications and fallout? You’ve been reassured by reliable sources that the other side is made up entirely of genocidal, Nazi bigots, so you don’t have to listen to what they’re saying at all. That’s a good look for journalists. I guess this sort of thing is bound to happen when you outsource your ethics, morality, and values to “reliable sources”. Like that bartender. You’re hostage to the integrity and thoroughness of those you’re letting do your thinking for you. It’s all about quality control; if you never visit the factory, how can you be sure just what they’re putting in those cans with your name on them?
Here’s another thought: perhaps something they haven’t heard of before might make a good subject for, oh I don’t know, maybe A NEWSPAPER STORY? Maybe they’ve only been reading their own paper and that’s why they’re so ignorant
I said, because people aren’t getting the whole story. Worse, there’s a concerted effort to stifle discussion about detransition.
DINGDINGDINGDING! LOOK, A STORY NOT BEING TOLD! You work for NEWSPAPERS!!! PUT TWO AND TWO TOGETHER!!!!
If Paley and Cohn are not transphobes, why do people online accuse them of transphobia?
“If Joe Biden is not a baby-eating, glue-sniffing Communist, why do people online accuse him of being a baby-eating, glue-sniffing Communist?” Jesus, the question answers itself. Dig deeper, look further; it’s only YER GODDAMN JOB.
Also why does the bartender get to intervene in a discussion of that kind?…Who, in short, the fuck asked him?
Maybe they were doing the whole “Undercover Boss” or “The Prince and the Pauper” thing, and the supposed underling was actually secretly in charge of everything. He felt so passionately about the issue he was compelled to break cover to put the Evil TERF in her place.
Or, maybe the janitor wasn’t available.
He accused them of manufacturing…
Yes, Paley and Cohn invented the whole idea of so called “detransition” and hired crisis actors to play “detransitioners” complete with fake mastectomy scars.
…and profiting from controversy…
Yeah, and doctors offering “gender-affirming care” do it for free out of the kindness of their hearts. They only have the very best interests of their patients at heart and are very careful to screen them to ensure that only those very few people who actually need it are rushed into life-long medicalization given the life-saving treatment they so desperately need.
and accused me of trying to conceal this “fact.”
A trans activist upset by someone concealing facts?! HAHAHAHAHA, ha ha, hoheh. Well!. Oh that’s a good one! Your movement has declared reality itself to be “transphobic” and unmentionable, and you accuse someone else of suppressing facts! Wow. Are you altogether sure exactly which side of the bar you’re on? Sounds like you’ve been sampling a good few of the wares you’re supposed to be serving. Leave some for the paying customers!
Okay, so that’s why Nina and Corinna were photographed outside the DPC.
Wait….
Isn’t that the business model of journalism? Discovering, bringing to light, and discussing controversies, as a means to make money?
Does this not simply illustrate the point that the essential difference between truth and reliable sources is that the latter are socially constructed while the former is not? Did the postmodernism wars amount to anything more than (engineered) confusion over (strategic) ambiguity between the two concepts and endless examples of reliable sourcery in the service of contestation of political power?
The diagnostic of a reliable source was traditionally identified as fact checking, but now fact checking itself is being outsourced. Ultimately it’s turtles all the way down (Hawking/Russell) or meta-genies all the way up (Hofstadter).
PS No HTML tags this time round because I suspect I have worn out our host’s patience with fixing them for me.
This is a fantastic way of putting a phenomenon I have noticed multiple times among the set who spend a lot of time yelling on social media (primarily, though not exclusively, amongst the very progressive); even when you speak with these people face to face, *all they have* are digestible platitudes and bunk statistics and predigested logical jiu-jitsu designed to expose some kind of fallacy which means they win.
I have, once or twice, observed two such people conversing in person, and they could quite literally have been reading an already-written Facebook comment thread. I have also tried to speak with certain friends and acquaintances on some topics and received this mechanical non-thought for my troubles; I called this “having to listen to other people’s propaganda coming out of your mouth”, or something else similarly trite.
But it is exaclty the same kind of thought-death that religious fundamentalism brings, where every answer must be sifted from a Bible verse or a Koranic sura. The gender religion is still in its early days, however, and does not yet have a singular canonical text, so the doctrine is congealing in an ad-hoc manner before our eyes. This ad-hoc dogma is also being inscribed into law in several countries, even as the dogma itself shifts and evolves beneath our feet.
We have already seen, for example, the GRA in Britain and the strict medically-observed transition process in Germany be decried as transphobic (when, in their day, they were hailed as milestones of progress) which need to be replaced by so-called “self-ID” laws that both remove any barriers for declaring oneself of the opposite sex as well as compel the rest of the population to go along with this pantomime on pain of civil fines and, ultimately, terms in prison.
One wonders how the next generation of activists will decry these laws as transphobic, and which pre-baked nonthinking mantras they will use to justify superseding them with whatever horrors come next?