11:38pm May 19, 2014

In general beware of this kind of thinking:

“If we allowed _______ to be true, then _______ would by definition also have to be true, and then ______ would have to happen, and ______ would be a terrible thing to happen, so we can’t allow ______ to be true, even if it kind of is.”

Or anything that resembles that.

That’s not thinking about the real world. That’s thinking about ideas, and putting ideas together without bringing them back to the real world.

And that kind of thinking always results in horrible consequences for people whose facts of life happen to contradict the thinking. For people who happen to be the facts that contradict the ideas.

There will always be people like that.

I will always be a person like that.

And I refuse to step aside and sit down and shut up just because some ideassay I’m in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, being the wrong person. And I refuse to sit by and watch while others are made to step aside and sit down and shut up for the same reasons.

See also Politics, Ethics, and Mental Widgets. And Disambiguation Post: On Language Dickery. Widgets and language dickery tend to abound in such discussions.