#and without context they form this totally illogical conclusions

[daddy-ul]

Since you’re a Lars fan do you believe that Lars was right about Napster

Ah, isn’t this ask the dream of every Lars stan? /sarcasm

My dear duder, I can totally see that you are genuinely asking this bc you are curious, so I’ll give you two answers: the one I want to give (1) and the one you are expecting to receive (2) from someone who, in theory, likes the man in question enough to know abt the debacle.

They will be both sincere, at time sarcastic, passionate, but never aggressive.

1.

“Napster? Is it a napkin american brand or something? This european ass doesn’t know” is my standard go-to, bc IT’S BEEN 20 YEARS. ENOUGH.

You called me “a Lars fan”, and tbh the best thing I can do as his fan is... not engaging with it. Because it has been 20 years, everything that could be said has been said, and the man can’t take it anymore. It’s almost never posed as a real question but more as a dig, as a way to extrapolate scandal, a reaction, views or whatever.

2.

Under the cut - it’s gonna be long - you’ll find my actual thoughts abt it, bc ofc i have thoughts abt it.

The thing is that I dont think most people even know what actually Napster is about, at least for Metallica.

Long story short: Metallica does a song for a movie, they are still tweaking it and suddenly it’s on the radio. It’s I Disappear. Metallica (the band, the management etc) goes wtf????? How?

In 2001 Napster was about control. Nothing more, nothing less.

🥕 Argument 1: “It’s about the money! Lars Ulrich is a greedy moth--”

Rebuttal: Nope, it’s the 2000s, Metallica is a fucking juggernaut, they sold so fucking much in the years prior and after that Jason Newsted still lives confortably with all that money, without having to work constantly.

Also, these are the dudes who let you tape their concerts back in the day and nowadays they give you a professional mix of your concert for free with the ticket. PROFESSIONAL MIX. Do you know that mixing requires money and time? They could easily not do it. They do, and i fucking love it bc I have forever my concert in digital form and with a good sound.

🥕 Argument 2: “He was an ingrate! He wanted to attack the fans! To sue them! To--!”

Rebuttal: yeah, I know where you get this from but it’s also not true. This is the only point of the story where I think Lars was on the wrong side, and the man himself admitted that.

What really happed was: Napster said “we cant do anything bc we cant know who downloaded what”, and they were lying, and Lars was so irritated by that, that went and with a fucking car full of paper with names on it, read out loud ppl names that downloaded from the site. Because OF COURSE you can know who is who with IP addresses. And Lars said it was only a show of force, a “do you think we are fucking fools? stop lying” and not a “I will come to your house and demand money”. It really went out of hand, he was too much in the heat of the moment, he regrets that move, bc of course it was interpreted like that, even if he didnt absolutely want to come after the fans.

🥕 Argument 3: “But Lars--”

Rebuttal: STOP SAYING LARS. SAY METALLICA, FFS. This is the thing that piss me off the most: it 👏 was 👏 not 👏 Lars 👏

Okay, it was Lars, but he was Lars on Metallica behalf. He was not a rogue agent of Justice. Lars doesn’t do stuff like that on his own. It was a group decision. Metallica chose to fight for it and Lars, as usual, chose to be the spokesman. But most people just hate Lars... why? I cant even take you seriously if you drool over James Hetfield bc he is “so cool” but then you go on hating Lars for Napster. You are just not making any sense. Hate ‘em all at least, lol!

>>>>> Why do I say that it was about control?

a) The man himself admitted it.

b) have you ever heard them talk? Everything is about control with them, bc control grants you freedom. Like, they have their own record company just to produce their shit themselves. Nobody ever talks how they fought Elektra to get back their masters (and again Lars was on the front for that). They want to do it their way, they always do.

From 2000!Lars POV it went like this “how come our song is out on some site or whatever when we havent even completely finished it yet? Who gave them the right?”

Look me in the eye and tell me that any artist would be fine with that.

So, then it escalated so fucking quickly, but 2000!Lars didnt know what duststorm he was rising. I dont want to paint him as a hero or whatever, he admitted that back then he didnt know how big and complicated the thing was, he learned it along the way.

Nowadays the music landscape is completely changed and I dont think my opinion on it has any value bc I’m not an expert and I know so little about it. But I read different articles about how hard it is to make music for a living now.

I could go on and on (i just cut out a paragraph that compared what making money in the music industries was about for Queen in the 70/80s and what it is now), but I’m tired of thinking in english, so I’ll cut this short and make it sweet:

I believe that artists deserve to be paid for their art and I also believe that downloading some songs is not the end of the world. Yes, these two things dont contraddict each other bc the world can contain such complexity.

Support the artist how you can!; if everyone does that, it will be fine at the end.

EDIT:

The most insightful, short comment I found was made by kirk a couple of years ago.

They told him "see? Now everyone understands the Napster thing! You were right, thank god you won."

But he said no, no we didn't win.

I agree with him.

[copiosis]

Making A Mountain Out of a George Floyd Mole Hill

A widely debunked meme continues circulating online. It makes the racist case that "black" Lives Matter is fake news. This meme offers a table of “statistics" that, when cursorily examined, begs the question: if "black" lives matter, why are so many "blacks" killing "black" people?

It argues further that cops kill few "black" people, compared to "white" people, although even the total number of "whites" cops kill is tiny.

The point: #BLM making a big deal about people killed by cops makes a massive racial mountain out of a George Floyd mole hill.

The meme next claims the vast majority of "white" people killed are killed by "black" people, and that "white" people kill hardly anyone by comparison. Especially "black" people.

Oh brother...

This meme finds itself everywhere tweeted by anyone agreeing that “all lives matter”. Even the president tweeted it. Most recently, a friend of ours found this meme in her Facebook messenger feed. Someone with university credentials sent it unaccompanied by context or personal commentary.

Racism is literally built into the United States’ DNA. Anyone disagreeing with this doesn’t understand how the United States got formed, the compromises made during its formation, or how nearly every institution formed since then contains structural racial bias based on our nation’s original founding.

But this post isn’t about US history or race.

What it is about is setting the record straight on relevant US crime statistics, then asking, and perhaps answering why such disinformation keeps the US (and the world) exactly where it is: mired in decadence, a culture steeped in racism and systems that don’t function if people aren’t in debt, or aren’t forced to earn a living.

What’s accurate about these numbers?

In a word: nothing.

First, we can’t really understand these numbers unless we look at other numbers for comparison. For example, according to the United States Census, there are 330 million people in the United States. Of those:

76 percent are ��white” or 197 million people.

13 percent are “black” or 42 million people.

For clarification, there is no such thing as a "white" person or a "black" person. These terms got made up as bogus distinguishers then amplified in Racist America so rich people at the time could concentrate power and divide the colonial poor and indentured.

So successful that strategy, “white” and “black” today are endemic to nearly everything American. They divide people who have far more in common by any measure than they do differences, which is why we see over 60 million mixed race marriages, to say nothing of mixed race pairings, mixed race poly relationships and hook ups, mixed race gay couples, married or not, mixed race friendships and neighborhoods, etc.

More specifically to the meme, numbers of mixed race marriages between “black” and “white” people continue to grow. Between 1980 and 2009, for example, such marriages increased from 167 thousand to over a half a million.

As pervasive and enduring as they are, the concepts “black” and “white” are empty in significance other than when trying to socially and economically divide overwhelming numbers of people who have nearly everything in common other than, perhaps, the amount of melanin in their skin.

Back to context: Knowing what percentage of “blacks” and “whites” make up the total US population is important, otherwise numbers of killings represented in any presentation make no sense. In other words, context reveals a number’s value.

So we have 330 million Americans. Over 70 percent of them are “white”. Thirteen percent are “black”.

Many already debunked the meme’s source. So rather than using that source or its numbers, we prefer the FBI’s crime statistics from 2016, which are the latest figures to our knowledge.

Here are those numbers. If you subscribe to the meme’s numbers, these actual numbers will shock you.

"Blacks" killed by whites: 243, or 8 percent of the 2870 "blacks" killed according to the FBI

"Whites" killed by whites: 2854 or 81 percent of the 3499 "whites" killed according to the FBI

“Whites” killed by blacks: 533 or 15 percent of the 3499 "whites" killed, and over 2X the number of “blacks” killed by “whites” according to the FBI

"Blacks" killed by blacks: 2570 or 89 percent of the 2870 "blacks" killed according to the FBI

Shedding light on bogosity

What’s interesting is almost the same number of "white" people are being killed as the number of blacks. “White"-on-“white" murder and “black”-on-"black" murder is roughly similar, at 81 percent and 89 percent respectively, meaning neither "whites" nor "blacks" kill more people than the other category. "White" people murder. "Black" people murder.

It’s true, "black" people killed almost double the number of "white" people as "white" people killed "black" people, 15 percent vs 8 percent, respectively. But these percentages are far, far different than the circulating meme shows. And compared to the national population, these numbers are staggeringly small. True mole hills.

And yet it’s clear more "white" people kill FAR MORE "white" people than "black" people and more "black" people kill FAR MORE "black" people than "white" people. These numbers aren’t a trifle. Thousands of people are being murdered. The murderer’s skin tone? Irrelevant.

Besides, more interesting interpretations shine through the FBI data than what race is killing who and how many each are killing.

For example, it’s extremely interesting that the number of "black" people killed and the number of "white" people killed, is generally the same with roughly 600 more "whites" killed than blacks. This shows once again that difference among “whites” and “blacks” isn’t all that different. People share more in common than what differentiates them: even when it comes to being murdered, "black" people and "white" people are more similar than not. Roughly the same number are killed by someone. Those killing them, by far, share the victim’s skin color.

Another fascinating revelation comes when these crime stats get put in context of the national population. Remember "white" people comprise over 70 percent of the total US total population. "Black" people represent just over 10 percent. Viewed from that understanding, the following conclusion could be drawn:

Since there are so many fewer "black" people in the US, you would expect far fewer murders of "blacks" than whites. After all, far more "whites" populate the US than “blacks”, so it seems rational to think far more "whites" should get murdered in the US than “blacks”.

What the numbers show instead is, even though only 13 percent of the population is “black”, "black" people comprise nearly half the number of people murdered in the US according to the FBI. You would also be excused thinking “if blacks represent 13 percent of the population, doesn’t it seem odd that the number of blacks killed by whites is half the number of whites killed by blacks?” In other words, it seems disproportional that so many blacks are killed by whites, compared to the number of whites killed by blacks, when blacks only make up 13 percent of the national population, and the number of whites make up over 70 percent.

And this is the reason so many people, "white" and “black”, argue that something disproportionate is happening in the US when it comes to Americans labeled "black".

This disproportion is persistent, whether it’s crime, poverty, healthcare, lack of housing, education, or treatment by police.

All Lives Matter

Looking at the real numbers from the FBI, it’s true “All Lives [should] Matter”: for as many "whites" are dying as “blacks". As we’ve shown so far though, this shouldn’t be the case given the tiny percentage of "blacks" compared to the number of "white" people. There should be way more “white" people getting killed, or rather way fewer “blacks” getting killed, because there are so few “black” Americans proportionally speaking.

^^Real crime data from a reputable Source: The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

That said, what do the FBI numbers tell us about run-ins with police?

The meme claims, and we’re quoting: "blacks" killed by police — 1 percent". But that number makes no sense because it has no context. Is it 1 percent of the entire US population? Is it 1 percent of the people killed by police? The same question applies to the meme’s claim about "white" people killed by police: "whites" killed by police — 3 percent. Three percent of what?

Given "blacks" and "whites" make up over 80 percent of the US population, it seems mathematically illogical that the number of "whites" and "blacks" killed by police total only four percent. We can’t logically contextualize these percentages. The US population is over 300 million people.

Maybe these are percentages of all the "whites" and "blacks" killed. So of the 2870 "blacks" killed, police killed one percent of them, according to the meme. Police also killed 3 percent of the 3499 "white" people.

The problem with our generosity here is, the meme isn't using FBI numbers. We don't know what data it is based on. So we can't say.

This is why contextualizing numbers means so much. Without the context, numbers and percentages make no sense. It's important too to be transparent with data sets, so critical thinking readers can see where the numbers came from.

The problem is, many readers aren't thinking critically when they read. If the reader isn’t thinking critically while reading, anything can make sense because the reader isn’t trying to make sense of anything!

For example, examining circumstances under which police kill “whites” and “blacks” might be revealing. They will show, as we’ve said before, that the number of “blacks” killed by police is disproportionate, meaning they kill a disproportionate number of "blacks" compared to "whites". They also will show that circumstances under which police kill “black” people tend to be questionable.

For example, statistica, a global, highly reputable data collection and research organization, recently published statistics on the incidence of police shootings according to race. Here's what they discovered: while the number of "whites" killed by the police is higher year over year, the rate of people shot to death by police is overwhelmingly disproportionate to "black" people.

^^"Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 558 civilians having been shot, 111 of whom were Black, as of July 29, 2020. In 2018, there were 996 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 this figure increased to 1,004. Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 31 fatal shootings per million of the population as of July 2020." Source

"The rate of fatal police shootings in the United States shows large differences based on ethnicity. Among Black Americans, the rate of fatal police shootings between 2015 and July 2020 stood at 31 per million of the population, while for White Americans, the rate stood at 13 fatal police shootings per million of the population." Source

The real numbers don't lie

The numbers shared through this meme not only mean nothing, they are HIGHLY INACCURATE, MISLEADING and DANGEROUS when exposed to a non-critical-thinking public. Someone who doesn’t understand how to communicate with numbers cobbled together a bunch of made up percentages in support of divisive intentions. Then they released them on a population famous for its non-critical consumption and sharing of information. You may be a member of this population.

The facts are there is no significant difference between people when trying to distinguish them by skin color other than the following: Most people, the vast majority of people, classifiable by skin color as “white” enjoy power, wealth, status and freedoms far above levels people not classifiable by that bogus distinction enjoy.

The reason these people enjoy this factual upper hand status is because some of their ancestors, using their power, wealth, status and freedoms at the time, structured society so that it favors this group of people over others.

Put more divisively, they structured society to disadvantage people who don’t look like them in order to have power over them.

Ironically, that structural favoritism stems from insecurity. The same insecurity that has some very light brown skinned people scared when they see brown and dark brown skinned people demand what they haven’t gotten for so long.

The good news is, it’s not necessary for those who enjoy privilege today, to become tomorrow’s less privileged. This is why Copiosis is so important. It’s the only system we’re aware of that preserves every dominant culture privilege with the exception of one:

The ability to define their privilege through a system that structurally denies privilege from those the dominant culture incorrectly perceives are different from them, and somehow therefore inferior, and because of that, not worthy of enjoying what the dominant culture enjoys.

[sincerelyajar]

The Atheist Perspective:

Introduction:   Discussion and open dialogue are a wonderful aspect of a free society.  To that end, a friend and I have gotten together to address the topic of worldview.  Two worldviews will be examined, the Atheist perspective and the Christian perspective. What makes up a worldview?  The prompt I suggested was on four central topics, the four qualifiers of a worldview made popular by Dr. Ravi Zacharias, a Christian philosopher and writer.   The four areas were: Origin - How does your worldview explain the origins of humanity? Meaning - How is meaning described within your worldview? Morality - What is the moral basis of your worldview? Destiny - What is the future of your worldview? A good friend of mine by the name of Jennifer Sternitzky was kind and gracious enough to step out and explain her worldview by these qualifiers, upon my request.  Jennifer is a graduate of the University of Green Bay, with two degrees in Psychology and English.  Jennifer is a feminist and a well read atheist.  We've been friends for several years. We decided upon approximately 750 words, one page, to describe the four points of worldview in a concise, direct manner.  Enjoy.  

The Atheist Perspective:

Jennifer Sternitzky, University of Green Bay

Origin:

I believe in evolution, human and social. I believe humans evolved from apes, and apes evolved from…whatever they evolved from. I don’t pretend to understand everything in science or how evolution works, but I don’t believe there is a God (Christian or otherwise) or in any higher power. I believe we are the product of a series of mutations, enabling the ‘fittest’ to survive, though I do not believe humans are the ultimate beings. I believe we are part of a larger ecosystem and no living creature is above the other, though people certainly act like humans are the dominant creature. I suspect that somewhere along the way we’ll find a way to destroy ourselves—maybe even our planet. If we destroy ourselves, I suspect vegetation and animal life will repopulate the earth; whether humans ever re-emerge again, who knows.

Meaning:

Plenty of people tell me that without God there is no meaning to life, and I disagree. Humanity is special, not because God created us all with a special purpose, but because we didn’t have to be. Through a series of mutations, humans evolved into what we are today, proving that we were better fit to navigate the world than previous humanlike primates. Still others ask if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys. And those people clearly don’t know how evolution works. It happens over millions of years, very slowly, mutating and branching off into new species. Other primates were equally good at surviving and so their species was sustained. The same with humans. But I digress. I believe humanity is special because we are sort of ‘happy accidents’; mortality makes it special too. We’re born with a certain, undesignated, amount of time to live and to create our own meaning. We find what means the most to us and strive to create a life around it. Most humans want to help others in some way—be it art, science, philosophy, psychology, civil service, etc. I believe humanity’s purpose is to look out for each other and to love each other and ensure the species’ survival. In the evolutionary sense at least. We find our own reasons to live and to make our difference in the world.

Morality:

I’ve also been told that without God there can be no morals, or that, as an atheist, I must have no morals. And I again disagree. I believe in love, hope, honor, loyalty, honesty, trust, respect, etc. Those things don’t come from God. They come from within and from human interaction. They are not imposed on us by some invisible spirit. To me, if you need God to tell you what’s wrong or right, and you can’t figure it out on your own, then you may be part of the problem. Also, I find that excessively religious people try to pass off their own opinions of morality as God’s will or God’s word or God speaking through them. It seems as if they’re trying to justify their own hatefulness. Also, basing morality off of an ancient text written by superstitious people who had vastly different values (slavery, women as reproductive beings only, myths about how crops appeared or weather changed, etc) seems absurd, as does picking and choosing the parts we agree with and want to practice. Do we still follow the Malleus Maleficarum? Of course not.  Because that’s of a time when people believed different things, superstitious, irrational things. They condemned things out of fear, because they didn’t understand it. I’m a firm believer in “Just because you can’t explain it, doesn’t mean God did it.”

Destiny:

To be honest, I don’t know that I believe in destiny. It’s a nice thought to believe that everything happens for a reason and we all have some special purpose, but that also defeats the idea of free will. It may be comforting to believe that there’s a special plan for each of us, but it’s illogical and superstitious, and doesn’t allow for people to take responsibility for their own lives.

The Christian Perspective:

Justin Steckbauer, Liberty University

Origin:

The question of origin has puzzled man kind for centuries.  How did we get here?  Where did we come from?  How did life come to be?  For the Christian, the action and the process by which life came about, the length of years it took, the exact biological functions that brought about the complex human life form are less important than the first cause.  Micro evolution, small changes in species that provide for adaptation, is beyond dispute.  That is something science can measure and observe.  In fact, I love science.  However, macro evolution seems highly speculative, and the processes by which a puddle of amino acids could become a highly complex life form like a human are not observable.  Given chance, matter, and time, a puddle of amino acids will never, ever become a human being.  It is simply impossible, statistically.  For the atheist, the first cause is a vacuum, an unanswered question: Where did energy come from?  For the Christian, the first cause is a loving architect of the universe, a necessary first cause who over 10,000 years or 7 billion years, crafted the universe into existence.

Meaning:

The question of meaning in Christianity is simple: We are children of the loving biologist, chemist, artist, writer, and architect, the designer of the human soul, who we call Father God.  In that context, every human being has value, incredible value, so much that God would come, Jesus Christ, to offer himself as a path of redemption for his wayward people.  In addition meaning, for the Christian, is a stark reality: The Earth is a very troubled place, and the problem is not outside ourselves, but within ourselves, and the only treatment is the indwelling presence of Jesus.  In the context of meaning, we find a treasure trove in the Bible of meaning, and inherent worth.  

Morality:

What is the perfect moral code?  Who had it?  What does each moral code look like when put it into practical application?  For atheism, we see Nazi Germany, with Nietzsche's idea of the superman put into practice.  Genocide.  Again in Russia, Stalin a former seminary student turned atheist, what do we find?  The writing of Karl Marx used for the purpose of subjugation.  Genocide.  And what about the Christian worldview?  The most prosperous countries on planet Earth, in contrast: Europe, and the United States.  Now we see in the 21st century as Europe and the United States drift into post-modernism and naturalism, corruption begins to grow like a cancer.  

The teaching of Jesus Christ is the perfection of morality described in powerfully simple terms: Love God and love others, as you love yourself.  Jesus Christ provides the model for a life of humble service to others, that will always bring about the most peaceable and prosperous paradise, when practiced in truth.

Destiny:

What future does an atheist have, after 100 years have passed?  After 1000 years have gone by?  The atheist passes out of existence into the natural and biological cycles of the environment.  What future does the Christian have?  Unending life, in community with a loving God and fellow believers who have chosen to fly in the face of everything the world says, and do it the way God says.  Jesus Christ provides the way, he is the road, a personal savior present, willing to show you the hard truth about yourself, and offer a way of total redemption and a future unimaginably wonderful.

Conclusion: Thank you for reading.  An open and respectful dialogue is vital to the ongoing discussions and debates between Christians and atheists as we attempt to navigate and make sense of things in a difficult world.  Respect, love, and mutual admiration can go a long way to healing wounds and bringing otherwise diverse groups into reasonable social harmony.  Take care and God bless.  

[epwinn]

Transgenderism as a Mental Disorder: My Response to Grace Pokela and The Huffington Post

Eric Winn, March 2017

High School teacher Grace Pokela and The Huffington Post contributor Curtis Wong have one thing in common: an equally toxic brand of argumentation. Wong’s article, “Biology Teacher Expertly Smacks Down Transphobe Who Cited Science”, and the Facebook post that inspired it, has secured a bandwagon of support highlighting the remarkably contagious nature of bad thinking.

According to the article, Pokela, a high school biology teacher by profession and self-described social justice warrior by duty, stumbled across a meme several weeks ago that described transgenderism as a psychological disorder. Apparently, hordes of pesky transphobes had been piling straws on her back for quite some time, and according to Pokela, this was the final one. Her social justice instincts immediately fired up and our warrior readied herself for battle. The meme reads as follows:

Her response to this was in the form of a Facebook post that went viral. Here it is in all of its glorious and incoherent tedium:

To preface, I’ll tell about my initial collision with Wong’s article in The Huffington Post. The link to the piece was sent to me via text message from a good friend who was admittedly fishing for a reaction. Well, needless to say he’s getting one now.

After reading the article, I immediately texted my friend back “This is why you wouldn’t take a high school biology teacher seriously in a philosophy seminar”. In my mind, this was an appropriately illogical response to Pokela’s equally illogical argument. My intention was to convey irony as a point of humor. But the reason I am pointing this out is because I think it will be instructive. Let’s start by analyzing my text message and see if we can extrapolate anything useful.

As we know, logic is a branch of philosophy and is the foundation for argumentation; the gold standard of philosophical discourse is to be as logically consistent as possible. In mentioning the broader domain in my message, my aim was to make a tacit reference to this narrower discipline. I could have just as easily said “because someone is a high school biology teacher, they cannot make a valid argument.” This is essentially the same claim but without the linguistic flair. It is a fairly straightforward example of a non-sequitur in an informal sense, which is to say the conclusion does not follow logically from the premise. Why? A person’s profession does not dictate whether or not they can make a valid argument. It is no sillier to say “because someone is a high school biology teacher, they cannot ride a bike.” But my message was also a red herring. It effectively diverts attention away from the original issue.

Before we delve into a more lengthy dissection of Pokela’s argument, it is necessary to highlight the distinction between how a person thinks and what a person thinks. By latching exclusively onto the body of facts she cites about biology as a reflection of what she thinks, those persuaded by Pokela’s rhetoric seem to be confused about this distinction and its relevance. It is also true that what she thinks could mean her opinion about the classification of transgenderism as a psychological disorder. But I have no interest in addressing the specific issue of transgenderism. To be clear, I only want to address the substance and validity of her argument.

As a precursor, it is true that I see her inability to argue effectively as an egregious disservice to those who argue in favor of her position. Her post is the perfect example of how to set yourself up to lose an argument while simultaneously ruining your credibility. People who agree with her that transgenderism is not psychological disorder should be recoiling in horror in response to her post. Maybe I am one of them, hence my motivation to publish my own response. Or maybe I just see her as an easy target and therefore an easily scored point for the opposing side. Either way, in an attempt to take down a toxic and ineffective interlocutor on the subject, consider this criticism to be of service to both sides.

First we’ll briefly focus on the information Pokela presents in her post as a reflection of what she thinks.

From the onset, her post becomes littered with facts so irrelevant to the issue that the reader is left wondering what it is she is even arguing. She drones on about environmental circumstances and spontaneity as factors that can determine sex in a multitude of species other than human beings. It’s not until about halfway through that she begins addressing human biology in an agonizingly smug shift in focus. It is precisely here that her argument loses all traction in two major ways.

First, Pokela immediately begins pointing out various anomalies that are classified as either deficiencies or mutations, leading us to believe that she might be fleshing out a causal relation between these aberrations and transgenderism. But she instead fails to mention any link at all, leaving us completely in the dark. Her argument continues to go absolutely nowhere.

Second, she begins to muddy her language to the point of incoherency. For example, she says that “You can be male because you were born female, but you have 5-alphareductase deficiency and so you grew a penis at age 12.” This is totally unintelligible in a grammatical sense. How can you be male because you were born female? This is tantamount to saying “you are a boy because you are a girl.” To be clear, this is not due to some fundamental misunderstanding of biology on my part—to the contrary. It is an obvious bungling of language on the part of the biology teacher. Allegedly, what she meant to say was that “You can be male even though you were born female because you have 5-alphareductase deficiency…” For someone who touts her credentials as an educator, this is an unforgivable error in syntax. Yet she continues to drive further into the ditch. Astonishingly, every subsequent sentence commits a similar syntactical error.

But if we hone in on her specific claim that you are born female and later become male if you have 5-alphareductase deficiency, we can identify a curious sleight of hand. Pokela shifts from discussing hard biological facts to that of gender identity, a much more subjective phenomenon. Her claim is that if you are born without a penis, and therefore in many cases raised as a girl until puberty, you are biologically female. From a psychological standpoint the child will most likely believe they are female, but even a person with 5-alphareductase deficiency is chromosomally male from birth, meaning they have an X and a Y chromosome. There is no hard biological shift in sex once puberty sets in, merely the emergence of male genitalia. Once again, every subsequent sentence commits the error, blurring this crucial distinction.

In the end, I don’t care that her mind is a receptacle for facts about biology. The ability to recite a textbook isn’t a measure of merit in an intellectual sense, and using facts to support an argument that are patently irrelevant to the issue is an intellectual disgrace. Her entire post proves to be nothing more than a giant red herring. She successfully diverts the attention of the reader away from the debate about transgenderism as a psychological disorder, shifting the focus instead to discussions about the nature of things like slime mold. Pokela also posits a false inference in the form of a non-sequitur, namely that because biological abnormalities occur in some number of humans, transgenderism is not a psychological disorder.

We’ll now shift the focus to how she thinks.

Whatever her opinion, as a starting point I could really only care about her ability to reason objectively and make a valid argument. The bottom line is that if she cannot establish credibility on these two points, then her position on the issue is simply not supported by her argument. In the context of her Facebook post, she has proven her inability to do both.

Pokela’s argument actually takes two forms, one using bigotry as the premise, the other using naturalism. Removing all the clutter, the crux of her argument comes in the last two lines of her post: “Don’t use science to justify your bigotry. The world is way too weird for that shit.” There is a lot embedded in these two lines, so let’s break them down.

The first line, “Don’t use science to justify your bigotry”, is a fairly loaded and misguided injunction. It seems that she acknowledges the scientific legitimacy of the meme, namely that there are two sexes in a sexual species, male (XY) and female (XX), and that any deviation from this as a “norm” is considered to be a mutation. But this is where she begins to incorrectly perceive the encroachment of bigotry onto what are otherwise sound scientific facts. The meme claims that because transgendered people do not psychologically identify with their chromosomally determined sex, they are suffering from a psychological disorder. This is a claim about mental health. If it is true that transgenderism is a psychological phenomenon that deviates from the “norm” and causes profound emotional suffering, then transgenderism seems to fit the bill of a mental health disorder by definition. But the debate is far more nuanced than that. The opposing rationale considers the idea that social attitudes and treatment options and their viability must also be considered, lest we risk further stigmatization of transgendered people. Therefore, all we are dealing with is a clash of opinions surrounding an official classification—a clash that quickly becomes an exercise in pragmatism. It is clear which side of the divide Pokela is on, and she’s clearly not arguing against classification for the sake of being pragmatic—she’s arguing in the name of biology.

At this point the errors in her perception of bigotry should also be clear. To be a bigot is to be intolerant toward those who hold different opinions, not merely to be the purveyor of a different opinion. The meme Pokela responded to is not an explicit display of intolerance. The denunciation of an opposing opinion as bigotry does not mean the opinion is bigoted just because one says so.  I could say that you are a bigot because you don’t agree with me that Duran Duran is the greatest pop band of all time. Not only would I sound like a priggish brat, but this would be an embarrassing error in semantics. It would also be a curiously intolerant position for me to take. Arbitrarily redefining words in an incoherent way, in this case by defining bigot as “a person who has a different opinion than me”, should automatically annul the argument. It is ironic that in calling others bigots simply because they disagree with her, Pokela actually becomes perceptibly more bigoted herself. And in her case, I suspect this was not an intentional injection of humor.

But Pokela is a master wielder of vacuous trigger terms. She intentionally uses words like “bigot” and “transphobic” to rouse her audience without any evidence to back up her claims. It is her way of controlling the conversation by silencing dissent. To those who are sensitive enough to understand that real bigots and real transphobes should be ridiculed and marginalized, but not incisive enough to recognize the bully teacher in righteous clothing, her rhetoric succeeds. This is how you play tennis without the net. By preaching to generally impressionable people in this way, regardless of how vitriolic she might be, her victory is all but guaranteed each time she steps foot onto the court.

The second line of her argument, “The world is way too weird for that shit”, backed by all the garbled bio-facts that precede it, contains an implicitly embedded argument that goes as follows: “Because transgenderism is a natural phenomenon, it is not a disorder.” This argument falls victim to a loose interpretation of the appeal to nature fallacy, which states in a basic sense that it is fallacious to make a value judgment about something based on its natural properties. An obvious example is rape. Rape is natural. Most species would not reproduce if it weren’t for non-consensual intercourse. This is also true for our earliest ancestors. This truth, however abhorrent, is not in conflict with the fact that rape is immoral and illegal in most of the world. But we aren’t dealing with a moral question when it comes to transgenderism. Again, as a biological and psychological phenomenon, we are debating its official classification in the context of mental health. The truth is every mental health issue that is classified as a disorder occurs naturally. There is nothing artificial or simulated about depression or schizophrenia. These are scientifically understood disorders that emerge under certain conditions within certain biological systems. Even a delusion—and some will argue that transgenderism is exactly that—is still a product of the internal workings of a biological system. To suggest that transgenderism is not a psychological disorder simply because it is an expected consequence of “weird” biological anomalies is simply missing the point.

But this is also an example of the special pleading fallacy. This fallacy occurs when an argument posits an exception to a generally accepted rule without justifying the exception being made, similar to holding a double standard. As alluded to before, there is no reason to think that transgenderism is anything but a psychological phenomenon. It is true that transgenderism—or gender dysphoria as it is commonly referred to in the mental health community— is a conflict between perceived identity and chromosomally determined sex. There are no social or professional misgivings about labeling numerous other psychological issues as disorders, but Pokela makes an overt exception in the case of transgenderism with no evidence or valid argument to justify her exception.

I’ll now attempt to accomplish in three sentences what Pokela failed to accomplish in the half-page fact-salad she vomited onto her Facebook page. If I was to defend her position and that of her sympathizers, my argument would go as follows: The official classification of any psychological disorder is based on clinical research and the resulting consensus of mental health experts. Currently, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD) published by the World Health Organization do not recognize transgenderism as a disorder. Therefore, officially, transgenderism is not a psychological disorder.

This is one example of how she could qualify her position successfully. It is important to always remember Ockham’s Razor, which states that when competing hypotheses emerge, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. In other words, the hypothesis that offers the simplest explanation is usually the best. Convolution presents little more than an opportunity to fail, and Pokela seized the opportunity.  

To conclude, I’ll highlight a brief quote from Wong’s article in The Huffington Post:  

“Pokela, who is originally from South Dakota, told The Huffington Post that she felt compelled to respond to the Facebook user because of the amount of conservative voters who she felt had “manipulated facts” to fit their agenda on social media. Based on the information presented in the meme, she added, it was clear that the user who posted it “wasn’t a scientist or an educator, and in fact had no interest in science” at all.”

Instead of breaking the excerpt down as part of another lengthy analysis, I will pose a very simple question: How is it clear that the person who posted the meme wasn’t a scientist or an educator and had no interest in science at all? I’ll leave this to the better faculties of the reader to ponder. Pokela did say in the article that she hopes her post will “empower” others. One can only wonder what degree of intolerance and anti-intellectualism she hopes to empower others with, exactly. Judging by the number of responses to her post, thousands have already been infected by her rhetoric. The rest of us can’t help but let out a nervous laugh.

In the end, my advice to Grace Pokela would be this: Don’t use science to justify your bigotry. The world will call you out on that shit.