White lady attempts to terf-shame

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Ophelia Benson

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I had much the same thought.

As I said Monday, Adichie didn’t reduce it to the absurd, it IS absurd. It comes pre-absurded.

In fact…how is Zoe Williams not just the Guardian version of Lady Susan Hussey?

Comments

2 responses to “White lady attempts to terf-shame”

  1. Mike Haubrich Avatar
    Mike Haubrich

    If I recall she wrote “I wasn’t having it.” Much like a teacher not buying a kindergartner’s porkie about a dog and homework.

  2. Nullius in Verba Avatar
    Nullius in Verba

    People who don’t know how logic works should stop using the phrase “reduce to the absurd”, because they don’t know what it means. “Accusing” someone of “reducing it to the absurd” is per se exactly as absurd as accusing someone of using deduction.

    For those who don’t know what reductio ad absurdum is. RAA is a valid form of logical inference in which one assumes a proposition to be true or false and then shows that this assumption results in a contradiction. For example:

    We wish to disprove the claim that there’s a largest integer.

    i. Assume k is the largest integer.

    ii. Let j be some positive integer.

    iii. k+j=k (because no integer is greater than k)

    iv. j=0 (subtracting k from both sides)

    v. But this is a contradiction, so k is not the largest integer.

    Why avoid contradictions? Because from a single contradiction we can prove literally anything.

    i. A and not-A (a contradiction)

    ii. A (from i, conjunction elimination)

    iii. A or B (from ii, disjunction introduction)

    iv. -A (from i, conjunction elimination)

    v. B (from iii & iv, disjunction elimination)

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