Truth and kindness
Andy Lewis on the Brighton “skeptics”:
So, Brighton Skeptics were to hold a talk in January between Hannah Barnes and Helen Lewis. Barnes was the journalist who wrote a book exposing the debacle of the Tavistock gender clinic and how it was desperately failing vulnerable children.
What a perfect topic for a public critical thinking meeting! It involves the failure of evidence-based medicine, the ideological capture of institutions, and popular ideological beliefs that turn out not to be true. That is bread and butter for the ‘skeptic movement’.
Or so you would think. But as @helenlewis tweets, the event has been cancelled despite selling out immediately. It looks like Brighton Skeptics failed to “compromise”. With whom though, and why?
Because third rail, that’s why. Touch it and instant electrocution.
A group was formed to get this event cancelled – and if that failed to try to disrupt it on the day. This new group was to be called “Reece’s Pieces”.
The founders though did not want this to be seen as pressure from external trans groups, so were keen to recruit ‘sceptics’ who were sympathetic to trans ideology. The “main thrust” must come from “sceptics”. They would front the “anger”.
They called it “Reece’s Pieces as this is a reference to the advertising slogan about a sweet with a peanut butter inner and a crunchy shell. They believed that “trans liberation and scientific skepticism are two great tastes that taste great together”.
They may taste great together but they sure as hell don’t work well together. The foundational belief and dogma and imperative is that people are the opposite sex if they say they are. It’s a magical claim, so skepticism has to be kept at a distance – a very large distance.
Sceptics should not intend to be cruel, but ought to believe that truth is necessary. Without truth we do not know how to be kind or just.
Unfortunately, too many sceptics groups now think we need to be kind first and foremost, and kindness needs to guide how we see truth. That is the road to hell. That leads to rejection of truths based on social acceptance rather than material reality.
Conformity rather than inquiry. The hell with that.
What we have here is a lobby group with pseudoscientific ideas trying to shut down public discussion that has material impact on the well being of many people, not least children. That they appear to have recruited “sceptics” to do their dirty work is deeply alarming.
But not at all surprising how sceptics appear to be easy prey for these fashionable “progressive” beliefs about how sex is not real and lesbians can have penises. The desire to appear to be ‘kind” easily suppresses critical thinking.
For some people, it seems. It doesn’t work that way for me. That’s not because I love to be unkind, it’s because I don’t believe in the “kind” they’re talking about, and I find it both soppy and manipulative. I don’t think it is “kind” to pretend that ludicrous fact-claims are true.
We’re being told that any such questioning is akin to the sadistic cruelty of pouring salt on a slug, just to watch it writhe in agony. “Be kind, we’re admonished” Speaking of sadistic cruelty, tell that to Barbie Kardashian, and keep him the fuck away from women. Women’s suffering is worth less than nothing compared to the percieved, imaginary discomfort of a single man. The man is prioritized, the women told to shut up and take it, their very real injuries buried by government departments and colluding media. “Be kind” my ass.
A better slogan would be slogan about a sweet with a dog turd inner and a crunchy shell
It’s not just “kindness.” Skeptics who believe that gender identity trumps sex seem to think that this belief butters the right bread and ticks all the right boxes. The “popular ideological belief that turns out not to be true” is that men are male and women are female. We’re to come to this conclusion by rejecting two other presumably popular beliefs that aren’t true — that biological categories are clear cut with no ambiguity, and that human beings have nothing to do with labels. Once you accept that science is a human enterprise and nothing in nature is neat, it’s supposed to follow that some men having the capacity to conceive, gestate, and birth a baby is a scientific truth, nothing to do with being kind to anyone’s identity.
Superficial resemblances to Creationism and other black-and-white simplifications of nature are reinforced by the fact that actual Creationists generally have no problem recognizing that men don’t menstruate and women don’t have functioning testicles. Once a skeptic thinks they know which side to look down on for insufficient nuance coupled with an agenda to reject science in order to control people, it’s hard to get them to entertain the idea that no, maybe for this issue, it’s them.
So, they apparently didn’t do their research before choosing their name. The candy is “Reese’s Pieces.”
It probably identifies as Reece’s.
Maybe it should identify as Rhys’ pieces, in honor of “Veronica.”
Re #4
Not only that, but the advertising slogan “two great tastes that taste great together” was for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, not Reese’s Pieces. The “two great tastes” were peanut butter and chocolate, not peanut butter and a crunchy shell.
Re #6
Or perhaps as “Rhys’s pisses”.
Sometimes one has to be cruel to be kind.
“Sometimes one has to be cruel to be kind.”
I do my best to understand, dear, but you still mystify and I want to know why I pick myself off the ground to ave you knock me down, again and again. When I ask you to eplain, you say…
@Banichi, Mike
…in the right measure.