Hey then I’m happy to have derailed the YouTube feed this way. For those who felt wronged by my joke the other night, I was not minimizing the feed itself. Just a correlation I thought about after a night of YouTube with a friend. But it’s not the same thing. Images are hypnotic and YouTube has a way of hanging on a limb to keep about center that’s sort of suprising and soporiphic.
Unpopular Opinions is more like late night friends or family party when you’re in that temporary bubble where you seem to overhear all discussions but are into none and it’s just warming and peaceful yet its erratic, both familiar and new and mixes and something else all together. The YouTube image was just more funny and to the point.
As for the other thing, it’s nice to see us talk about it. I mostly respect everything that has been said and agree to it. Yet to me there is a very dangerous zone here that we’re trying to cross the wrong way. It does not good to deny what is evidence. Especially when it’s thrown about trying to hide what’s more obvious. I’m talking about a mental construct.
That’s where the language failed. It did not suffice. It tried to roughly cut people in two where people are a million things each of them. That’s where society failed as well: to peg this as mental deficiencies instead of constructs. A mental construct is what each stands on as he confronts the world. And you cannot categorize that.
And it has nothing to do with categorizing them as mentals and the rest of the world is sane. In fact, the danger is that once you start seeing it as a mental construct, you do open a totally different can of worms. If there is enough people feeling that language distorts the perception they and others have of themselves, and if they gather around and gain momentum, then their mental construct is normalized. If it is, well we need to understand why this has normalized. It is just as important as to understand what sets of cirmustances brought us to Enlighment, why we chased witches, how Hitler came about, how we woke up to the urgency of a decaying planet and started really working to control and even revert it. We’re looking deep into the reasons why we all tend to refuse and destroy. It is looking deep into civilization’s mirror, because it encompasses everything: how humanity evolved, persecuted, and compartmentalized everything - their own way.
It’s not just their mental construct: it is all of ours. Being « binary » does not mean your mental construct is anything more obvious than theirs. It comes from somewhere, and you are thinking as someone that cannot be interchanged with someone else. I never felt any diffirent about anybody whatsoever.
It’s compartmentalization again, on another level and it won’t end nicely, especially not if we push denial of what is really happening by blaming language itself. Language followed us and adapted to us, both encompassing the human experience and the scientific progress. It was never meant to be right: it is meant to have a way to shape ideas into concrete demeanors. Of course it has to adapt right now, but it is not the problem: we are.
And then going the length of subverting this dilemma from language to biology, and claim something aberrant like it’s weird and wrong to call your baby boy a boy just because of biology, since he as an individual is not yet ready to think for himself and make the decision. So now all binary parents should feel like they did something wrong?
Well no because you can’t argue against biology. I don’t care how you think, and how your baby boy will think: you still need to teach him the particularity of keeping a dick clean around 2 and explain to him why he has it/how it is different from the girls.
And we all know why boys are made that way and girls made another one: so that the specie can reproduce and survive. And that’s not really something you should just throw aside as a casualty of language.
To really understand you need to ask yourself: what then? I mean, maybe because I called my two girls « girls » and « princesses » and never told them they could also be a boy, I’m an *******. And maybe I’ll have bullshited them and ruined their lives. But if we start the other way around - make do like it has no importance well first it won’t work because it is an important distinction and children are no morrons.
That they come to grow up and don’t feel that way, that’s alright. But here is something that language is not wrong about: differentiation is the basis of survival and intelligence. That’s why language is based on differentiation. That differentiation has come from a fundamental one - we are different from the rock, the trees, the other animals, and among ourselves even.
So there is nothing wrong with giving children the basic scope of differentiation that at once explains how life thrives and how we intelligent creatures will still come to war, blood, rape, ostracism, in the name of refusing difference.