Blog
A concern troll’s cognitive dissonance: Helen Joyce on trans kids
If your mind is made up, why do you pretend to be open to more data? I used to wonder why people got so anxious over the idea of trans people, and now I realize it’s because they believe contradictory things about us.
Helen Joyce: All trans people break the world
It sounds metal, but actually, she just doesn’t like us. She compares gender transition to a contagious disease, lobotomy, and opioid abuse and calls us a disaster.
YouTube deleted the Peterson/Joyce ‘meat lego’ video
On ‘meat Legos’ and what’s older than trees. “That’s what people say about me,” Joyce says innocently, smiling, batting her eyes. “That I want to cause a genocide…When did I ever write such a thing?”
The feeling of knowing
Steven Connor’s 2019 book ‘The Madness of Knowledge’. ‘Epistemopathy’ means the feeling of knowing. We have pleasant and unpleasant feelings associated with knowing. That’s part of why knowledge matters to us.
Turtles all the way down
Finding truth in emptiness. When we acknowledge there is no final turtle, we open ourselves to discover and live more. The turtle on which we are standing is never the last one.
We can’t prepare for this moment
‘Opening to Darkness’ by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. What to make of this political and ecological moment, this chaos that arrives with no instructions? We can “see, collectively, in the dark.”
‘Do I want it? Life, that is.’
‘On Not Knowing‘ by Emily Ogden. What is there to hope for? Should we hope? We can work in the field, making bales of hay, but the work of the soul “never will be cut and dried.”
‘Agnotology’: The study of ignorance
Our ways of knowing can be corrupted. “We’re going to have to rethink our metaphors,” Proctor said, on persuading people away from science-denial. “We’ve got to think much more creatively.”
We knew it before we were quizzed
That truth remains valuable. We existed. We went to school and forgot ourselves for a while. Then we remembered who we are. We had this knowledge with us the whole time.