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[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / drafts / a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md

diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
index e715d63..1f23add 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
+++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
@@ -54,13 +54,22 @@ The _causis belli_ for the religious civil war happened on 28 November 2018. I w
 
 I had recently joined Twitter under my real name, inspired in an odd way by the suffocating wokeness of the open-source software scene where I [occasionally contributed diagnostics patches to the compiler](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits?author=zackmdavis). My plan was to avoid gender issues on that account, at least to start—with the option of going "mask off" and self-canceling in a blaze of glory later.
 
-So there I was, browsing Twitter in the bedroom at the rental house for the dayjob event, when I happened to stumble across this thread by @ESYudkowsky:
+So there I was, browsing Twitter in the bedroom at the rental house for the dayjob event, when I happened to stumble across [this thread by @ESYudkowsky](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521):
 
-> [TODO: linky/excerpt hill of meaning thread]
+> Some people I usually respect] for their willingness to publicly die on a hill of facts, now seem to be talking as if pronouns are facts, or as if who uses what bathroom is necessarily a factual statement about chromosomes.  Come on, you know the distinction better than that!
+>
+> *Even if* somebody went around saying, "I demand you call me 'she' and furthermore I claim to have two X chromosomes!", which none of my trans colleagues have ever said to me by the way, it still isn't a question-of-empirical-fact whether she should be called "she". It's an act.
+>
+> In saying this, I am not taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies.  I am making a stand on a hill of meaning in defense of validity, about the distinction between what is and isn't a stand on a hill of facts in defense of truth.
+>
+> I will never stand against those who stand against lies.  But changing your name, asking people to address you by a different pronoun, and getting sex reassignment surgery, Is. Not. Lying.  You are *ontologically* confused if you think those acts are false assertions.
 
 Some of the replies tried explain them problem—and Yudkowsky stonewalled them:
 
-> [TODO: linky "You're not standing in defense of truth"]
+> You're mistaken about what the word means to you, I demonstrate thus:
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
+>
+> But even ignoring that, you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning.
 
 Dear reader, this is the moment where I _flipped the fuck out_.