No Stupid Questions

No way, that's just science, baby! (Edit: OK, and philosophy)

I think those questions need to be followed through with a chain of reasoning and questions, not denial. There's usually lots of options.

So for that "gay people are deviants" question, a "no they aren't" answer isn't helpful, because it's faith based, which leads to a shutdown of thinking and curiosity.

Another line might be: if they are, then does that mean that the tens or hundreds of other animal species with documented existence of homosexuality are also deviants? Can an animal be a deviant? Seems unlikely... Does that mean that maybe deviance is a dodgy concept? What does it actually mean? Does it mean a thing is fundamentally bad, or does it just mean that it doesn't fit with a particular value system? If that's the case, and I personally know a bunch of gay people who are really lovely people, is it possible that it's the value system that's the problem, not the gay people?

There's usually plenty of other chains of thought that will get you to a place like this. Doing this kind of thought exploration also means that when you come up against someone making that argument in public, then you have a better idea where you stand, and you can potentially engage constructively with them, if they seem open to it.

Weird Al wrote a song about this

*whether

Why does it happen? Because the world is crazy and if nobody does anything about it then it starts to feel like you’re the crazy one. It also doesn’t help that there’s all this propaganda out there to make you feel that way.

But what do you do about it? Questioning your beliefs on a factual or analytical level is very useful. I don’t think I could have reached my current beliefs in the first place without that openness to new information and critical eye towards what I knew.

But I think the important thing is to separate that out from what you VALUE. What are the things which you care about independent of what the facts are? Do you value treating people kindly? Then it shouldn’t matter if it turned out that some other group was actually inferior. That shouldn’t change that core value. Now if you only value people based on how useful they are, then thinking that someone else was inferior would change how you treat them.

Thinking about my own beliefs and values, my political beliefs have changed a lot over the years, from vaguely American liberalism to some kind of communism, but my values haven't changed. That’s because the values nominally espoused by the mythological American national identity are good ones. What’s not to like about freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness? Democracy sounds great!

But as I learned more about the world, it became more clear how America failed to live up to those values and more precisely, didn’t really hold those values, or at the very least had subtly different meanings of them that created wide gaps in how those values were acted on.

“Freedom” in America is something you can buy. The more money and power you have, the more free you are. And the freedom to use that power to exploit others consequently means you’re less free if you’re poor.

“Equality of opportunity” that is blind to historic inequality and power structures creates this illusion that everyone had a fair shot to succeed or fail and therefor “deserve” where they end up where in reality we never started on equal footing and where we end up is largely an accident of birth. Rich people aren’t necessarily better or harder working than poor people. People don’t actually get to keep the value of their work, it’s just not taken through taxes, but by capitalists in the form of profits. (Also, this is another values thing, but even if the assertions of meritocracy and equality of opportunity were true, I still don’t think a society with this level of poverty and inequality is an acceptable outcome even if people somehow ended up where they were through their own failures.)

Democracy in an unequal society where the rich can put their thumbs on the scale isn’t really democracy. Plus when you learn about the founding of that “democracy”, you learn how explicitly it was set up to favor those powerful few over the many. This is kind of one of the things that makes me feel crazy. I didn’t read about this on some obscure internet blog or commie book, literally everyone in the country learns about the founding in school and more or less learns its anti-democratic bend. It’s not hidden, it’s just that everyone kind of forgets it or doesn’t really internalize the way it relates to our experiences. Also, if we like democracy so much, why do we effectively suspend that democracy for half our waking lives when we go into work? Why shouldn’t people have a say in that? “Nobody’s forcing you to work” doesn’t really work when the alternative is starvation and homelessness.

I still want the ideal, I just recognize the ways I’ve been lied to by people who claim to share that ideal. And that’s where you have to be careful. Not everyone is honest about what they want. ( Sometimes even with themselves) There’s the saying on the left “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” because for some of these people, when you really confront their beliefs with evidence that contradicts it, instead of growing and changing, they just reveal their true colors. Some people who talk about equality while being racist aren’t just misinformed, they actually do believe in hierarchy and the concept of equality is merely a way to rationalize away the that hierarchy. Sometimes you show people how the US fails to be democratic and they reveal that they don’t even think democracy is good. That people are too stupid or evil to rule over themselves.

So yeah. Test your beliefs about the world, but the only way you have a metric to test them against is if you know what your values are in the first place.

Right or wrong is rarely as binary as you seem to be imagining. It's a spectrum. Alignment with reality is contingent upon a habit of seeking better information. If better information comes along, any intellectually healthy person should be willing to accept it and integrate it into their understanding of the world.

Also - cultivate a habit of knowing that it's ok to be wrong. Your beliefs don't define you as much as HOW you choose to shape your beliefs.

We have pattern-seeking brains that instinctually crave a sense of certainty that rarely exists in reality. We always have to be aware of that. We also live in a society that unfortunately reinforces this tendency.

Don't strive to be "right." Strive to be well-informed.

Depends on you - can you deal with asking yourself tricky questions and finding good answers? Or does the challenge make you uncomfortable?

The mile markers along the road to truth are ideas we used to believe were true.

Further truth can only be obtained by holding currently accepted truth to the highest standards of scrutiny.

You seem to be obsessed with a certain area of thought, particularly with your own sexuality & that of others. You should get therapy and figure out your own sexuality before examining this any further. There's something extremely wrong with worrying about other people and where they put their genitals.

There’s one single thing in the entire universe that I’m absolutely certain of - something nothing could ever change my mind about: the fact that it feels like something to be. That there’s qualia, subjective experience. I could be a simulation, a brain in a vat, or something else entirely - but it’s undeniable that it is like something to be whatever “me” is. Everything else is up for debate.

Now, sure - there are things it would take a lot to convince me otherwise about, but I’m also not married to my ideas. I don’t attach my identity to them. I’ve been wrong before, and I’m almost certainly wrong about plenty of things even now. I don’t reject ideas just because I don’t like them. There are uncomfortable truths in this world, and not believing them doesn’t make them untrue. Even politically, it would be statistically absurd to think one side is right about everything and the other side is wrong about everything. It’s a mix. The challenge is figuring out where you are mistaken.

As for the examples you mentioned - homosexuality and transsexuality are human-made labels, ways to describe patterns we see. But like all labels, they’re rough generalizations. The differences between individuals even within these groups are vast - so much so that it starts to put the usefulness of the label itself into question. Personally, I’m just me. Tomorrow I’ll be a slightly different version of me. I don’t even fully identify with who I was yesterday - let alone some rigid label that society wants to stick on me.

Ok, let’s run that thought experiment, what if we’re wrong?

All too often, even if my premise is wrong, I’d get to the same results. Even if I agree with their premise, they are monsters. However you want to marginalize people for different preferences or presentation or not matching their body or skin color or gender, that’s no excuse for the abuse, taking away human rights, taking away normal accommodations for everyday life. Treat people like people.

Equally the thought experiment just proves the original point. Let’s assume there are people who believe the government is full of waste, fraud and abuse, and we need to fix that. They haven’t presented anything to convince us that’s true, their actions cutting people and agencies without investigation, due process, contractual requirements, or regard for constitutional checks and balances is quickly a much bigger problem. Then you have those same people acting above the law, a very suspicious correlation between cuts and personal enrichment of those involved, and you’re firmly in bizarro world territory where the asylum is run by the real lunatics. Even assuming the worst of people employed by the federal government, I can’t conceive of a way this isn’t far worse, proving my original belief

It's important to question your beliefs when presented with evidence. My views on pacificism have loosened a lot, for example.

But the two view you mention are ones where the left is objectively correct. Homosexual behavior is a biological fact in almost all animals and non-binary gender systems exist across the breadth of human cultures.

Any belief system which serves as a permission structure for brutalizing others can safely be rejected as false.

It's a good thing to question your beliefs every once in a while. Sometimes people get things wrong, and sometimes ideas need re-evaluated.

The way I look at gay/trans/etc is to take MLK Jr's advice: judge people by the content of their character.

Don't stop it. It's healthy.

Daily, but on a much smaller, pettier scale. What if I'm wiping my ass wrong? Nobody taught me exactly how to do it, and it's not like anybody is around to notice and say "hey, you know you do it like this?"

I try not to think about my own opinions on big picture stuff as I can spiral fast.

Question everything.

As a trans person, I have various mental illnesses. None of them is 'being trans', but it's likely some of them are related, particularly gender dysphoria. In regards to your actual question, I'm so glad you're evaluating your beliefs! Everyone should deconstruct and know why they believe the things that they do - and if there's no good reason, to stop believing them - regularly. It's the sign of a curious and humble mind.

It's pretty normal. There's a graph that plots confidence as you gain new skills or knowledge, and it sounds like you're on the down-slope of Mt Stupid and coming into the Valley of Despair.

I have spent my life learning for fun and if I can be said to have learned anything about the process it's that the more you learn the better you understand just how vastly complex everything is, how many ways you could be wrong, and how insufficient your earlier simple assumptions were. Like yeah, maybe trans people are just mentally ill because there have been a few cases where that seems to be the case. But does that make it okay to deny all of them the agency and dignity of being able to decide who they want to be? Even if we define gender-affirming care as 'harm', we seem fine as a society with people harming themselves with stuff like cigarettes, why are we not fine with people 'harming themselves' with gender-affirming care?

At the end of the day the question you have to ask yourself is: would you rather never be made uncomfortable by this realization that things are more nuanced htan you thought, or would you rather have the most accurate information about the world that you can get? Because you can't have both. Moral/intellectual certainty is a pipe dream, that way lies true evil, because no one cares less about others than someone who is absolutely convinced that they're right/just.

no, it's not weird. you gotta stay open minded.

The real measure of whether or not an idea is true, at least in personal view, is how well does it hold up to your internal concept of ideal self?

We do not possess a source of universal truth. Sure, there's math and elaborate painstaking work done by scientists to identify what is true to the best of our knowing, but none of that is a "universal" truth.

After all, 1 + 1 = 2 only works when both of the 1s are the same things.

1 apple plus 1 orange does not equal 2 apples, you know?

Going back to the main point, if your version of your ideal self prefers for other people to be happy so that you can live in a world with as many happy people as possible, then ideally, leftist concepts and trans rights would be a truth for you.

What would matter to you about the lives and sexualities of other people is: are they happy?

If they are, great!

If they aren't, treat them as they want to be treated in that situation.

I assume that that is something akin to your ideal version of you.

If it is not, I'm not properly equipped to identify for you what is truth.

But I will say this: if you think that trans people or gay people are deviants or messed in the head, what does it matter to you?

If the entire nation of bumfuckistan started having gay sex from 8.30 to 5, Monday through Friday, what does that matter to you?

How are you affected by the actions of other people that you never interact with, that you never encounter, and that you never see?

Even if it is the most degenerate, horrible thing that can ever happen, it's between two consenting adults.

They're not going to hold you down and make you watch. You won't even ever know it's happening.

So why would you even give the first fucking thought about it?

If it's weird, we can be weird together.

If your leftist ideals are just that trans people exist and gays aren't deviant then I would like to extend an invitation to the ShitLib party.

'cause that shit ain't leftist. It's just human. I'm a ShitLib and I support LGBTQ+. Nearly all of us do. You don't have to be a commie.

I do this often and it can feel like the bottom of my existence fell out. But I always end up back where I started after using logic and my understanding of the world. It's probably good to reality check yourself every so often

It's good to be unsure. The worst people are the ones who think they know everything. The only universal absolutes should be respect and love for others. Other than that, keep thinking and enquiring and learning.

I sometimes wonder if my parents are actually my kidnappers and that one time I ran away from home is actually when I got kidnapped and this could be a suppressed memory.

Or they might be actors and I'm in a truman show.

Or this is a simulation.

Or other people aren't real, this is my imagination.

So yea, I have a lot of "conspiracy theories", but confidence in those theories is less than 40%, so it kinda just lingers in the back of my find, its just those unprovable theories that I like to think about. I don't like actually believe they are true, but its just something I keep in mind as a possible explanation of reality.

I sometimes to wonder about the anti-vax conspiracy. I'm like 50% skeptical of them. Not exactly antivax, but like I'm not gonna be the first one to get it, I'll wait a bit to see if anyone dies first.

Now, about what you are saying. Nah. I concluded that it's very a bad idea to judge someone for being something they were born with. My reasoning is, if I were born as a [Insert Race/Ethnic group here], I wouldn't want to face discriminayion. As with sexuality, I ask myself: "What harm does two men or two women being together have on me?" Can't think of any, so yea do whatever you want, life is short, go fuck whoever you want, as long as you are all consenting adults. Same with gender identity. I mean, I think separating bathrooms by genders is just ridiculous. I mean, why is someone watching me washing my hands a problem if they are the opposite gender, but not for someone of the same gender? Like... stalls are locked anyways, why is there even a gender separation. Just make every bathroom unisex, done. What even is the problem with this "culture war" BS.

So yea, I don't really don't really doubt my beliefs in egalitarianism.

Of course not everyone is born equal, some have disabilities, the point is to treat people as equals.

It's a symptom of having been raised at the peak of a deconstructionist age. Doubt is how we reinforce our beliefs. I'd say you can absolutely stop it, but wouldn't you somewhat doubt that you can absolutely do much of anything if you meditate on it long enough?

Those are your only "leftist" ideas? 😅 But no, if it's still uncertain, it bears examination until it's not anymore, one way or another, and that goes for every idea.