Leo Gura

If you want to do brainless conformist spirituality, go ahead. But that is not what I do or teach.

@Emerald You literally wanted me to debate you. I wisely refused. Now I am the scapegoat. All that noise just avoid watching some videos. Sigh...

That's mostly what happens now. It's not like a kid is paying for his own penis surgery in secret.

Your position was that you didn't want kids to receive any transition treatment.

@Emerald I was never in an argument with you. And I do not care about winning anything here.

I don't remember what it was called. His basic program. It is not a cult in a technical sense. But his followers are brainless conformist sheeple. He doesn't teach them how to think, he teaches them how to be spiritual robots.

There is no contradiction in my position. Everyone is free to see a doctor of their choice for whatever condition they have. No doctor is forcing anyone to do anything. You, on other hand, want to tell 70 million kids what is best for them.

Musk deeply cares about what's best for humanity.

So what? That is irrelvant. It doesn't mean you understand him. You are too busy judging reality to see it for what it is.

That's not for you to decide, but for them and their therapists and doctors. How dare you tell every kid in the country what is best for them! You don't know. That's the whole point. Yet you want to dictate your opinions on others.

Something I did was just sit down and watch Musk talk without judging him, really seeing the world from his POV. Dare I say, empathize with him. If you actually do that you will have an experience very different from all the leftist moralizing. That would be transcending the Green narrative. And this doesn't mean I support Musk's politics.

Yes, that's the meta issue. I merely suggested that you watch some videos with an open mind. You refused. So there is nothing more to do here.

@Emerald I am not going to engage with you on content debates. I pointed out a meta issue, which you are uninterested in handling. So that's the end.

You can easily find clinical statistics on all this. And they are not in your favor. Your position is unscientific. Not from above, but from below. You don't even know the science that has been done on this phenomenon. The science could change in the future, but you don't even know the current science, so your position is unserious.

There you go again, doubling down on the Green. Come on guys, I expect you to see through Green and yet you're still mired in it.

You are always interpreting experience. There is no alternative.

I told you to watch a serious interview with Musk. This doesn't count.

Absolutely! I cherrypick science to weed out the shit. This is not a bug, this is crucial to avoid self-deception. And you should not confuse meta-scientific matters with distrusting of what appear to be solid clincial results. These are totally different things. Gender dysphoria is a disease-like condition that warrants treatment, whereas drinking and smoking are just bad habits which no one needs. Kids aren't suffering from not having access to alcohol and tobacco. Kids are not commiting suicide from lack of drinking and smoking. Your whole approach here is non-clinical and non-therapeutic because you are not interested in the substance of the issue, you are interested in defending a cultural attachment. You are not even asking or wondering: What is empirically the best method to help reduce the suffering of trans kids? You already assume you know even though you did zero clinical work.

Yes. This is the real honest answer. Everything else here is just noise.

But this position contradicts our best clinical science, so it doesn't make sense. You want us to ignore clincial science just to pander to your biases and prejudices about gender to make you feel comfortable.

But therapy IS a big part of gender affirming care. You act as though kids are given free hormone pills at school. And it's not like the right wing has any desire to fund free therapy for trans kids. The only therapy the right would support is telling kids they are whatever sex they were born as and anything else is wrong. Any other kind of therapy would be called "grooming kids". So your position is not in good faith. It does not come from a genuine desire to help kids, but to reinforce a dogmatic binary worldview which is held as absolute.

Memory is not the same as what is usually meant by "direct experience". But memory is far superior to belief, theory, or fantasy -- which is what most people are operating on. Since reality is nothing but experience, without sufficient experience you are simply lost in fantasy. Experience does not guarantee truth, but it's a lot better than not having experience.

They are off point. Green narratives are self-deception.

You just need to be biased, selfish, or unconscious. Because I care about epistemology and avoiding bias. Because it's just obvious that the denouncements of Musk posted thus far were just a parroting of Green memes, not a serious independent line of thought. These Musk narratives are so cookie-cutter, so unoriginal, that they might as well have been written by a chatbot from 2021. I can literally get a more original, accurate, and developed line of thought from an AI in 5 seconds.

Musk's politics are crappy, but there is more to people than their political positions. The key mistake of Greens is that they smear, judge, and dismiss anyone who opposes their Green ideals. This makes deep understanding impossible.