petrol_sniff_king

I suppose. I mean, I was reacting to the suggestion that it was indeed a bad argument.

For what it's worth, I do only see themoonisacheese saying that anti-transitioners are being transphobic.

I am trying, but I literally cannot think of a way to be more direct here.

The transphobe's hypocrisy is being used here as evidence of their lack of sincerity. i.e., they're conning people. They are conmen. Liars and cheats who believe whatever they have to to convince people to hate the gays too. They will constantly contradict themselves because they don't care about consistency. The irrational fear that they feel is the only consistent position they hold. And so, they don't care about children's causes because they aren't motivated by children's causes.

I know that you already know this; I'm not trying to be condescending. What I think is that you are, like, debate-tricking yourself into disagreeing with something really easily understood by most people.

Where transhobes do and do not direct their attention betrays their motivations.

Their motivations are very important.

The OP comment is not anti-transitioning, nor pro-child-meth.

Anyway, you have a very unimaginative and literal approach to all this

The one thing I really dislike about lemmy in general is that there are sooo many people like this here.

No fun. No whimsy. All philosophical challenges are puzzles meant to be conquered by misinterpreting the point and then writing a 4-line python script. It's linux people, man, I swear.

Haha! Ahh...

"You are a senior games engine developer, punished by the system. You've been to several board meetings where no decisions were made. Fix the issue now... or you go to jail. Please."

I want my bananas to be the star of the bread show.
But to be fair, I am a horny slut for bananas.

I should look up some tomato stuff; I've never even heard of these things.

Christ, my man, do you need a time out? Are you late for a nap or something?

I promise you there's nothing at stake here; I'm not "dismantling" chemistry. I agree it's useful, it's good stuff. Mendeleev did a good job.

Aw, don't be a sore loser.

I can't engage with your point on its merits because it's not relevant to the argument that I'm making—it's a complete non-sequitur.

You want me to prove that the periodic table doesn't predict undiscovered elements? What does that have to do with where people direct their effort and attention?

This is why the tomato fruit/vegetable example is so useful: it's about what facts are useful to whom. It actually has nothing to do with the periodic table at all, that just happens to be a particularly prickly thorn for stem majors.

Neither of the two constructions you listed would result in a periodic table.

I... didn't say that they would? If you change the map, it's obviously a different map. You'd call it "Metallica's table of metals," or something.

So your telling me that I need to be cautious of you derailing the conversation away from it's original premise?

No... I just don't think you realize how anti-intellectual you're being.

i'll be keeping you to the premise and the periodic table for this discussion. It need not go further.

Okay, dad. But, you were the one who brought up fascists.

Very rude, by the way.

Uh, to anyone reading, I guess: Look up Jordan Peterson's wikipedia. He is not a fan of whatever his meat-addled brain thinks Post Modernism is.

If the ordering of the periodic table were arbitrary, it couldn't be a periodic table.

It is arbitrarily a periodic table because the periodic table has utility. That utility is why we don't arrange them a different way. This isn't complicated.

If you want an example of different motivations: Do these periods tell you how beautiful each element is? Does beauty rise in each column and row? You might need a different map for that.

In fact, the ordering even predicted languages that were not yet known to the person who developed the order.

That would be very insightful. I would say we should arbitrarily prefer that ordering because of how useful it would be to us.

Or we could arbitrarily choose not to because just the one language is good enough, innit?

It can be constructed in other ways. I gave you two of them. Those other presentations are not "less correct," they're just less useful. It just so happens that the most useful, scientific depiction of the table to us is also the one that contains the most facts.

You are also wrong in the basic philosophy of it.

Keep in mind, this argument I had was several proxy-arguments downstream of whether or not transwomen are women. So, be aware of what waters you're treading into.

Isn't the rejection of post-modernism like a very Jordan-Peterson–like thing to do? I'm pretty sure I heard him whining about it when he was also whining about ~~jews~~ cultural marxists.

Wow, there he is. Like, for real.

It's okay, man. You majored in some science field, you don't care much for philosophy; we don't have to be at each other's throats here. I'm not questioning the validity of the periodic table, it's simply a way of thinking about it.

Ah, there he is!

Just kidding.

The extreme usefulness of the one periodic table as we know it is why this is so hard to talk about. Philosophically, it isn't any different: it is arranged by human values for human consumption. I think there is likely a strong reason that alien values would converge here, but that doesn't really affect its arbitreity. The elements don't have value unto themselves, they just are.

And there are plenty of different ways to arrange it. For one, if all you care about are the metals for some reason, you can arrange the nonmetals out of it completely. You could keep a linear, alphabetical list because whatever work you're doing is derived from chemistry but does not actually care about atomic values.