The Limits of Principles

confronting reality, and doubt

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For most of the last two weeks, I keep thinking that I’ve got something terribly wrong.

The vast majority of the writing I do here — including the US history series for paid subscribers (which I’ll be returning to in the winter) — is for me. I write to clarify my own thoughts, to process my own feelings. Then, depending on the topic, I either lightly edit it myself or have a friend look it over. Then I publish. It is one of the weird, wonderful ironies of my life that other people enjoy reading what I write here.

This is different, because I am at a terrible impasse, and I just don’t know what I think about this topic. The implications of changing my view on this are staggering to me, and yet I cannot bring myself to say that the events of the last two weeks haven’t rocked me just as hard.

I’ll be very interested in the comments and hope some of you will take the time to share if you’ve found yourself similarly re-evaluating everything.

What’s On the Line

One of my principles has long been this: that I’m obligated to live up to my own morals, principles, and standards whether you do or not. I’ve applied this to myself (with many failures) and expected it of people, institutions, governments, etc., that wanted my support, respect, vote, etc.

But I’m questioning it now.

The Rules of War

I’ve been reflecting on this idea a lot lately, especially in the two weeks since Hamas launched a massive terrorist attack on Israel, filled with depravities including burning people alive, committing gang rape so violent that women and children have fractured pelvic bones, and taking both babies and Holocaust survivors hostage.

As the world calls on Israel to be “proportionate” in its response, I’ve found myself repeatedly wondering if the entire world is insane.

Israel would never be truly proportionate, a response that would require them to send their citizens to burn babies alive, commit violent gang rape, and otherwise turn themselves into the monstrous barbarians who attacked them.

What the rest of the world seems to mean is that Israel should allow the Hamas atrocities to go without response—that the tactic of using civilians as human shields should be a checkmate, forever, and if the Jews have to let some of their children be gang-raped to the point of a fractured pelvis, well, what did they expect to happen?

Besides the appalling racism in the assumption that barbarism is simply to be expected from brown people with difficult lives—which is so disgusting and horrifying that it’s going to be the topic of another essay, on another day—the world seems to believe, based on the rallies, cheering, violent uprisings, and other events happening in the US and across Europe, that Jews who are attacked in a manner on the level of the Holocaust for barbarity should not respond with military force unless the terrorists all conveniently put every civilian in a saferoom and send up a skylight notifying the IDF of where they are. Otherwise, human shields are a permanent trump card for any group barbaric enough to use them.

Watching the left erupt with celebrations, rallies, cheering, and abominations like members of the US Congress spreading lies intended to stoke rage against Israel (I’ve linked to many examples of such in my two recent posts about aspects of the crisis) has also made me question my principles.

The message I’m getting from the rest of the world is that if you’re a designated oppressor in the Intersectional Hierarchy, you’re going to be held to much higher principles and standards than any designated victim, and there is no atrocity—not even burning babies alive or breaking the pelvic bones of kindergarteners and grandmothers with the violence of your gang rape—that gives the oppressor a right to respond with force.

Playing by these rules is unfair, unjust, and, most crucially, a prescription to turn the entire world into a hellscape ruled by the worst and most brutal people who are oppressed by Intersectional Hierarchy rules.

How did this happen? Some slopes are slippery, and thus “slippery slope” is not always a fallacy. Much like “correlation isn’t causation,” it requires intelligent analysis on a case-by-case basis.

Not wearing a seatbelt correlates to flying through windshields.

Not situating candles properly on stable surfaces correlates to houses burning down.

Drinking to excess correlates to liver failure.

In a way directly analogous to how correlation points to causation when you have a hypothesis of a causative mechanism that explains how the causation results in the correlation, the “slippery slope” isn’t a fallacious argument when you can back it up with examples, facts, and evidence.

Most of the time that “slippery slope is a fallacy!” gets invoked, we are already well down the slope and picking up speed.

Some slopes are so slippery that they lead to the mobius strip we find ourselves in at present.

What Does Intolerance Mean?

This comic strip gets tossed about on the internet a lot, usually to justify someone being canceled or deplatformed for their “hate,” nearly always “hate” of the ridiculously stupid sort—like believing that there are only two sexes.

The interpretation of Popper is debatable here, but the idea is widely held, even distinct from Popper as the origin.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about it. I think I understand what the point is, but it seems to not work out this way in reality much, if ever.

For example, this principle is often used to shut down the speech of TERFs, both in the literal sense (actual radical feminists) and in the colloquial sense, the sense in which TERF only means “anti-trans bad person.” People called TERF who are not remotely radical feminists include me and some non-feminist friends. It is never used against radical trans activists, whose tactics are often vile beyond words.

I crossed the trans activists once — my crime was refusing to tweet what they told me to tweet on an old Twitter account I used to run about women in mathematics — and the response was so vile that, a couple of years later, I’m still affected by it. No longer in a PTSD sense, but in the sense that permanent impressions have been left in my mind. The first video that went viral after the October 7 attacks was the nude corpse of a woman, and I didn’t have a strong emotional reaction. It was only later, when other videos went viral, that I started having feelings about the attacks.

Why? The paradigm of that first video — a raped woman who has been murdered and whose corpse is being desecrated — was so entirely familiar to me. I had read many accounts, both sent to me and to other “TERFs,” describing in detail that transwomen wanted to do such things to me. The threat of being “raped to death” is an old one, one that’s been in my brain since I started saying what I think online about whether the 6’3”, bearded, smirking “people with penises” using the ladies’ bathroom at my university campus were in fact women.

I’ve also read many accounts, mostly on Reddit but in other places too, of how transwomen fantasize about a future wherein “AFABs” (an acronym for “assigned female at birth,” which just means “woman”) are forced to be their slaves and kept in our “proper place.”

So my brain had already played that scenario out, many times, with both myself and friends of mine who’ve also run afoul of the trans activist brigade, in the role of the murdered woman. I knew that atrocities of this nature are simply what men with Cluster B disorders want to do to women, so some Cluster B psychopaths in the Middle East doing it when they had the chance wasn’t remotely surprising.

How did we get to a point where this principle is used to uplift the voices of psychotic monsters and shut down ordinary women who believe that they shouldn’t have to compete against men in sports or have men in their locker rooms?

How did we get to a point where most of the world is pointing at a country who just suffered 1500 brutal, barbaric murders and atrocities including grandmothers and kindergarteners having their pelvic bones broken with the force of violent gang rape—and accusing them of war crimes because they stopped providing the territory ruled by the gang rapists and terrorists with free water and electricity until they return the hostages they’re almost certainly presently gang raping?

Definitions are Everything

The answer is simple: the Intersectional Hierarchy re-defined “intolerance.” That was always the key to the idea in the comic—a broadly reasonable definition of “intolerance” such that only truly fringe ideas fall inside the notion of “intolerant.”

We’ve left that so far behind now, it’s doubtful we could find it with a telescope.

The US campuses where our ruling class comes from are cheering and applauding for the gang rapists and murderers, gleefully spreading the image of the paragliding rapists on their way to carrying out mass rape and mass slaughter—criminals with whom they specifically identify. Reminder: the chant is “They’ve got tanks; we’ve got hang gliders!” We. First person plural, including the speaker(s).

Now that “intolerant” is a synonym for “finding even one thing wrong with what an oppressed-by-Intersectional-Hierarchy-rules person or group does,” the old rules no longer apply.

This is terrifying. And it should be.

When Are Principles A Kind of Weakness?

These questions and doubts correspond quite well to something else I’ve been thinking about a lot, since Trump started facing multiple layers of prosecution. Ben Shapiro commented on this development with the warning that nothing would ever be the same. Now that prosecuting political rivals was on the table, the next Republican administration would do the same. Then so would the next Democratic administration. The idea that the US is a place where elections are decided by voters, not by prosecuting one’s rivals, is over.

I hoped he was wrong, and I hoped very much that the right side of the aisle would not respond in kind.

The election-year discussions of expanding the Supreme Court also come to mind. Expanding the Supreme Court to put more leftists on it would simply result in the next Republican president expanding it even more, and it would go on, ad infinitum, until eventually we’re all preparing for our confirmation hearings starting around puberty. (I’m exaggerating….or am I?)

I hoped that even if the Democrats do pull off this stunt, that the next Republican president would refrain from tit-for-tat. Constitutional government is too precious to fuck with in this manner, I believed, and hoped that the Republicans would safeguard it by not responding in kind.

I don’t know what to hope for anymore.

Implications in General

There is surely a time for fighting by the rules, regardless of what your opponent does. As is the case with most women who have non-Woke opinions on the internet, I sometimes get grossly misogynistic abuse sent to my inbox. Responding in kind—for example, by writing an equally repugnant fantasy about all transwomen being enslaved—is not something I would suggest to anyone, nor would I do such myself. I wouldn’t cheat in a sports tournament or exam, even if everyone else was cheating.

But these are simple matters of my wanting to sleep well at night.

What Holds Me Back

The events of the last two weeks, especially watching people (mostly but not exclusively on the left) demand of Israel that it show kindness, mercy, and compassion to the perpetrators of the worst pogrom since the Holocaust—that Israel must live by its principles, even if that makes its children vulnerable to barbarians—has me questioning everything.

What holds me back from saying “Fuck it, game on, there are no more rules, since rules are for suckers?”

I’m not sure what principle would replace the principles that presently hold good people back from acting like our enemies.

But I’m also becoming convinced—rapidly—that refusing to stoop to an enemy’s level is worth what, exactly? What is its consequence?

In the Middle East, if Israel abides by the wishes of the left and responds with nothing that risks any civilians, the consequence will be more and worse events of this nature. Emboldening barbarians is what will happen if weakness is shown there.

Unlike in the West, where we say that diversity is our strength, in the Middle East they correctly recognize that strength is their strength, and showing weakness is deadly.

It’s hard to imagine a worse signal of weakness than failing to respond to the events of October 7 with military might.

It is hard, sometimes, to differentiate logic from emotion. To separate a conclusion from the reasoning that gets you there.

I’m not saying anyone should do anything, and despite my atheism I’ve said prayers of thanks a few times this week that I don’t have to make the decisions that Israel must now make.

But it really does seem to me that living by principles and rules that your enemy—whether it’s a political party determined to instantiate their Intersectional Hierarchy and its rules in every aspect of life, or a bloodthirsty death cult of barbarians who want to rape and murder your children—scoffs at is nothing more than a prescription to turn the entire world into a hellscape ruled by the worst and most brutal people who are oppressed by Intersectional Hierarchy rules.

We in the West, especially in the United States, have grown accustomed to the luxury of a world where tit-for-tat rules, where responding with overwhelming force to set up a game theory where bad guys never do that again, is considered irresponsible, distasteful, and shameful.

The West re-defined “intolerance” so that it relates to the Intersectional Hierarchy, not morality. And the chaos snowballed from there, leaving us where we are now: where our principles are a weakness, where the ability to stand up and say no to barbarism is gone so utterly that we are cheering it as “liberation,” a grand and glorious victory over “oppressors.”

We are going to have to get over ourselves and our emotional distaste for responding to evil with force.

We are going to have to find a way to do this with restraint that prevents us from becoming like our enemies, but with enough force that we don’t end up ruled by them.

Where do we go from here?

I don’t know, but I am relatively certain of one thing: nowhere good.

Comments are back on for now, but I’m really out of patience for justification of rape and murder, as well as the racism that motivates it — people who just can’t bring themselves to say that no, not even being brown and having a difficult life justifies barbarism. I will start banning people if this shit keeps up.

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About Me and My Substack: I’m a data scientist whose great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.

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