You Can't Describe Your Way Out of Reality.

There is a move that magicians use when attempting to fool the audience which is called ‘sleight of hand.’ A sleight of hand is when a magician uses misdirection and clever hand movements in order to fool the audience. For example, when doing a card trick the magician can use clever hand movements to make it look like he is putting a card back in the deck, meanwhile he is really placing the card in his pocket or hiding it up his sleeve. The goal of the sleight of hand is for the magician to be doing one thing with the cards while is looks like he is doing something else. The genius of the sleight of hand is that if it is done right the magician can manipulate the cards in whatever way he wants with the audience being none the wiser.

This is how I feel about the way “woke” Social Justice activists use language.

Often the Woke activists will respond to those who disagree by attacking the meaning of the language that is being used by those who disagree with wokeness. You can make an argument objecting to some woke idea, or put forward some idea of you own, and instead of responding to the central point that you are making the woke will seek to undercut and subvert your argument. They can do this in a number of ways including but not limited to: intentionally misinterpretating your argument, reinterpreting the meaning of the words you use to describe your idea, and subverting or undercutting the meaning of the concepts and ideas in play. This is very hard to describe, so lets take a look at some examples that will help us get a hold of exactly what’s going on here.

Suppose I ask you "what is a stack of books? I want to know how many books you need to have on top of each other in order to have a '“stack.” How many do I need for a stack? Is one book a stack? what about 2 books? Or 3 books? Or 4 books?”

For the sake of argument let us say that you answer and say that I need 4 books to have a stack. Now, pretend I respond by asking "why does a stack need to be 4 books? Why doesn’t 3 books count as a stack?" You can't think of a principled difference between a stack of 3 books and a stack of 4 book and agree that 3 books is a stack. So I say "Why not 2 books? Why isn’t 2 books a stack?" You agree that you can’t think of a deeply principled reason for why you would say that 3 books are required for a stack instead of 2. So then I say "why not 1 book? Why can’t just 1 book be a stack?"

At this point you begin to see the game I’ve played and so you say "because one book is not a stack!" I continue with my language game and say “Why not? Is five small books that are 10 pages long a stack? Is one 50,000 page book a stack? What counts as a stack? You don’t know, and that proves that you don’t know what a stack of books is.” You are stumped. You can see that I’ve done something wrong, but it is very hard to figure out exactly what the game I’m playing is. 

This move is called "the fallacy of the heap,” and was first explained by Eubulides of Miletus, who was a Greek philosopher with a fantastic name. The fallacy can be explained as follows:

A single grain of sand is not a heap. Adding a second grain of sand does not turn a non-heap into a heap. There is no specific point where we have a group of sand grains that is not a heap which we can turn into a heap by adding just one grain of sand. where is the line? 500 grains of sand? what about 499 grains of sand? We know that if we add enough grains of sands, one grain at a time, at some point we will have a heap of sand, but it is very hard to draw and exact line.

That is the fallacy of the heap.

The way this fallacy works is to say that because the boundary between two things is blurry that there is really no boundary at all, or the boundary is so arbitrary as to be worthless. Another way to think about it is to say that the heap fallacy works by claiming that the existence of unclear examples means that there are no clear cases. We might also say that the heap fallacy works by claiming that the existence of boundaries that are not precise means there are really no boundaries at all, or that the boundaries are so trivial as to be useless.

The fallacy is one example of definitional line blurring: the practice of attacking the meaning of terms by attacking, subverting, and otherwise blurring the boundaries and lines used to define the terms in play.

This logic can be used with other things as well. Think of a table and chair. We can blur those lines. Is a chair I set my drink on a table? Is a table I sit on a chair? What about a picnic table? Does the fact that there are unclear cases this mean we don't know the difference between tables and chairs? Of course not. All these examples use the same bad reasoning: they claim the existence of unclear cases implies there are no clear cases, or that the existence of edge cases and borderline cases means that we don't actually know where the edges are or where the lines are drawn.

This is a move that often gets used by “woke” Social Justice activists. They attempt to avoid dealing with the central point of an objection by playing a sleight of hand with words, and last week provided a fantastic example of this tactic which I think we can use to show exactly how this tactic gets employed in the real world.

For some time now the twitter account @libsoftiktok has been publishing videos of raunchy drag queen performances that are clearly not appropriate for children, but were still occurring with children present. I attempted to do a thread about why this was wrong, and why people were rightly opposed to this. In my attempt to do this I referred to the performers as ‘drag queens’ and I said the sort of thing in the videos had always been sexual.

This is where the blurring of lines began.

No sooner had I made the case against this sort of thing when people came into my timeline and began to say that my opposition to drag performances for children were unfounded because not all drag queen performances are sexual as I claimed. The example they used was Mrs. Doubtfire. Mrs. Doubtfire was a man dressed as a woman and was therefore a drag queen, and nobody thinks this is sexual. Technically they have a point: Mrs. Doubtfire was a man dressed as a woman and was therefore performing as a drag queen, and Robin Williams performance as Mrs. Doubtfire is not a sexual performance.

The game here is to point out that Mrs. Doubtfire was a drag queen, and then claim if that case is acceptable I can’t object to the other cases of drag queens. After all, if Mrs. Doubtfire is a drag queen and that’s fine, there can’t be anything inherently wrong with drag queens performing for children.

The is where Chris Rufo suggested a solution to our problem. He wants to stop using the term ‘drag queens’ and start using the term ‘trans-strippers.’ Some people (who will remain unnamed so as to avoid creating a mob) said this was a dishonest tactic. I think those people are missing the point about why Chris wants us to use the term ‘trans strippers’ rather than ‘drag queen.’ Chris is not arguing we should shift our wording to be dishonest, he is suggesting we do it it because of the tactic the woke use to defend sexualized drag shows for kids.

When you use the term 'drag queen' woke activists can take advantage of the fact that ‘drag queen’ can be used to refer to both Mrs Doubtfire and trans strip shows. The woke use this ambiguity to defend strip shows for kids by hiding behind the fact that ‘drag queen’ can also be used to refer to performances that are more like Mrs Doubtfire than strip shows.

Pointing out that ‘drag queen’ can be used to refer to both trans strippers AND Mrs. Doubtfire is an example of the woke using a sort of sleight of hand to defend the indefensible. They pretend that an event with trans strippers doing sexual dances is the same as Mrs. Doubtfire on the grounds that both the trans stripper and Mrs. Doubtfire are technically ‘drag queens.’

Chris Rufo’s solution is to use the term ‘trans strippers’ because that term has all the lurid sexual connotations that allow us to avoid woke attempts to blur the lines. After all, nobody thinks of Mrs. Doubtfire when being asked about ‘trans strippers.’  If you object to 'drag queens' the activists can start blurring the lines by nitpicking the term ‘drag queen’ and bringing up Mrs Doubtfire. If you say 'trans stripper' they can't do that. This is not dishonest, this is leveraging the power of language to make arguments that are clear enough that attempts to blur the line will fail.

There is another point to be made here that will help us out.

When someone attempts to blur the definitions you use to make your argument bringing up borderline examples or edge cases and saying"These borderline cases prove we don't know where the lines are," the correct response is this:

"THE ONLY REASON YOU CAN THINK UP CASES THAT FALL ON OR CLOSE TO THE LINE IS THAT YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHERE THE LINE IS ."

See how that works? If woke activists do not know where the line is, how do they know that some cases fall on the line? The woke activists can only able to blur the lines by bringing up cases that fall on or close to the line, because they know where the line is, and the know which cases fall on or near that line. When they bring up edge cases, they only know those cases are on the edge because the edge is clear enough for them to find.

Precision is the antidote to word games, and clarity is the antidote to argumentative and rhetorical nonsense. If you are precise and clear you can bypass the word games and force the conversation back to the central point. That is when you can make your best case. The woke might be able to play word games, but they cannot describe their way out of reality, and the use of precise and clear language makes the reality of the situation clear to all so it can be discussed and debated on fair terms.

This is the way to handle linguistic sleight of hand.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.