Thursday, March 10, 2011

Why don't I just shut up?

Back when I was in high school, in a zoology class, the teacher was giving us a test on the classification of various pickled or otherwise prepared critters. We were allowed to look over the various dead things, along with their classifications, before the test.

I was glancing over the specimens without thinking too much about it until I came to a mislabeled fish. It was clearly a tiny flounder (a "bony fish") of the type commonly sold in pet stores, yet it was labeled as a "skate" and classified as "Class: Chondrichthyes" ("cartilaginous fish").

I pointed out this error to the teacher. To me, it was a critical mistake, on the level of claiming a dolphin is a fish or a bat is a bird. But the teacher just said, "for our purposes, it is a Chondrichthyes".

I said he was misleading his students in this way; he was not educating them but giving them false information. In fact, I just wouldn't shut up about it.

He said I was "beating a dead horse" and I needed to "drop it". Even on my test, though, I wrote a comment about "mislabeled as..." rather than just letting it go.

Yes, I was a pain even then.

That's why I still speak out. I value the truth. Truth, even when inconvenient, painful, or annoying is still better than a comforting lie. Liberty is better for the individual than The State. Taxation is theft. The military is anti-liberty and pro-tyranny. And no amount of denial will change the facts.

Added:
I've recently realized this is why I won't go along with the "transgender" lie or the "non-binary" nonsense. If it's a flounder, it's a flounder even if it imagines it is (or lies about being) a skate. I won't lie or go along with a lie (or a delusion) just because I'm told to do so. You aren't helping by going along. If you identify the speeding truck that's coming at you as a butterfly, it's still a truck and will kill you if you don't move out of its way. No matter how much it hurts your feelings to admit it's really a truck. Reality doesn't care about your feelings. Every cell in your body will testify against you if you misidentify your sex (and "gender" is a feature of some words, not of biological lifeforms-- another lie). Now, you might get away with it if I can't tell by looking, and I don't really care in that case. But if I can tell by looking that you are lying about what you are, I'm not going to go along with the lie. And I'm not sorry.

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