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Abdul El-Sayed stands up for trans people & their rights in "hostile" 60 Minutes interview - LGBTQ Nation (www.lgbtqnation.com)
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Trans journalist Erin Reed called Douthat’s interview “hostile” and noted that El-Sayed previously stood up for trans rights when asked in August by Fox News’ Jesse Watters whether he supports “sex changes for minors.” El- Sayed replied, “The government shouldn’t tell you what kind of health care you should have, and if you’re a minor, that’s between you and your doctor and your parents.”

In September, a state university student asked about his position on gender-affirming care. El-Sayed answered, “I don’t think the government gets to have a say about what health care is provided in what circumstances and why.”

Reed also praised El-Sayed for remaining steadfastly committed to trans rights at a time when other Democratic politicians have adopted right-wing framing, saying they oppose government-funded surgeries for trans kids (something that almost never occurs) and “biological men in women’s sports” (an inaccurate and insulting reference to trans girls and women athletes who want to play on sports teams matching their gender identity).

“El-Sayed’s race will be one of the most important to watch on election night,” Reed wrote. “If he can win a highly contested seat despite the anti-transgender Republican money spent against him and the attacks from the right-leaning wing of his own party, it will be a clear case that embracing anti-trans views is not required to win swing states and swing districts across the United States.”

On his campaign website, under the heading “Healthcare Freedom for Women and LGBTQ+ Americans,” El-Sayed wrote, “Healthcare decisions should be made by a patient (and their parents if they are a minor) and their doctor–no one else. That includes reproductive and gender-affirming care…. I oppose any effort to criminalize certain medications and the use of lawfare or funding cuts to stop healthcare providers from providing full-spectrum healthcare that meet all the needs of their diverse communities.”

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[–] 1 point 10 hours ago (1 child)

Absolutely.

So you have objective and subjective morality. Morality simply meaning actions we should or should not take. If something is immoral, it is an action we should not take. What actions should we not take is predicated on logic.

The fundamental premise here is simple: You cannot desire the violation of your own will.

This is actually impossible. Let's say for instance that you don't want to be punched in the face, but then you want me to punch you in the face. You are not desiring the violation of your own will here, your will has simply changed to desiring that I strike you. Even if you changed your mind again, you are still not desiring the violating of your own will.

And since it is not possible to quantify value in an objective way, you also cannot create an objective hierarchy of value for will. Your will and mine are equal, for all intents and purposes. Any and all ideas we might have that seem to contradict that claim are merely our personal opinions.

So what this fundamentally means is that since you would never want me to initiate any actions of which violated your will - AND you cannot quantify an objective hierarchy of value for human will - then it leads that you as well should not initiate any actions of which violate my will.

Imagine the golden rule but edited in just the slightest. It's not do unto others as you would want done to you but do unto others as they would want done to them.

In fact, majoritively this is how all human societies already engineer themselves - they just take a great many smaller caveats away from this in their own quest for greed and power.

Take murder, rape, assault, theft, or fraud for instance. ALL of those things are only made manifest when at least one party initiates an act against another in which the second party did not consent. If you hand me $20 and your will is aligned to do so (a gift, say), that does not manifest the idea of theft. But if I take that $20 from you without your permission, I have violated your will within a logical order of operations across time.

In short, we both held the same will as it pertained to that $20 - exclusive authority over it.

The reason why you are the owner of that $20 is because you fulfilled two primary fundamental criteria: 1. You desired exclusive authority over it. And 2. You did not violate the will of another as it pertains to that $20 in order to obtain exclsuive authority over it.

In other words, you wanted it and you didn't steal it.

And these things predated my will to also hold exclusive authority over it. We have a conflict here though - a conflict of wills - where both of us desire an outcome that we both cannot have. There is only one $20 bill and both of us want exclusive authority over it, but only one of us can.

So morally, we back you, because logically neither of us can desire the violation of our own wills and also because your will predated mine. In short, in order for you to continue to hold exclusive authority over that $20, you need do nothing, whereas for me to hold exclusive authority over it, I must violate the second rule of ownership - I must violate your will in order to have it. I have to rob you.

This is why societies punish murderers, rapists, robbers, and fraudsters. They don't punish all of them because of power and corruption, but as a whole, all societies always have done this, or desired to do this, given their resources and power.

Rape as another example does not manifest unless there's at least one non-consenting party. Same thing for murder. If both of us went into an MMA match together for example and we both fully understand the risks therein - including but not limited to possible death - then so long as we both followed the rules then if one of us died in the ring, we didn't commit murder. Would it be a tragedy? Well, sure, but it wouldn't (and shouldn't) be called murder.

Now if I laced my gloves with lead which wasn't in the rules and you didn't consent to that? Then I murdered you. Even if my intent wasn't to kill you, that is still breaking your consent which lead to a highly negative outcome for you. In many societies across the world as well we wouldn't even classify such an act as first degree murder, and the penalty wouldn't be as severe, though it would still be severe.

Or if someone tries to enter my home to harm me and my family and I put them down - that too isn't murder, even though the assailant didn't want to die, the logic there is that my will predated theirs - I did not want someone to attack me and my family, or even enter my home without my consent - so the moment they did my act of violence was a reaction to their initiated act of which violated my will. It'd be akin to taking my $20 back if you stole it from me. I should be allowed to at that point even if you don't want me to because it's my $20.

In fact you already agree to this because you have no choice because of the two cardinal premises here. You would never want me for example to violate your will, so even if you were to tell me you would be OK if I took $20 from you that's missing the point - that just means your will was aligned to give me $20. I again, never robbed you. You never ACTUALLY want to be robbed, you might just agree if someone takes something from you that you subjectively agree with their justification for doing so and thus, change your will so that you would be OK with them having what they took.

Your will was never violated then.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 hours ago

    I think I see the problem now. You're confusing a moral principle you personally endorse with a conclusion that necessarily follows from logic.

    Your entire philosophy appears to depend on three claims:

    1. Nobody wants their own will violated.
    2. Nobody's will has objectively greater value than anyone else's.
    3. Therefore, nobody should violate another person's will.

    Except 3 does not logically follow from 1 and 2.

    I can acknowledge that you don't want your will violated, acknowledge that your will has no objectively demonstrable superiority over mine, and still decide to violate it.

    You can call that immoral. You can call me selfish. But you cannot call it logically contradictory without introducing an additional moral premise establishing that I ought to respect your will.

    You're attempting to derive an "ought" from an "is," and you've simply skipped the step where you're supposed to justify it.

    But your theory of property rights gets even more interesting.

    You claim that ownership requires two things: wanting exclusive authority over something and not violating anyone else's will to obtain it. You then assert that whichever claim existed first takes precedence.

    Okay. Let's test that.

    I hereby declare my desire for exclusive authority over the entire surface of Mars.

    I've violated nobody's will in making this declaration, and my desire predates the desires of any future Martian settlers.

    By your stated criteria, I've satisfied both requirements for ownership.

    When the first settlers arrive, are they violating my will by occupying my property?

    If not, why not?

    What additional requirement have I failed to satisfy, and more importantly, where did you logically derive that requirement from your original premises?

    Because this illustrates the fundamental problem with your "logical order of operations."

    Something happening first doesn't establish that it has moral authority over something happening later. That's an additional normative rule you've introduced without justification.

    You keep using examples of murder, rape, and theft because those are cases where your conclusions conveniently align with moral intuitions most people already share.

    But demonstrating that your framework agrees with conventional morality in obvious cases doesn't prove your framework is logically necessary. It doesn't even establish that your principles work consistently in less obvious cases.

    And the funniest part is your insistence that I "already agree" with your philosophy because I supposedly have no logical choice.

    No. I can agree with your conclusions about murder, theft, and consent without accepting your reasoning for arriving at them.

    That's not a contradiction. It's an elementary distinction between the validity of an argument and the truth of its conclusion.

    So here's what I'd genuinely like you to demonstrate:

    Can you derive your principle of nonaggression, and your rule that earlier desires establish property rights, using only your two original premises, without introducing any additional moral assumptions?

    Because until you can, you haven't demonstrated that morality is objectively dictated by logic.

    You've described your preferred moral framework, assumed its foundational rules are true, and then mistaken the resulting consistency for proof.

    That's not a logical derivation. It's circular justification with extra

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