I think they're saying that they're fine with kids playing with OPPOSITE GENDER TOYS but that uh they also are fine with the kids being cis and that they're not forcing the kid to transition and brainwashing them into believing they're trans, which is definitely a thing that could happen if you're very rational I suppose?? But they don't know how to turn on the lights in the factory or get the beavers into the hole, so whatever.

One thing that's interesting is that on first discovering this term "Rationalism" one generally has to spend a lot of time working out ("just fucking checking") that it isn't *supposed* to be a recapitulation of "rationalism" in Early Modern Philosophy (or at least you do if you're the sort of over-educated arsehole who associates "rationalism" with that usage - with all due apologies to my friends and family: I got into a thing and ended up with a post-graduate degree, dunno how). But *then* the whole enterprise ends up looking so remarkably like a recapitulation of the worst *caricature* of the likes of Descartes, where just *thinking* - solipsistically - about things gets you to the answers you need, without ever having to check. Of course, be they Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, whatever, the Early Modern Rationalists didn't actually believe that (although they could be accused of behaving like it sometimes - cf. Spinoza's *Ethics*), and that kind of rationalism was devoted to putting *empirical* observations on a sound metaphysical footing, whereas this extremely online Rationalism seems primarily to posit as undeniable and in need of no justification certain metaphysical claims (everything is just matter; ethics is utilitarian calculus; objective rationality is co-extensive with a "view from nowhere"; hence why simulations are qualitatively identical with that which they simulate). And then you get all this solipsistic guff about made-up numbers and stats and so on, because somebody's adopted the biggest criticism of that caricature as a maxim rather than a warning: if I just apply the technique rigorously enough (by my own, often self-serving, standard for rigour) then my extrapolations are worth it just on their own. It seems natural, at that point, that people just forget to do any checking: they've adopted a powerfully individualist metaphysics that brooks no alternative hypotheses and which insists that the most important thing for anybody to do in working things out is not to work stuff out bit by bit and respond adequately to evidence, but to come up with as complete a single picture of how things are in one fell swoop...inevitably that's going to run into problems when knowledge might be benefited more by us going out into the world and looking, responding critically to counter-evidence, and embracing at least a modicum of general scepticism (that's "scepticism" as in moderation and agnosticism - I was gonna do a bit about Berkeley here but I would probably top myself if I were ever asked to re-read it).

Spite donating also makes perfect sense as a political tactic. The TERFS might think twice about targeting other charities now that they know it’ll backfire harshly. For a similar example, see the town that turned a nazi march into a “[walkathon](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/18/neo-nazis-tricked-into-raising-10000-for-charity)” raising money for anti-fascism.

They’re not genuinely deontological, just consequentialists lying about their motives. The grey tribe in particular wouldn’t know how to argue in good faith after spending so much time “proving” the Russia investigation is a nothingburger.

I think Glinner should qualify as an honorary rationalist based entirely on his level of self-awareness: https://twitter.com/Hbomberguy/status/1088733774936977409