Originally written in response to a post claiming it's untruthful (?!) to vote for Biden

This whole thread is a great answer to a question a certain other user keeps asking.* They don’t get why people keep using words like “depravity” to describe their own interests and values. “Depravity” sounds like a bad thing, and why would you want to sound bad?

The answer is that it’s not really about what you call yourself. It’s about what other people call you, and about how tired you can get when you try to make them stop. If someone wants to say that you don’t believe in truth, saying “great, I don’t believe in truth” takes so much less time and effort than saying “I do believe in truth, and I think you’re using the word ‘truth’ wrong.” That’s why people who don’t believe they’re “depraved” have stopped arguing against the constant accusations that they’re “depraved,” or why people who aren’t actually socialists have accepted that their political positions will keep getting referred to as socialism.

*Not naming because I don’t remember whether or not I’ve blocked them. It feels rude to name someone if they can’t participate in the conversation.

Written in response to a post about transphobic hiring practices at a Rationalist nonprofit

More broadly speaking, Rationalists are the only group I interact with on the Internet where, when they accuse each other of doing bad things, those things are actually bad. Normally, I see people accuse each other of doing bad things, and those things are basically irrelevant and tied way too heavily to ship wars. I guess there's the occasional scammer like Sixpencee, but it's never as awful as the stuff Rationalists accuse each other of. Since I have no idea which accusations are true or false or somewhere in between, I end up feeling like I might be doing something wrong by interacting with Rationalists at all.