Abigail Thorn Quotes

Transhumanism makes a great conspiracy costume. There's always a lot of tech news so you can rip stuff straight from the headlines about Elon Musk putting computers in monkeys and it'll get clicks. It's also not explicitly religious or racial. If you just come out the gate and say "Jews are planning to exterminate Christian white people!" then a lot of folks will go "Yeah? Allreet, on your bike Adolf!" but if you frame it as 'Elites are planning transhumanism', then at least some people will go, 'Wait, really?' and you can always add the hardcore stuff later once you've got their attention.

If you ask three philosophers how social constructs work, you'll get four theories.

The real meaning of the text, or at least one possible meaning of it, is given by something that is not present in the text itself. Basically, meaning is like jazz. It's about the notes you don't play.

Security might never go back to the way it was. It can’t. The surveillance and the paranoia and the invasive measures can only ever expand, because it’s not actually grounded in any presently knowable facts about threat or safety. The whole game is about risk-managing the possible future, and since what might happen in the future is infinitely imaginable, the justification for more security becomes infinite too.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that many though not all people would decide that faced with an opponent whose entire position is the total denial of your humanity as the kind of human being that you are, the only winning move in such a game would be not to play.

When you leave the classroom, politics and metaphysics will come at you at the same time. We're not just doing philosophy for the hell of it. We are tinkering with the engine of the world here.

On Philosophy Tube, I call all the shots, I do all the writing, I do all the research. I plan it all out, and it's my show. I miss the feeling of being at the bottom and having to climb up again.

Harry Potter is a bit of a bourgeois fantasy.

Gender is one of the way that human subjects come into existence. The technical term here is "subjectification" and that process happens publicly. Gender creates the illusion of a private self, which exists before all of that, but this is just an illusion. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it has no pronouns.

Masculinity is a subject about which I know more than I should, but less than some of you may think. I studied it for a number of years but I never quite had the natural talent.

It's always good to squat over the mirror and take a good, hard look at your own ideology sometimes. 'Cause if you don't do the thinking someone else will do the thinking for you.

Racism is a full-blown normative theory in its own right. Writing it off as just “hate” which needs “love” to combat it can be a little bit reductionist; it can stop us from understanding it.

The reason I left [my pre-transition videos] up is because I don't see Philosophy Tube as being about me, it's a bigger mission about education and people's relationship to knowledge that I am trying to live up to.

Art isn't a statement or a question. If it was, the artist would just write it down. Art isn't philosophy with pictures. It's art!

Trauma isn’t always like a lightning bolt where you know that you’ve been hit. Sometimes trauma is like poison that someone slips into your food in little doses and you sit down every night and you eat that poison and you don’t realize that it’s building up inside you until suddenly you stop functioning.