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from the does-the-pensioner-want-to-repay-his-benefits-and-go-back-to-work,-too? dept.
In the quixotic battle against old age, some people use skin care and spin class.
That’s not enough for Emile Ratelband, a 69-year-old who feels like he’s in his 40s. The Dutch pensioner is asking a court in his hometown of Arnhem, southeast of Amsterdam, to change his birth certificate so that it says he took his first breath on March 11, 1969, rather than on March 11, 1949. The judges heard his case Monday and promised they would render a verdict in the next several weeks.
Ratelband sees his request as no different from a petition to change his name or the gender he was assigned at birth — and isn’t bothered that this comparison might offend transgender people, whose medical needs have been recognized by the American Medical Association. It comes down to free will, he maintains.
I want to be recognized as an alien trapped in an Earthling's body.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday November 09 2018, @11:46PM
This is the difference that makes me say that he "may be" a genius, and not he is clearly one.
He is claiming that age is fluid.
If we reasonably define our terms ("age" as revolutions around the sun, "fluid" as might change in the future), then he's dead wrong, and it's pretty easy to spot that.
He is further claiming that age is fluid, "no different from name or gender." That's trolling.
There are people who claim, wrongly, that everything's fluid and reality is whatever you say it is. This is wrong, objectively wrong, yet many people who point it out are called intolerant or worse.
Our friend here is claiming an extension of that nutty idea by saying that age, name, gender are equivalently fluid. It's top-notch trolling; he's meeting their nutty wrong with his own nutty wrong, the wrongness of which is even obvious to them.
Now, if "everything is fluid" then so is age.
Age isn't.
Therefore, "everything" isn't fluid.
That's kind of a reset. Now that we've established that not everything is fluid, we can talk rationally about what things are objective and fixed, and what things are subjective and fluid--without instantly being called intolerant. (Otherwise, the pro-everything-fluid people are being intolerant here by claiming that, well, yes everything but *that* is fluid and is whatever some random person says it is.)