All Thoughts Being Equal

I've informally decided to allocate roughly ten percent of my gross annual earnings to donations, in the spirit of Effective Altruism and the "Giving What We Can" pledge. As public reporting of contributions is rather in line with the EA philosophy, I'm keeping a record of what I've done. Maybe it will inspire people to imitate or critique my donation choices! I donated a total of $500 in December 2015. This year, since I didn't earn a lot of money, was mostly about starting to give , and establishing a baseline from which I can iterate and move towards a more satisfactory and effective contribution portfolio. So in future, I suspect that my contributions to, say the "De Facto Subscription" category will stay flat while donations to actual charities will increase. You might ask: why are you publishing this? The answer is: Other people have. Also, why should charity be secret ? Humanities Donations: 5% In 2015, I donated $25 to...

Now that we've seen why Western Washington University decided (and was justified, in my view) to cancel classes for Tuesday, 24 November 2015, in response to racist and threatening comments on the anonymous social media shithole application Yik Yak, let's look at the reaction from the students and the community. Was their response justified? I don't think so. This post is a partial follow-up to: On the rigged-world fallacy and pullback error , Rhetorical imperialism I. Let's get this out of the way first: of the two "camps," so to speak, of students who disagreed with President Bruce Shepard's decision to suspend classes, the ones who thought classes shouldn't have been suspended have a very weak position. Now, there wasn't a lot of publicity of the various posts made, so I can understand why—at the time—some people might have thought the class cancellation was the wrong call. I hope that since those posts have come to light, those peop...

A dive into the inexcusable vitriol burbling up through social media and message boards over the WWU Viking mascot controversy. 4chan and Yik Yak are the main cesspools here, although Breitbart and Twitter make appearances. I. I wish the previous post had been the end of it, me making some criticism at the WWU AS for being silly about social media nonsense, then ending with a half-joking, half-serious suggestion that WWU change its mascot to the Viking... landers. Tee hee!  Or, you know, some fucking asswipes could ruin everything. That could happen, too. What... the... Are you... fucking... kidding... And that's just about when Western Washington University, for the first time in decades, decided to cancel classes on Tuesday, 24 November . Now, these are just the things that were publicly available to me [NB: The 4chan thread has since been deleted] , so there could very well have been additional private threats, emails, or deleted Yik Yak posts that I...

This post is a follow up to the AS Elections series: Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3 . This post series of posts is going to be a rather odd one. The first few sections I wrote under the intended title of "AS Elections 2015: Representation Without Representation," addressing the initial mascot stupidity and the messaging of the WWU Associated Students. Then some shit went down, and things became, well, problematic . I can't in good conscience keep the rest of my thoughts under the same title, so I'm adding this intro by way of disclaimer. Yes , I have another post about the racist pricks who decided it would be "top kek" to "joke" on anonymous social media about lynching people. I also have some criticism of the WWU AS, though, and more importantly I don't want one criticism obscuring the other. Since the AS did some questionable things first (and I'll make a hub post with a timeline, maybe) this critique comes first. Here we go: I. ...