All Thoughts Being Equal

Now I've gone and done it. This week I've found myself in tiresome social-media sparring matches not once, but twice, over matters I thought were relatively uncontroversial. I should have learned that lesson a long time ago, perhaps, but in this case it was strange: my interlocutors this time were atheists, and we were debating philosophical points. And yet, for all that they were nominally in my own "tribe," they weren't, and in the end I found them more distasteful than the far-left social justice crusaders of yesteryear . I. I'll start with one that didn't actually involve me, except on the side. Michael Luciano, a staff writer at The Daily Banter, wrote a piece called Atheists Don't Owe Your Social Justice Agenda a Damn Thing , criticizing social-justice-oriented atheists for presuming to speak for all atheists. I think he was only partially right: it does seem a bit presumptuous to say that one can only be a "good atheist" (or the f...

I. Robin Koerner, a liberty-minded Brit whom I heard speak at last year's Washington State Libertarian Party convention , has a new article out at Huffington Post called Your Problem With Guns or Gays Is Not Political . Given my moderate bias against guns, shockingly, I kind of agree with him. But I also think this is a case that nicely illustrates how the personal is (sometimes) political. I recommend that you go read the whole thing, but I also want to excerpt some juicy quotes. First, Koerner describes his own British noncommittal stance towards guns. As he puts it, "guns feature nowhere in British culture." I expect that most Americans would in practice find "taking tea" a bit odd, even though we academically know what it is from various imported movies and television shows, and many Americans like tea. But then Koerner gets into the meat of his point: Many decent people who have no interest in guns simply can't imagine what it must be like to be ...