All Thoughts Being Equal

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 partial follow-up to: But first, you've got to get MAD! , Atheism doesn't mean you're smart , and Diagnosis of an overwhelming fear pt. 2 I. My friend Asher has a new post about dealing with bigotry in online spaces. It's enough to get me up and writing on this theme again, after several forays in the recent past (see above). Because I'm never in complete political-ideological agreement with anyone I know at any given time, at least on this blog, let's start with what I do agree with: I actually used to argue with bigots, to engage with them rationally, and to try to convince them. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time and effort trying to convince random dudes on the Internet that no, my sexuality was not a mental illness, and that no, there actually is no scientific basis for an innate intelligence difference across racial groups. In every instance, I had all the evidence, but they had all the stubbornness. In every instance, they f...