All Thoughts Being Equal

Yes, this is where I'm going to express an official blog-opinion on #GamerGate—in the most abstract way possible. [WARNING: This post is very long... one might even say excessively so.] I. Richard Feynman, in a 1978 commencement address at Caltech (and also in the last chapter of his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! ), describes a phenomena he calls "Cargo Cult Science": I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land....

or, A waltz down the primrose path of I-don't-even-know-what I've been meaning to finish the companion piece to this blog post (forming the third in a trilogy of social justice musings) but then Facebook happened. Okay, I might have poked a hornet's nest with this one, but I really want to understand a certain mindset. There's a certain kind of person who holds social justice as a very high goal (not bad; in fact, commendable) but who takes up the arms and armor of highly charged political language. I don't know what to call these people other than "social justice crusaders." They're activists-plus. They confuse the hell out of me. Just to get some things out of the way: I think I share their goals. I want social justice for everyone—a society where everyone is treated equitably, without undue irrational privilege or prejudice. Not judged by the color of their skin (or their religion, or their choice of whom to love or...) but by the content of...

or, Something from Nothing Last week, I attended a presentation by Dr. Kim Yong-Taek, my professor for Japanese 302 during winter quarter, called “Linguistic Descriptions of the Same Event in Japanese, Korean, Chinese and English.” A talk about how we do things with words! Okay, so it wasn’t about performatives per se , but it did make me think a lot about language in general, and continue to pester me with thoughts of linguistics study even though most of it makes my eyes glaze over.