All Thoughts Being Equal

There are lots of ideas whose adherents think grant them an intellectual carte blanche , like now that they answered one of the Big Questions all their other opinions suddenly become validated. I've explored this before with atheism : sure, I agree with the idea that wait a second, nobody's actually given me good reason to (1) believe in any supernatural Higher Power, much less (2) worship the thing , but that doesn't mean my reasons are the best possible reasons. Nor does it mean that my future statements on this topic (e.g., heard from some atheists—"Isn't it dumb how all Christians believe [thing not all Christians believe]?", "fairy-tale sky daddy" straw-theism—are any more likely to be correct. This might be the halo effect in action (hey, Ron Paul even has a halo in the picture!): atheists all agree on the God question, so we may be biased towards uncriticality when one of our own starts expounding on similar topics. Now I come to libert...

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...

or, Notes towards a new characterization of bumper-sticker politics in the American mainstream I. I've had a reasonably long-running joke that when Subarus accumulate enough bumper stickers, they metamorphose into Volvos. Certainly bumper stickers say something about the person whose vehicle they're on. This blog post (which I mostly chose because it features a liberal-bestickered Subaru and a conservative - bestickered pickup truck) opines:   You can tell a lot about a person by their bumper stickers.  I get a kick out of reading what people have branded on the back of their cars.  Some of the stickers are political some are religious and some tell us about the kids or dogs.  If you see a car with multiple bumper stickers one thing about these people who you can count on is, they are passionate and dedicated to what they believe in. I don't think this is entirely true. Bumper-sticker politics is a derogatory term for a rea...

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....

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...

This post is in response to Danny Canham's post, "The Naked Truth: Continuing a Discussion on Anger." Go read that first , and then come back here. I. Anger is a powerful emotion, but the use of anger in discussion, especially ones as fraught as the discussions around social-justice issues like race and gender and sexuality, can be seen as a sign of rhetorical weakness. At least, when it's the Wrong People who are getting angry. Consider the enthusiasm heaped upon Nevada rancher and sovereign citizen Cliven Bundy (pre-"one more thing I know about the Negro") by the right-wing news media, pundits, and blogosphere. Consider the Tea Party and all its derivatives. It's okay if it's an old white guy getting angry. Somehow anger at a Lost Cause is slightly more normalized than, say, the anger at a Utopia Denied from something like the Occupy movement. That is, the narrative that "we lost something, and we're trying to get it back"...

In many discussions that swirled around the Internet in the wake of Brendan Eich's resignation from Mozilla Corp. , someone invariably invoked the concept of the "marketplace of ideas"—just as in the market for physical goods or services, ideas themselves are brought to the "marketplace" of discussion, weighed on their merits, and adopted or discarded as this "market" dictates. If you hang positive traits like "freedom," "openness," and "meritocracy" on the market-metaphor, that's all the more reason to apply it to many different spheres. But it's worth noting some possibly uncomfortable implications.