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....

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"...

Disambiguation: I’m not talking about the T.V. show called “Fringe.” That show is awesome and I love it to death, but wholly unrelated to this post. As my previous blog posts may suggest, I’m a (at times, masochistic) fan of politics and the way people think. As such I tend to eagerly participate in online discussions, in an attempt to encounter beliefs not the same as my own. One exchange got me thinking about the way I use words—specifically, the word ‘fringe.’ What do we mean when we talk about “fringe theories” or “fringe ideas”? Fundamentally, I think, ‘fringe’ is a political term. I’ve often heard ‘fringe’ used in the context of the so-called “demarcation problem” in science: how can we tell whether something is science, or pseudoscience ? “Fringe” therefore takes on the connotation of pseudoscience, but I think they’re describing two very distinct things.

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.