All Thoughts Being Equal

This post is a tangential follow-up to: Rhetorical imperialism I.   I will soon be working on a non-Marxist fix-up of an article from the Harvard Political Review called "On Privilege: A Leftist Critique of the Left":  Let me be clear that my criticism of discussions of privilege is not that they are too radical. My quarrel, to the contrary, is that they are not radical enough. The cultural Marxism of the mid-20 th century gifted the left with a powerful tool by which to understand how oppressive social structures are perpetuated through discourse—the critique of ideology. Ideology critique acknowledges that the status quo is enforced not only through a single, centralized node of authority, but through dispersed and diverse forms of discourse from all points of origin on the social spectrum. It is a peculiar feature of oppression that it is often enforced by those who are, in fact, oppressed. Ideology critique uses the term ideology to denote modes o...

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...

Fact: Ancient Carthage was 300x more metal than the modern day Here's a quick thought on the eve of the new year. In mathematics it's common to take a space or a structure and examine an interesting subspace or substructure of it. For example, when thinking about the integers {..., -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ...} we can consider the odds, the evens, multiples of 7, and so on. Things get interesting when we can, for example, note that any two multiples of 7 add together to get another multiple of 7, and we didn't have to make up new rules about addition to achieve this. So the "multiples of seven" are a subspace of the integers. So far so elementary. But now consider a bit of geometry. Imagine a two-dimensional rectangle sitting inside three-dimensional space—like a floating rigid sheet of paper. We could draw a circle on that sheet of paper and fill it in. Call the filled-in space A (because mathematicians like naming stuff). Now we might want to know something...

Thought Catalog is a dumping ground for any brainless dribblings that happen to hit the right spots on the keyboard. One such was the fecal gem titled 9 Reasons You Absolutely Do Not Want a Feminist to Be the Father of Your Children , and since I made fun of Salon -style stupidity in critiquing libertarianism a while back , let's make fun of stupid-critiques of feminism here... by stupid-critiquing libertarianism! Tee hee and tra la! So you’ve decided to ignore my advice about dating libertarian women and you are okay with shitty sex and kinda really like the whole no accountability and no consequences deal, and you are wondering if perhaps your libertarian girlfriend might make a pretty terrific libertarian wife and mother for whatever children you conceive. No need to make sure the children are biologically hers, because a true libertarian understands that infidelity and paternity fraud are just a bit of pro-free-market activism in the face of centuries of statist oppression ...

I went to my first Drunken Philosophy meetup at the behest of friend and fellow blogger Kayla (one half of Crows Against Murder dot Tumblr dot com ), and it was really great. One of the more interesting questions, not coincidentally posed by her, involved the nature of art. This is a topic over-ripe with potential, but we eventually digressed from Kayla's initial question ("When an artist makes better art over time, what exactly is the thing that's getting better?") to the nuanced categorization question of What is Art? Specifically, we were interested in figuring out what distinguishes Art from Propaganda and Craft. And for that we asked whether beer brewing is an Art. We agreed that it is not, at least not what most people think of as beer brewing. When a brewer makes a beer, they are aiming for a specific taste-sensation (hereafter "taste")—this is a mental experience that is obviously tied to an external physical stimulus. That is, if a brewer want...

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...