All Thoughts Being Equal

I. It's election time yet again at Western Washington University, and times are desperate. Last year, a scant seven percent of the student body voted in the election. Where did it go wrong? The last couple times I wrote about student electoral politics at WWU, things got a bit... lively. Hopefully this starts a discussion as well! The 2014 election marks the third straight year of precipitous decline , it should be noted. (The linked Western Front article implies that the decline started in 2012, but actually the turnout in 2011 was the peak.) Now we have this bizarre twist in the 2015 AS Presidential race : [AS Presidential Candidate Belina] Seare is now running unopposed after her one opponent, AS Communications Director Josie Ellison, announced the end of their campaign Tuesday, April 21. [...] Ellison attended the debate and voiced support for Seare. “The position was something that I was interested in doing, something I thought I could do well,” they said. “...

Source In the annals of philosophical thought experiments, it is written : There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks . Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the correct choice? And lo, there were many variations: Fat Man Trolley As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your onl...

Source: Travis Walton / WikiMedia I used to really like UFO stories, pretty much ever since I watched E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind , but then especially after picking up a book called Alien Encyclopedia in a third-grade book sale. It was great because the author presented both "real-life" stories and fictional characters with pretty much equal weight, so I learned about paranormal stuff and lots of science fiction at the same time. For a kids' book, it affords a surprising level of literacy in close-encounter stories (that is, stories from either abductees or contactees )—everything from Grays to Project Blue Book to Reptilians. At least, I thought it was surprising. Then I learned that pseudoscience is actually kinda boring . I'm still interested in those stories—for example, I listen to Coast to Coast AM —but more because I'm fascinated by the social phenomenon of telling close-encounter stories than the stories themselves. For exampl...

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...