A brigade of pearl-clutching, virtue-signaling, cancel-culture keyboard warriors wants you to know that Cuties (Mignonnes — it’s actually a French film) is a bad, bad movie that no one should watch and that Netflix should immediately remove from its lineup.
Tag: conflict
Loyalty Oaths Compared: An Orwellian Exercise
What’s afoot? Orwellian doublethink of the highest order. Sure, the hated 1950 Loyalty Oath seems far less onerous than the new Diversity and Inclusion Vow. But the people who refused to sign the 1950 Oath were heroes standing up for freedom of conscience. The people who question today’s orthodoxy, in contrast, are hate-mongers who need to be excluded from high-skilled employment.
Silence Is Not Consent in Politics, Either
When you undergo a medical procedure or volunteer for a research study, you’re presented with forms to sign, outlining what’s going to happen (and what bad things could happen), and expressly consenting to have those things happen. If you’re accused of rape, “he or she didn’t physically resist” isn’t an acceptable defense. In fact, express consent is the emerging standard, sometimes to seemingly ridiculous degrees (i.e. re-requesting consent at each stage of an encounter). Consent, I think we can agree, is a big deal in America today.
Politics and Violence Go Hand in Hand
As America’s latest long hot summer drags into autumn, politicians and pundits are getting louder and more shrill in their denunciations of political violence. Considering the sources, those denunciations smack of hypocrisy.
Facebook’s Violence Standards Make for a Bad Business Plan
“Facebook Employees Are Outraged At Mark Zuckerberg’s Explanations Of How It Handled The Kenosha Violence,” reads the headline at Buzzfeed. One such employee asks “[a]t what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services?”
The Desire for Purpose verse The Betterment of Others
I don’t give progressives, socialists and generally left-wing people the pass others often do. These people are rarely well-intentioned. I can only give this pass to very young or very naive people. The emotional dynamics in the minds of these people lead them to seek purpose and validity in others, most often others that are…
Who Are Your Representatives?
Political representation is a myth. Believing in political representation is a superstitious belief. Such a belief is as delusional as believing in astrology.
In Most Conflicts of Ideas, Socratic Dialogue Beats Research
It is far more efficient to deal with identifying the errors in logic than the errors in fact (though correcting all kinds of errors are important). Logic works by a series of first principles that everyone can learn and no one can evade. Contradictions, fallacies, false equivalencies, and other errors in thinking are much easier to dislodge than disputes over evidence (often evidence can be ambiguous).
The Problems We Must Solve Are Too Important to Reduce to Left vs. Right Politics
When considering a way forward, the discussion initially seems to be complicated because there are a lot of things that have gone wrong in the aftermath of George Floyd’s tragic death.
Want to Reform the Criminal Justice System? End the Drug War
“It pitted police against the communities that they serve,” says neuroscientist Carl Hart in my new video. Hart, former chair of Columbia University’s Psychology department, grew up in a tough Miami neighborhood where he watched crack cocaine wreck lives. When he started researching drugs, he assumed that research would confirm the damage drugs did.