Freethought!

Jeet Heer wrote a nice article on Kanye West and freethought, and I just felt like sitting down and saying a few things about freethinking and freethought in general. So many people fail to understand the words!

Oh, look. A wild transcript appears!

I want to take a moment to share something that made me happy, an article in the New Republic. I’m one of the people behind a writing collective called freethoughtblogs — Ed Brayton and I put this blog network together back in 2011, and we started it with a specific mission: to create a site for progressive writers, and specifically, to make it a comfortable place for all the godless people who weren’t white heterosexual men, to leverage our traffic to call attention to the diverse ideas that are out there in the blogosphere.

Of course, we were a couple of white heterosexual men, but we never thought of this as a zero-sum game — it was going to be a win-win situation for all of us, because we like new ideas, and thought atheism and secularism were great unifying principles, that without religious dogma barking at our heels, we’d all naturally gravitate towards ideals of fairness and equality and social justice.

You can stop laughing now. This was about the time we were discovering just how thick the racist/misogynist dogma coating the the atheist community was. We were naive and innocent and optimistic.

Anyway, we were chatting back and forth, trying to figure out what we’d call this thing, among many other details, and all credit to Ed, he came up with the basic idea of linking our site to the tradition of freethought, rather than just atheism, and so we christened it freethoughtblogs. We were both conscious of the history of that term, we knew exactly what it implied, and we realized that it was exactly representative of the set of ideas we wanted to advance. And we made it so.

We built it, we recruited smart progressive people, we explicitly set it up as a pro-feminist, pro-liberal values site. We were then surprised, because we were naive and innocent, when harassment campaigns followed, and when ignorant people started complaining that we weren’t allowing anti-feminist or racist or wildly conservative voices on board.

“You’re not really about thinking freely if you don’t let Thunderf00t rant about how feminism is a cancer”, they said. “You can’t moderate comments because that violates free speech”, they declared, confusing free speech with freethought, and not comprehending either.

Some people get it, though. That’s not what freethought is about. I can’t recommend an article by Jeet Heer in the New Republic highly enough, because he really gets it. He is criticizing Kanye West who has come out as a conservative jerk, and then labels himself a freethinker…so Heer writes,

Many people who claim to be “free thinkers” today are, in other words, just ignorant right-wing trolls. That’s a shame, because the term “free thinker” has a long history, dating back centuries, and refers to a noble tradition that’s worth recovering.

Exactly. Freethought is not an empty word that implies an absence of values. The best summary of the term comes from Susan Jacoby’s wonderful book, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. It’s a book that came out shortly after Harris’s End of Faith, but before Dawkins’ The God Delusion. The End of Faith did not impress me; the major philosophical and historical work that shaped my attitudes towards atheism was Jacoby’s. I think the American atheist movement would be far better off if it had been inspired by Jacoby’s tolerant and historically aware ideas than the simple-minded “There is no god” and “I really hate Islam” approach of far too many atheists.

Jeet Heer quotes Jacoby to summarize the deeper meaning of freethought.

The term “freethought,” according to Susan Jacoby’s 2004 book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, “first appeared in the late 1600s and flowered into a genuine social and philosophical movement during the next two centuries.” Freethinkers played an especially important role during the American Revolution and the early days of the republic, when they were key in securing the idea of a separation of church and state.

As Jacoby notes, freethinkers ranged from deists to outright atheists, but what they shared, “regardless of their views on the existence or nonexistence of a divinity, was a rationalist approach to fundamental questions of earth existence—a conviction that the affairs of human beings should be governed not by faith in the supernatural but by a reliance on reason and evidence adduced from the natural world. It was this conviction, rooted in Enlightenment philosophy, that carried the day when the former revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to write the Constitution.”

Get it? It’s a positive set of values. It’s more than just rationalism and naturalism, though, but also includes a social and political agenda. Jacoby explains:

For if freethinkers did not have a political platform, they nevertheless agreed on a wide range of social, cultural, and artistic concerns, which generated such fierce debate in the decades after the Civil War that they would form a template for the nation’s ‘culture wars’ a century later. These included free political speech; freedom of artistic expression; expanded legal and economic rights for women that went well beyond the narrow political goal of suffrage; the necessity of ending domestic violence against women and children; dissemination of birth control information…; opposition to capital punishment and to inhumane conditions in prisons and insane asylums; and, above all, the expansion of public education.

That’s a movement I can get behind. There is meaning there. It’s not the vapid emptiness that too many people want to assign to atheism.

I’ll include a link to Jeet Heer’s article below, and I recommend it highly — it’s short, it’ll be a quick read. I’ll also include a link to the book Freethinkers on Amazon, which is even better if more than a bit longer. And of course I recommend that you read the fine assortment of freethinkers at freethoughtblogs.com!

Do not yield

I like a Democrat who will not yield. Maxine Waters ripped into a Republican who wanted to repeal anti-discrimination laws.

Mike Kelly, by the way, made his moolah running car dealerships, and auto dealerships are rife with racial discrimination, which is why the law was passed in the first place.

The House then voted to nullify existing anti-discrimination laws. Because of course they did.

Bigots don’t know they’re bigots, I guess

It’s useful to look at who your friends are. Who is defending the Intellectual Dork Web? Why, it’s the far-right conservatives, of course, like David French of the National Review Online. He’s got an angry defense, primarily of such right-wing luminaries as Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, that is dotted with the usual buzzwords: “Identity politics! Political correctness!” But it’s also interesting to see what ideas he thinks are worth defending from the Identitarian PC Hordes of his imagination:

My email inbox is often a clearinghouse for dissenters from corporate America. They’ll forward me all manner of corporate communications in which their bosses establish definitive company political positions on all manner of hot-button political and cultural topics unrelated to their business. Banks, insurance companies, and technology companies produce statements about gun rights, fund Planned Parenthood, and conduct “diversity training” sessions that would make an Ivy League gender-studies department stand up and cheer. An employee “transitions,” and rather than relying on the good will, manners, and professionalism of an otherwise collegial and functional office, the company brings in “trainers” to teach a roomful of people in no uncertain terms that gender is different from sex, the man they worked with for years is a woman and always has been a woman, and dissent from these highly contentious positions is pure hatred and bigotry.

And everyone knows what happens to bigots in the workplace.

They rise to CEO positions, get appointed to the Supreme Court, elected to the Senate, or become President of the United States? Is this a trick question?

Curious, though, that what has steam coming out of his ears is gun legislation (we need more of it, I would think that’s obvious), Planned Parenthood (a good organization that provides necessary services to women), and … trans people’s rights? He seems most irate that we aren’t just shutting up and trusting in the good will, manners, and professionalism of an otherwise collegial and functional office, which would be hilarious if it weren’t so harmful.

Remember, this tirade is primarily in support of Ben Shapiro, that man of good will, manners, and professionalism, who has declared that “(1) Being trans is a mental disorder and trans folk need psychological help, (2) If you are born with X genitalia you are X gender, (3) Forcing people to treat trans people as their preferred gender is ‘thought policing.’” If we’re supposed to rely on the good will, manners, and professionalism of Ben Shapiro and David French, that’s a pretty good argument that the offices of the National Review need some diversity training.

I haven’t forgotten, either, that Jordan Peterson was launched into notoriety by his ill-founded protest against pronouns and laws that would give trans men and women equal protection under Canadian law. Bigots, all. Shouldn’t we be calling them out?

Conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians: all dishonest frauds

Are you interested in a good, balanced article on free speech? Here’s one: How Free Speech Warriors Mainstreamed White Supremacists. Our current problem isn’t a lack of free speech, it’s that the most vocal advocates for free speech, the ones who claim that it is curtailed and that they are victims, aren’t actually interested in free speech. They want an excuse to silence criticism of the most odious opinions. It’s the opposite of free speech — they want selective support for expression of bad ideas, while shutting down opposition in the name of protecting their views.

Capitalizing on the fuzziness of their coded speech, the new right has spun this plausible deniability off on hosts who either aren’t attuned to the underlying message or simply don’t care. Take, for example, the Rubin Report, a YouTube show purportedly devoted to “free speech” and “big ideas” with more than 700,000 subscribers. Host Dave Rubin positions himself as a “free agent” in the “marketplace of ideas,” seeking to establish a “new center rooted in free speech, logic, and reason.” To that end, he has invited on an eclectic, albeit right leaning, mix of guests, including mainstream public intellectuals like David Frum and Steven Pinker. But Rubin has made his antipathy for what he calls the “regressive left” and PC culture a common theme and so on the more extreme ends of the spectrum, he rarely, if ever, brings on a radical leftist. While Rubin frequently rails on identity politics, which he has called “evil,” he often invites on some of the most toxic practitioners of pro-Trump, white-identity politics, like InfoWars’ Paul Joseph Watson, who recycle black and immigrant crime stories, decry globalism and multiculturalism, and portray white identity as under attack. There they are offered the same deference and audience as some of the country’s leading public intellectuals.

Rubin is what used to be called a useful idiot — an undiscriminating tool who would uncritically promote terrible, destructive opinions while presenting himself as the noble supporter of open unbiased commentary. He’s not very bright, despite claiming to be a fan of logic and reason. The worst skinheads are smarter than he is.

“Thirty years ago, we used the same tactic and would refer to our movement as ‘White Pride’ or ‘White Separatist,’ said Picciolini, who was once a leader in the skinhead group Hammerskin Nation, recounting that less palatable labels caused problems and turned off potential recruits. “We [would say] we didn’t hate anyone, we were just interested in white civil rights. That was our public face. Behind closed doors, we were virulently racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic. The whole notion of ‘white nationalist’ or ‘race realist’ or ‘identitarian’ or ‘alt-right’ are based in the same racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic ideas we held. It is a marketing tactic and people should not be fooled.”

Yeah, they shouldn’t be, but it seems that being a fool is a path to wealth and popularity, as the Intellectual Dork Web has discovered. People with bad ideas are desperate for some kind of affirmation, and there’s always someone willing to provide it, for a fee. That’s been the lesson of religion for thousands of years, and now some atheists have rediscovered the principle, and have found that there are misogynists and racists happy to cough up cash if only you will tell them that their beliefs are virtuous and good. Telling people what they want to hear is always profitable.

Another darling of the Right, Bari Weiss, has also mastered this style. Like others of her duplicitous alt-right kind, she doesn’t even seem to be aware of how bad her arguments are. I’ll bet you’ve heard this one from the media a few times before.

I’m talking here about an emotional response. What happens to you when you are called deplorable? Is the response to say to the accuser: Actually, hey, you’re right! I hadn’t realized that about myself. Or is it to maybe consider voting for Trump?

When conservatives, classical liberals or libertarians are told by the progressive chattering class that they–or those they read–are alt-right, the very common response is to say: Screw it. They think everyone is alt-right. And then those people move further right.

Trump voters aren’t racist! But you are making them racist by calling them racist!

You know, that’s not how it works. I don’t want to be racist, either, but if you called me a racist, if you were even precise and specific and quoted something at me that I said that was racist, my reaction wouldn’t be to embrace that idea and go whole hog for Trump and join the KKK. It would be to say to myself that I don’t want to be a racist, I don’t want to be that person I was, what can I do to be better?

The Bari Weiss response is apparently to say, “What can I do to be a better racist?”, and that’s only the kind of thing somebody who is already pretty damned racist would say.

But here’s the bottom line, my emphasis:

In their blinkered fight for the alt-right’s “free speech”—a battle rarely, if ever, waged by the same actors on behalf of liberals—Rubin, Shepherd, and a number of college groups around the country seem to be both unable to make the vital distinction between protecting and promoting hateful ideology and unwilling to learn about it. They seem to view white-supremacist ideas pushed by social-media trolls to be on the same plane of harmless offensiveness as a Coed Naked T-shirt, inured to their real-world implications. Of course, they all have the right, at least in America, to give a platform without a heckler’s veto or credible counterpoint to ethno-state propagandists and noxious conspiracy theorists, who can smile and speak politely while peddling black crime stories and racist pseudoscience. But why, in the name of civil discourse and individual rights, would they want to?

That’s the real problem. I like free speech; I benefit from free speech. But I believe in the responsible exchange of ideas, I think in part because I’ve been conditioned by years of engagement in creationist arguments. That’s a situation where the other side is clearly intellectually bankrupt, where even someone like Dave Rubin or Sam Harris would agree that those people are so terribly wrong that it’s appalling to even consider giving them a free pass to indoctrinate our children. Yet I can disagree with creationists in the strongest possible terms and so detest them that I’ve been refusing to dignify their representatives with debate, while not suggesting that churches ought to be burned or fundamentalists jailed. That’s free speech.

They don’t seem to recognize that the pseudoscientific racism that they platform, or the institutionalized misogyny they promote, is just as disreputable and scientifically nonsensical as creationism, and even more damaging to society. So they talk about the “marketplace of ideas” and the “free exchange of views”, and offer a bullhorn to the biggest assholes they can find, while quietly whispering mild demurrals.

We on the Left are not fooled. We can see what you’re doing.

What’s wrong with you conservatives, classical liberals or libertarians that you don’t realize we can see right through you? The Communists had a term for enablers like you, “korisne budale”, or “useful innocents”, but I don’t think these right-wingers are innocent at all — they can’t be that stupid. They are well aware of what they are doing, and their disingenuousness is duplicitous.

How many rabbis do you need?

There are 57,000 children of ultra-orthodox Jews in state-funded yeshivas in New York. They are exempt from minimal education standards.

In April, state Senator Simcha Felder (D – Brooklyn) refused to sign off on the state budget unless yeshivas, which accept millions of dollars in government funding, were given more autonomy over curricula. Per a Post editorial, “Felder demanded [legislation] to exempt private yeshivas from state requirements to provide adequate education in basic areas such as English, math, science and history.”

The yeshivas are already black holes of miseducation, and this is going to make them even worse.

“[They] are being denied an education,” said Naftuli Moster, executive director of YAFFED, an organization that advocates to improve secular education in ultra-Orthodox yeshivas. “The main reason has to do with [yeshiva administrators] saying there’s no time to learn stuff [students] won’t use in life — especially boys, who are [expected] to be rabbis.”

Moster added that there are other issues at hand as well: “There are certain things in science and history that contradict portions of the Torah — fossils, dinosaurs.”

Also things like English and elementary arithmetic. According to the story, only about 5% of the boys who go through the yeshiva system become rabbis — and that’s about 5% too many — and the rest are just untrained and unprepared for anything practical or useful, which means that some of the most poverty-stricken areas of New York state are those inhabited by the ultra-Orthodox.

The article interviewed several adult products of the yeshiva system. They came out of it with a cultivated ignorance. The ones in the story, though, are men who scrabbled to make up their deficiencies and get somewhere in life, which makes one wonder about the majority, who never get out and perpetuate the same handicaps on their children.

ContraPoints does it again

This is a phenomenal deconstruction of the incoherence of Jordan Peterson — I do wonder if some of her sarcasm is going to sail right over the heads of the people she’s criticizing, though. This thing is full of post-modern neo-Marxist dogwhistles (oops, I just did it, too.)

Also, even though she strongly criticizes academia, I know very few people who are as entertainingly soaking in academic culture as ContraPoints. A lot of what makes her so informative is the constructive tension in her arguments.

Anti-immigration paranoia is just another form of racism

I have an intuition that immigrants, contrary to Republican rhetoric, are going to be more law-abiding than those who take their citizenship for granted — I think if I were living in a foreign country, one where I was less confident about my rights, I’d be more cautious about breaking laws. That would be especially true if I were in a country where the police had a reputation for brutality.

But that’s just my feelings on the issue. Apparently a lot of Americans think the people who move here to do hard, menial labor in the farm fields or the poultry sheds are more prone to be criminals. If only there were objective studies of immigrants and crime rates…oh, there are? And there are no crime waves fueled by illegal immigrants? Gosh, I guess it’s nice to have one’s subjective opinions confirmed.

Now, four academic studies show that illegal immigration does not increase the prevalence of violent crime or drug and alcohol problems. In the slew of research, motivated by Trump’s rhetoric, social scientists set out to answer this question: Are undocumented immigrants more likely to break the law?

Michael Light, a criminologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, looked at whether the soaring increase in illegal immigration over the last three decades caused a commensurate jump in violent crimes: murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

“Increased undocumented immigration since 1990 has not increased violent crime over that same time period,” Light said in a phone interview.

You can read summaries of the other studies at the link. They all say the same thing: the myth of the predatory, criminal immigrant is imaginary.

But of course they also have to find a contrary view.

Ed Dykes, a local electrical engineer, says a crime committed by an undocumented immigrant is one too many.

“It’s actually immaterial whether they commit more crimes or not because they commit additional crimes,” Dykes says. “They are crimes that would not be committed. There are American citizens who’d be alive today if [unauthorized immigrants] were not in this country.”

So they found a guy with zero qualifications and no expertise at all in the sociology of immigration, and he disagrees. That’s about as relevant as my subjective opinions on immigrants. I do find something interesting about his comment, though: it’s a refocusing of the problem to concerns about individual crimes, rather than the aggregate behavior of a particular group. I think that is a valid perspective. We should be seeing this situation through the eyes of the individual victim and the individual criminal, because that’s how we address the breaking of laws, by trying the individual lawbreaker. That does say, though, that Ed ought not to be policing classes of people if he’s only concerned about individual acts.

Of course, from that perspective, there are more American citizens who’d be alive today if other American citizens had been properly investigated by law enforcement, rather than the law haring off after innocent people who happened to be brown-skinned, a fact irrelevant to the crime. It’s also a confusing argument to say it’s immaterial whether they commit more crimes or not — because if you replace a population having a certain frequency of crime with a different population that has a lower frequency, you will see fewer crimes committed.

Maybe Ed ought to stick to electrical engineering.

I get email

Ahh, evangelical Christians…so persistent, so illogical, so arrogant. There’s a guy who has been pestering me for years, and he wrote again today. I’ll include most of it here, because one notable thing about him against the background of the usual mob of people who write is that he actually has decent command of spelling and grammar. He couldn’t argue his way out of a wet paper bag, though.

Isn’t that nice? He’s read some books about science. It’s an open question whether he understands them, though, since he never talks about the contents, nor will he in this letter. It’s a kind of meaningless nod, to say he has some books on his shelf I might have read, too, but nah, he’s going to talk about a sermon he heard, instead.

Also, it’s very nice to hear that Harry Kroto had recommended me to the evangelicals that pestered me. Harry and I had quite a few conversations before his death — he was deeply passionate about science education, and used his Nobel as a tool to fund all kinds of outreach programs. He was a genuinely good guy, and ferociously godless as well.

See what I mean? All he writes about is the stupid goddamn sermon he heard recently, and he seems to think that sprinkling Bible verses everywhere will be persuasive. I believe there was a Paul who lived in the first century AD. I believe that he traveled about, preaching. I can believe he visited Athens, and that philosophers were curious about him (I don’t believe that all Athenians did nothing but listen and think about the latest ideas, though). Nothing in this account contradicts a reasonable understanding of people and the natural world. So, so what?

Of course many people are searching. I’m searching. That doesn’t mean I’m searching for a god — I’m searching for a better understanding of reality. I even accept that last line, People will NEVER find soul satisfaction in false gods. True. That’s why I reject Jesus and Jehovah and all that nonsense, along with other false gods. Is my correspondent actually so incapable of understanding that other people won’t necessarily find his assertions about god at all true?

He just resorts to puking up more Bible quotes.

Some guy insisted, 2000 years ago, that his god was real and true, and some people believed him, and others disbelieved him. There are prophets everywhere who have been saying similar things — Mohammed, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard. Why should I believe? Because you thump your holy book harder?

Here are his conclusions.

No evidence given. We’re just supposed to accept this because it’s in the Bible. You know, this is not an approach that’s ever going to work with people who deny the authority of scripture.

But wait! He has a little evidence to throw at us at the end!

So they found that the Bible names 53 people who have been confirmed to have really existed.

I can do that, too. Here’s a story.

Robert Downey Jr and I used to get together to drink beer and build robots in Wakanda several years ago — Harry Kroto was there, too, as well as Harry Potter, and the leprechaun from Lucky Charms. Downey later used the skills I taught him to build an armored suit and become famous as Iron Man. Unfortunately, we had a falling out because his girlfriend, Pepper Potts AKA Gwyneth Paltrow, found me irresistible and kept throwing herself at me, and Iron Man refused to believe me when I said I found her ditziness unattractive. So I moved to Iceland and married a far more attractive woman named Mary and we went on to found the city of Little Rock, Arkansas. You’ve probably heard of it.

There are 6 names in there, maybe more if you aren’t particularly rigorous in your fact-checking, that you can easily confirm belong to people or places that verifiably exist.

Therefore, the whole story is true.

The mole people are taking over

Late last night, I mentioned that terrible little man who defended torture by claiming it worked on McCain. Again, I think McCain was a posturing, hypocritical Republican, but it turns out that one thing he was not is a “songbird”: when asked to name the members of his squadron under torture, he gave up the names of the Green Bay Packers football team. The cheeseheads of Wisconsin might resent that bitter treachery, but he didn’t betray his military colleagues.

The guy who made the accusation, Thomas McInerney, is a kook of the first order who was formerly on a birther crusade, claiming that Obama was a secret Muslim who was not born in this country, and he also filed an affidavit to support a military officer who refused to obey orders, since the Commander-in-Chief, he claimed, had no authority. I think that makes him more of a traitor than McCain.

McInerny still got booked for his valuable opinions on Fox Business, despite being a gullible conspiracy theorist and racist (face it, if you gave credibility to the claim that a black president was not eligible for the office, you’re a goddamned racist.)

Gina Haspel was the commandant of a secret prison in Thailand, where prisoners were tortured. She was responsible for destroying all recordings of the torture. She got nominated for head of the CIA.

Scott Pruitt was bragging about blocking environmental regulations before he was made head of the EPA. Now it’s revealed that he was also having expensive dinners with a certain Catholic defender of kiddie diddling. Isn’t associating with Cardinal Pell a moral failing?

I could name the entire cabal of crooks in the Trump administration, including the chief con artist himself. None of these people belong in any position of power and influence, yet there they are. I could name the rotating cast of regulars appearing on talk shows and “news” programs every day, milking every scrap of notoriety for more notoriety. They’ve tunneled through rich loamy filth to suddenly pop up with an eruption of dirt and sludge at the top of our country.

This is America.

It is 2 am and I am wide awake. I’ve had a nightmare.

It’s my own damn fault. I’ve been watching this video a couple of times a day for the last several days, and I think it’s doing things to my brain.

That transition…it hurts so good. It starts sounding a bit like Simon & Garfunkel, light and happy, and Glover is mugging like an old time minstrel, and then wham, we get a rumbly throb, an act of unspeakable violence, and “This is America”. Oh, sure, pop music has to have a catchy hook so it sticks in your brain, but this is more like a 2×4 upside your cranium. As the song goes on, it keeps on alternating between shuckin’ and jivin’ in the foreground and casual crime in the background.

That’s the dichotomy that jars me out of my sleep. I dream about this video, it’s in the forefront of my mind, but I’m thinking about all these other events going on recently.

I see Lauren Southern, her conventionally pretty white face blown up to ten times the height of a man on a video screen, her amplified voice indignantly declaiming to a crowd about how her free speech has been taken from her.

This is America.

Gina Haspel, the woman who helped cover up the CIA’s record of torture, is asked in her senate confirmation hearings if she would obey a direct order from the president to torture someone.

“I do not believe the President would ask me to do that.”

Oh my god. She really said that.

This is America.

The New York Times runs a really long piece on a collection of apologists for the status quo, people who represent nothing but the shabby id of white people, and puts on the pretense that these are radical intellectuals. No one on the NYT staff notes the irony.

This is America.

The NRA, a criminal terrorist organization, announces that their new president is Oliver North, a convicted criminal who sponsored terrorism in Central America. His first major speech representing that organization denounces the survivors of the Parkland shooting, a group of high school kids lobbying for gun control, as “civil terrorists”.

This is America.

Bitter old white guy on Fox News sneers at John McCain to defend torture.

“…it worked on John [McCain]That’s why they call him ‘Songbird John.’ The fact is those methods can work, and they are effective, as former Vice President Cheney said. And if we have to use them to save a million American lives, we will do whatever we have to.”

I don’t even like McCain. I detest McCain. And oh my god, Cheney is back?

This is America.

That video by Donald Glover is great art, it’s shaking me up. But I shouldn’t blame it for my loss of sleep — it’s only the musical accompaniment to the real nightmare. This is America.

This is where I live.

Can’t sleep. This is America.